GODS AND GODDESSES OF CALENDAR ART : AN IMAGE TO WORSHIP, MODERN & COMMERCIAL ART

Gods and Goddesses of Calendar Art: An Image to Worship, Modern & Commercial Art

A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial or administrative purposes.  This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months and years.  A date is the designation of single, specific day within such a system.  A calendar is also a physical record of such a system.

The Chinese, Hebrew, Hindu, and Julian calendars are widely used for religious and/or social purposes.

A calendar can also mean a list of planned events, such as a court calendar or a partly or fully chronological list of documents, such as a calendar of wills.

A date is of prime significance starting with a person’s birth date and other important anecdotes. A calendar, diary, desk calendar, planners and digital calendars are of great value in daily life.  In the modern world time has great value.  It is noted that the day passed cannot be bought back and thus every single moment is precious.

       

                                    

A good number of calendars are prevalent in the modern world.  The date calendar, the wall calendar, the desk calendar with the images of gods, scenery, flowers etc.  The wall calendar is slowly replaced by digital and online calendars in the present world. 

The calendar art made it available an image to worship our deity in the past few centuries.  The Jesus Christ and Madonna have occupied a place in the calendar art in the 15^th century.  Raja Ravi Varma is well known for the introduction of Calendar Art of Hindu Gods and Goddesses in the 19^th century.

 

 
















 














    






The various commercial organizations started shooting photos to promote their goods through calendar art.  In the beginning of New Year they come out with a number of themes according to the nature of products they manufacture and sells.   There is soap, automobile and liquor brand which comes out with wall calendars every year.  Though hanging calendars are slowly and steadily becoming out of fashion, even today they are popular with a section of the society.

The Sports Illustrated, Kingfisher, Pirelli and other liquor, automobile and sports brand calendars shot with sizzling pin-up girls  - normally the top rated models in the world - are available to promote such products.

                       American model GIGI HADID on the Sports Illustrated Calendar

The paintings and art calendars often on canvass or paper portrays images.  The Gods whom we worship in the form of a portrait is the imagination of an artist.  The worldwide recognized calendar today is the Gregorian calendar or English calendar.  The international events make a notation based on the English Calendar in the modern world.

                  
 







History of Calendar:

Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon.  The most common type of pre-modern calendar was the lunisolar calendar, a lunar calendar that occasionally adds one intercalary month to remain synchronized with the solar year over the long term.

      

The calendar in most widespread use today is the Gregorian calendar, introduced in the 16^th century as a modification of the Julian calendar, which was itself a modification of the ancient Roman calendar.  The term calendar itself is taken from calendae, the term for the first day of the month in the Roman calendar, related to the verb calare “to call out”, referring to the “calling” of the new moon  when it was first seen.  Latin calendarium meant “account book, register” (as accounts were settled and debts were collected on the calends of each month).  The Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calendar by the 13^th century (the spelling calendar is early modern).

 

A number of prehistoric structures have been proposed as having had the purpose of timekeeping (typically keeping track of the course of the solar year).  This includes many megalithic structures, and reconstructed arrangements going back far into the Neolithic period.

A Mesolithic arrangement of twelve pits and an arc found in Warren Field, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, dated rougly 10,000 years ago, has been described as a lunar calendar and dubbed the “world’s oldest known calendar in 2013.

Methods of timekeeping can be reconstructed for the prehistoric period from at least the Neolithic.   The natural units for timekeeping used by most historical societies are the day, the solar year and the lunation.  Calendars are explicit schemes used for timekeeping.  The first recorded calendars date to the Bronze Age, dependent on the development of writing in the Ancient Near East, the Egyptian and Sumerian calendars.  A larger number of calendar systems of the Ancient Near East become accessible in the Iron Age, based on the Babylonian calendar.  This includes the calendar of the Persian Empire, which in turn gave rise of the Zoroastrian calendar as well as the Hebrew calendar.


A great number of Hellenic calendars develop in Classical Greece, and with the Hellenistic period also influence calendars outside of the immediate sphere of Greek influence, giving rise to the various Hindu calendars as well as to the ancient Roman calendar.

  

                     







Calendars in antiquity were usually lunisolar, depending on the introduction of intercalary months to align the solar and the lunar years.  This was mostly based on observation, but there may have been early attempts to model the pattern of intercalation algorithmically, as evidenced in the fragmentary 2^nd-century Coligny calendar.  Nevertheless, the Roman calendar contained very ancient remnants of a pre-Etruscan 10-month solar year.

The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE.  The Julian calendar was no longer dependent on the observation of the new moon but simply followed an algorithm of  introducing a leap day every four years.  This created a dissociation of the calendar month from the lunation.  The Gregorian calendar was introduced as a refinement of the Julian calendar in 1582 and is today in worldwide use as the de facto calendar for secular purposes.

For the calendar of religious holidays and periods, see Liturgical year.  For this year’s Gregorian calendar, see Leap year starting on Friday.

The Gregorian calendar, also called the Western calendar and the Christian calendar, in internationally the most widely used civil calendar.  It is named after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in October 1582.

The calendar was a refinement to the Julian calendar amounting to a 0.002% correction in the length of the year.  The motivation for the reform was to bring the date for the celebration of  Easter to the time of the year in which it was celebrated when it was introduced by the early Church.  Because the celebration of Easter was tied to the spring equinox, the Roman Catholic Church considered the steady drift in the date of Easter caused by the year being slightly too long to be undesirable.  The reform was adopted initially by the Catholic countries of Europe.  Protestants and Eastern Orthodox countries continued to use the traditional Julian calendar and adopted the Gregorian reform after a time, for the sake of convenience in international trade.  The last European country to adopt the reform was Greece, in 1923.

The Gregorian reform contained two parts: a reform of the Julian calendar as used prior to Pope Gregory XIII’s time and a reform of the lunar cycle used by the Church, with the Julian calendar, to calculate the date of Easter.  The reform was a modification of a proposal made by Aloysius Lilius.  His proposal included reducing the number of leap years in four centuries from 100 to 97, by making 3 out of 4 centurial years common instead of leap years.  Lilius also produced an original and practical scheme for adjusting the epact of the moon when calculating the annual date of Easter, solving a long-standing obstacle to calendar reform.

The Gregorian reform modified the Julian calendar’s scheme of leap years as follows:

Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400.  For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.

In addition to the change in the mean length of the calendar year from 365.25 days (365 days 6 hours) to 365.2425 days (365 days 5 hours 49 minutes 12 seconds), a reduction of 10 minutes 48 seconds per year, the Gregorian calendar reform also dealt with the accumulated difference between these lengths. The canonical Easter tables were devised at the end of the third century, when the vernal equinox fell either on 20 March or 21 March depending on the year's position in the leap year cycle. As the rule was that the full moon preceding Easter was not to precede the equinox the equinox was fixed at 21 March for computational purposes and the earliest date for Easter was fixed at 22 March. The Gregorian calendar reproduced these conditions by removing ten days.

To unambiguously specify the date, dual dating or Old Style (O.S.) and New Style (N.S.) are sometimes used with dates. Dual dating uses two consecutive years because of differences in the starting date of the year, or includes both the Julian and Gregorian dates. Old Style and New Style (N.S.) indicate either whether the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (N.S.) even though documents written at the time use a different start of year (O.S.), or whether a date conforms to the Julian calendar (O.S.) rather than the Gregorian (N.S.).

The Gregorian calendar continued to use the previous calendar era (year-numbering system), which counts years from the traditional date of the nativity (Anno Domini), originally calculated in the 6th century by Dionysius Exiguus.  This year-numbering system, also known as Dionysian era or Common Era, is the predominant international standard today.

The calendar art changed from devotional to commercial use such as in liquor, automobile, soft drink beverages, sports brand etc.

The Pirelli Calendar, Kingfisher Calendar, A utomobile Calendar etc. are publishing calendars year after year and they are the most popular among general public.  Various liquor companies and sports goods calendar such as Sports Illustrated are also a regular in the Calendar scenario.

Sports Illustrated Calendar

Sports Illustrated is an American sports media franchise owned by Time Inc. Its self-titled magazine has over 3 million subscribers and is read by 23 million people each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice. Its swimsuit issue, which has been published since 1964, is now an annual publishing event that generates its own television shows, videos and calendars.

Pirelli Calendar

The Pirelli Calendar is a trade calendar published by Pirelli company’s UK subsidiary.  It has become an annual publication that dates to 1963.  The calendar is known for its limited availability, as it is only given as a corporate gift to a restricted number of Pirelli customers and celebrities.

Over the years, the models and celebrities who have appeared in Pirelli Calendar include Adriana Lima,   Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, Sophia Loren, Naomi Campbell, Penelope Cruz, Alessandra Ambrosio and Lakshmi Menon.

Kingfisher Calendar


India’s answer to the Pirelli Calendar is United Breweries Group of India’s  Kingfisher Calendar.  Since 2003 every year Kingfisher Calendar is published.   The glamorous and prestigious Kingfisher Calendar features India’s top models and Bollywood actresses.  Photographer Atul Kasbekar has been associated with the Calendar since its inception.  Kasbekar along with Liquor baron Dr. Vijay Mallya who is the owner of United Breweries are credited with creating the idea of the annual Kingfisher Calendar.   
 

Angela Jonsson, Katrina Kaif, Deepika Padukone, Lisa Haydon, Nargis Fakhri, Shobhita Dulipala and Ujwala Rawat are the noteworthy models and actresses featured in Kingfisher Calendar.

Dabboo Ratnani Calendar


Dabboo Ratnani is a leading Indian fashion photographer, known for his annual calendar which has become a highly notable showbiz event in India since its first publication in 1999.  The start of the year wouldn’t be complete without the release of the iconic Dabboo Ratnani Calendar.

The celebrities who rocked the Dabboo Ratnani Calendar includes John Abraham, Priyanka Chopra, Hrithik Roshan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Katrina Kaif, Kriti Sanon and Parineeti Chopra.

Dabboo Ratnani is a leading Indian fashion photographer, known for his annual calendar which has become a highly notable showbiz event in India since its first publication in 1999.  The start of the year wouldn’t be complete without the release of the iconic Dabboo Ratnani Calendar.

The celebrities who rocked the Dabboo Ratnani Calendar includes John Abraham, Priyanka Chopra, Hrithik Roshan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Katrina Kaif, Kriti Sanon and Parineeti Chopra.

                                 

The gods have got an image from calendar artists and devotees worship the deity as gifted by some artists.

The date and calendar is an integral part of daily life and the time has more significance than anything else in the world history as well as in the present day.

I am happy to present the Calendar Art that produced the images of gods as my 100^th – centenary BLOG Post in JOHNNY’S BLOG.