Malta GGANTIJA Myth Temples August 3, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Beach Resorts, Sightseeing, Tour, Trails, Trip , 3commentsWORLD HERITAGE LIST NUMBER 185 ARCHAEOLOGY, EVOLVED, GEOMANCY
The GGANTIJA temples are situated near Xaghra on Gozo, a Mediterranean islanda few miles northwest of its larger neighbour, Malta. Although the combined surface area of these two islands adds up to merely 125 square miles (320 square km), the importance of the megalithic architecture which has survived there is ‘out of all proportion to the islands‘ size’.’ (more…)
Egypt Ancient Thebes & its Necropolis continue… August 3, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Egypt, Flight Schedule, Memorial, Museum, Restaurant, The Nile, Tour, Trip , 6commentsHawkins crossed the Nile to the necropolis. This complex of mortuary temples and tombs hewn out of the living rock served many periods of ancient Egypt and covers a large area. The whole landscape is dominated by a remarkably regular pyramidical mountain. Atop it are the remains of a prehistoric mound, predating dynastic Egypt. It is difficult for a geomantic researcher not to consider that the shape of this peak was an important factor determining the Egyptians’ initial choice of this area as a major necropolis. (more…)
I travel in Rome continue… June 21, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Hotels, Italy, Jerusalem, Museum , add a commentAt Recanati, we are not admitted to the already thronged Leopardi house, and at Loreto the frescoes by Signorelli and Melozzo da Forli, let alone the Santa Casa, are impossible even to approach because of the crush of pilgrims. (Why did Velazquez, who painted only four religious pictures, come here? And why Montaigne? Descartes’s reason is well known, of course, to fulfill a vow to the Virgin for having received the inspiration of analytical geometry, even though he must have realized, as clearly as Noam Chomsky, that Euclidian geometry is innate. Carlo Borromeo’s visit, the last fifty miles of the journey on foot, may be attributed to piety and curiosity.) (more…)
Pleasant hollow QUELUZ June 15, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Brazil, Lisbon, Portugal, USA , add a commentThe royal palace of Queluz is situated in a pleasant hollow about nine miles north-west of Lisbon. It belongs to the last phase of the opulent period in Portuguese culture that followed the discovery of gold in Brazil in 1693. At the beginning of the 17th century, foreign artists flocked to Portugal, where they created the somewhat over- decorated Baroque art of the royal palace at Mafra and the churches in Oporto and other cities. Artistically, Queluz represents a reaction against this earlier heaviness a shift from the dominant Italian influence to the lightness of French Rococo. (more…)
ROCOCO April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Australia, Austria, Brazil, England, Europe, France, Germany, Greece, Hotels, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, The Nile, USA, Wellington , add a commentAfter the great days of Baroque, the High Renaissance, led by Bernini and Borromini, and followed variously by Mansart and le Vau in France, Fischer von Erlach and von Hildebrandt in Austria, Zimmerman in Germany, Churriguera in Spain, and Wren,Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh in England, and before a period of Revivalism, France emerged from the reign of Henri IV (reigned 1589-1610) to establish a wealthy bourgeoisie under the political patronage of high taste in the salons of country chateau and hotels. In the next century, during the transitional period from Louis XIV (1638-1715) to the regency of his great grandson, Louis XV (1710-74), a demand for comfort, intimacy and ornament led to the late Baroque variant of Rococo.
The word Rococo derives from the French word rocaille, meaning sea rocks and shells, and it is applied to the highly ornamental and decorative strain of late Baroque architecture. (more…)
NEOCLASSICISM April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : China, England, India, United Kingdom , add a commentAs a response to the need for order after the chaos of revolution, colonizations, restored monarchies and political change, architects looked back, rather than forwards, for a style that could provide stability. In a philosophical and scientific age of reason and objectivity, the Jesuit Abbe Langier published the Essai sur l’Architecture (1752). Its authority combined with Colin Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, Leoni’s Architecture of Palladio and William Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones (1744), to establish a neoclassical revival.
Eventually, however, the spirit of the individual, the romance of medieval Gothic and the exoticism that came from travelling in India, China and beyond, led to a bizarre chapter in the evolution of architecture, in which the 19th century saw the rich treasury of history being ruthlessly plundered in the name of eclecticism and stylistic revivals. Architecture was at the edge of aesthetic anarchy, but it was rescued by four very different persuasions. (more…)
BAROQUE April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : England, Europe, France, Greece, Hungary, London, Poland, Russia , add a commentWhile Europe celebrated the dawn of the 17th century with a new Baroque architecture that was to survive for 200 years, Jones followed his mentors, Alberti and Palladio, to Rome, where he studied neoclassical buildings in the company of his patron, the Earl of Arundel. His return to England led to an extraordinary paradox. While Europe had moved from the austerity of Bramante’s classicism, through the French “Fontainebleau style“, to the decorated sensuality of Baroque architecture, England emerged from a stone, timber and brickwork craft tradition to embrace an apparently revolutionary style, which, under Jones’s hand, returned the Renaissance to the rigour and scholarship of the early period.
From 1618 until his death in 1652, Inigo Jones dominated architecture, and he left to the Stuart period of English history a new tradition of classicism or Palladianism, which challenged the Dutch-influenced brick and stone style and established a platform on which Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) continued to build. After a distinguished career at Oxford University as Professor of Astronomy, Wren was appointed surveyor- general of the King’s Works. He was influenced by the French Baroque, a style that is evident in many of his great buildings, especially those designed after the devastations of the Great Fire of London in 1666. (more…)
The Renaissance continue… April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Austria, Belgium, England, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Library, London, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain , 1 comment so farThis language was inherited by Donato Bramante (1444-1514), whose friends and mentors included Leonardo da Vinci (14591519), Alberti and Piero della Francesca (c.1420-1492). Within this extraordinary environment, Bramante, who had trained as a painter, studied the work of Brunelleschi and turned his genius to architecture. He collaborated with Leonardo da Vinci in the Santa Maria delle Grazie, a partnership that gave Milan a great building and the Last Supper. The French invasion of northern Italy forced Bramante to flee to Rome, where he taught Raphael (1483-1520) and the influential architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1483-1546), and he was commissioned to design the new St Peter’s by Pope Julius II. After Bramante’s death in 1514 and the sack of Rome in 1527, Michelangelo (1475-1564) inherited the task of continuing the project, which was to become the apogee of classical architecture. (more…)
The Renaissance April 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Dominican Republic, England, France, Italy , add a commentThe 14th century saw a new spirit of intellectual inquiry, which was democratized by the invention of printing and radicalized by the Reformation in religion and a Renaissance, first in literature and, afterwards, in architecture. In England the new wealth of the laity led to the development of domestic architecture, which was encouraged by Henry dissolution of the monasteries. In Italy, the seat of Roman antiquity, the scholarship of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Petrarch (1304-74) and Boccaccio (1313-75) was celebrated by a national interest in classic literature, which paved the way for a revolt against medieval art.
The fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 led to an influx of Greek scholars to Italy, especially to Florence, a city of great military and political power. Florence had conquered Pisa in 1406 to gain a valuable seaport, and had gone on to take Milan and Lucca, becoming a powerful republic, the centre of European Renaissance art and a place of religious intrigue, from where the pious and indefatigable Dominican friar Savonarola (1452-98) simultaneously challenged the papal authority of Alexander VI and the tyranny of the powerful Medicis. Rome meanwhile awoke from the poverty of medieval feudalism to welcome the return of the popes from Avignon. Nicholas V (144755), Julius II (1503 - 13) and LeoX (151322) became great patrons of the arts. (more…)
Medieval Europe March 30, 2008
Posted by flyman in : China, England, Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Lodges, Spain , 5commentsAfter the chaos of the Dark Ages that followed the fall of the Roman Empire, states and nations began to evolve. At the same time science, letters, arts and culture were developed by the monastic civilization that exercised a Christian order over an emerging feudal system, in the same way as the Samurai developed almost total military power over an identical system in Japan. But whereas the Japanese declined to lose its scholars to China and Korea by reverting to a complete and deliberate isolation that mummified any architectural development, the nations that were emerging in western Europe were becoming powerful enough to set aside the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, and they no longer stood in awe of the architectural remains that memorialized the genius of Roman architecture. Thus, Romanesque was born from the ruins of ancient buildings and developed as a prologue to the great European period of Gothic architecture. Romanesque was a compound of many influences, including Roman, Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian, Viking Celtic and Saracenic, but it was universally influenced by the monastic churches of St Bernard and St Benedict, where an eclectic style was homogenized by the development of the Roman vault. (more…)
Coming to Far East March 30, 2008
Posted by flyman in : Asia, China, Egypt, Europe, India, Japan, Pacific, The Nile , add a commentIf an Arabian legacy to India and, particularly, Pakistan, is the Muslim mosque, then the Indian legacy to China must be the pagoda. Buddhism was introduced to China about AD65, and the pagoda was a strictly Buddhist building.
Before that, Confucius (c.550-478BC) had laid down a social, ethical and moral order that competed with the more mystical teachings of the Taoist teacher Lao-tze. Thus, three religio- socio-political systems dominated the early world of China, which foundered under a line of early despotic emperors, but was revived under the Han Dynasty (206BC—AD220), which so developed the economic and cultural state of the empire that, under Emperor Kuang Wu Ti, it challenged the Roman Empire of Hadrian as one of the greatest on earth. (more…)
Ancient Greece, the Link Between Greece and Egypt March 28, 2008
Posted by flyman in : Africa, Cairo, Egypt, Italy , 1 comment so farThe links between Greece and Egypt developed first through Grecian military interventions during the 26th Dynasty (664-525Bc) to rescue Egypt from the Assyrian yoke, and second by trade. Greek craftsmen and artists helped to restore, albeit for a relatively short time, the architectural characteristics of the Old Kingdom, until, in 525Bc, Egypt fell under Persian rule for the first of two occasions during which a succession of pharaohs failed to establish the type of cultural, religious and political stability that enabled the great building works of earlier Dynasties to be undertaken. The last native pharaoh was Nectanebus II, but Egypt was effectively under Persian control until the arrival in 332Bc of Alexander the Great, whose capital Alexandria became the intellectual heart of Greek scholars and artists. From the stepping stone of Crete in the Mediterranean to the Aegean Sea builders, artists, architects and craftsmen travelled by sea or through Asia Minor and Troy to play a part in one of the most important turning points in architecture.
Although the Greeks followed their predecessors in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia in establishing their principal architectural works in the service of religion, the revolutionary aspect was rooted in the belief that beauty must be considered as a subject in its own right and that the philosophical search for all things beautiful will naturally lead to the perfect temple. However, the Greeks, like many other early civilizations, were subject to invasions, warring and catastrophes before they settled to build the great monuments that mark the Hellenic and Hellenistic periods (650-30Bc). (more…)
