View allAll Photos Tagged Ceiling
The ceiling of the Hypostyle Hall at Dendera Temple is enriched with an incredible amount of figurative detail carved in low relief and painted in subtle shades against a blue background. The subjects include numerous deities and hybrid figures (some familiar, others much less so) and even astrological elements, such as recognisable figures from the zodiac.
Over the centuries the ceiling had become so darkened by dirt and soot to become heavily obscured and hard to read, and this is how I saw it for the first time in the 1990s, when many visitors probably missed it altogether. Now it has been fully cleaned and restored it shines again not only as one of the glories of the temple but one of the most remarkable surviving decorative schemes of ancient Egypt. The contrast with its previous blackened, unrestored condition is dramatic, giving an entirely different impression from our previous visit.
The Temple of Hathor at Dendera is one of Egypt's best preserved and most beautiful ancient shrines. This magnificent edifice dates to the Ptolemaic period, late in Egyptian history, though the site long had been the cult centre for the goddess Hathor for centuries before (the earliest extant remains date to c360BC but a temple is recorded here as far back as c2250BC). Most of the main building dates to the reigns of the last Cleopatras and further decoration and building work within the complex continued in the Roman period up to the reign of Trajan.
The dominant structure in the complex is the Temple of Hathor, an enormous structure with a rectangular facade punctuated by the Hathor-headed columns of the hypostyle hall within. This hall is an architectural wonder, a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian design and decoration, which covers every surface and has been recently cleaned, revealing a superb astrological ceiling in all its original vibrant colours.
Sadly there was much iconoclasm here during the early Christian period and most of the reliefs of the walls and pillars have been defaced. Worse still is the damage to the 24 Hathor-head capitals: not one of the nearly a hundred huge faces of the goddess that once smiled down on this hall has been left unblemished, most with their features cruelly chiselled away.
The main temple building is otherwise structurally intact, and extends into further halls and chapels beyond, again with much relief decoration (much of which is again defaced). In one corner is an entrance to a crypt below, an unusual feature in Egyptian temple architecture consisting of several narrow passages adorned with carved relief decoration in good condition.
There are further sanctuaries and chapels above on the roof of the temple, accessed by a decorated staircase and including the room where the famous Dendera Zodiac was formerly located (today its place in the ceiling taken by a cast of the original, now displayed in Paris). The highest part of the roof complex is no longer accessible to tourists, but I can still recall making the ascent there on our first visit in 1992.
Several other buildings surround the main temple, the most impressive of which is the mammisi or 'birth-house'. This consists of a large rectangluar hall surrounded by a colonnade near the entrance to the site and has some well preserved relief decoration on its exterior. Most of this structure dates to the Roman period, but the ruins of its predecessor built under Nectanebo II (Egypt's last native pharoah) stand nearby.
Dendera temple is one of the most rewarding in Egypt and shouldn't be missed. It is one of the most complete and evocative ancient monuments in the country and its recent restoration has revealed a surprisingly extensive amount of colour surviving within (we were amazed by the dramatic contrast with the soot-blackened ceiling we'd beheld on our previous visit in the 1990s). Despite its relative youth (in Egyptian terms at least!) it is easily one of my favourite sites in Egypt.
Part of the magnificent ceiling at St Michael and All Angels Church in Great Witley, Worcestershire. Many of the paintings are by Italian Rococo painter Antonio Bellucci. The chuch has been described as the Sistine Chapel of the north.
One of the many painted ceilings in the Vatican. This one is actually a small dome, though it doesn't really show up well in 2D.
Stramit Board or compressed straw ceiling panels at St Elizabeth's Primary School in Dandenong North southeast of Melbourne.
The ceiling system has been used for decades for public buildings, some commercial buildings and even occasionally private residences. The panels are formed by compressing straw under heat until the individual lengths fuse together from the resins released by the process. The system proved popular owing to the lightweight panels being strong enough to be used in long lengths reducing the steel framework support system required. In addition they provided good thermal and acoustic insulation.
Stramit Board ceilings were popular at Melbourne schools from the 1970s onwards including this which was built in the late 1970's with extensions in the 1980's. Nearby Nazareth College designed by the same architect used the same system.
This ceiling is in the lobby of a building downtown that many doctors, dentist, orthodontist, etc. practice. I went to visit my orthodontist and I finally snapped some photos of it :)
I'm feeling a bit grounded, so to speak, because of the overcast weather, so this is from my trip to Rome last year.
I loved the Pantheon. It's a spectacular space and the light that streams through from the hole in the roof makes it very special.
The weather on this day was very changeable, there having been a shower just a few minutes earlier. It's a particularly spectacular sight when it rains.
I love this ceiling, it is just incredibly beautiful. I have been wanting to go back and shoot it again for quite some time. I was just a little off center, but I am getting closer to just the shot I want. This shot was triple exposed and tone mapped in photomatix, I also played with it a little in lightroom. This is why HDR is so beneficial, the originals show no where near the detail this shot does.
The lights you see are a chandelier and this is the info from the brochure I took last night: A chandelier weighing 6,000 lb (2,700 kg) hangs from the rotunda of the central dome. The chain supporting it weighs an additional 7,000 lb (3,200 kg).
You are doing yourself and this photo a disservice if you dont View On Black.
by Yoko Ono
Climb up a ladder. Look at the painting on the ceiling with a magnifying glass, and find the word ‘YES’
The interactive object known as Ceiling Painting was an important work shown at Ono's historic 1966 Indica Gallery show in London. The viewer is invited to climb a white ladder, where, at the top, a magnifying glass, attached by a chain, hangs from a frame on the ceiling. The viewer uses the reading glass to discover a block letter "instruction" beneath the framed sheet of glass-it says "YES." It was through this work that Ono met her future husband and longtime collaborator, John Lennon.
Q: How did you meet Yoko?
John Lennon: There was a sort of underground clique in London; John Dunbar, who was married to Marianne Faithfull, had an art gallery in London called Indica, and I'd been going around to galleries a bit on me off days in between records, also to a few exhibitions in different galleries that showed sort of unknown artists or underground artists.
I got the word that this amazing woman was putting on a show the next week, something about people in bags, in black bags, and it was going to be a bit of a happening and all that. So I went to a preview the night before it opened. I went in - she didn't know who I was or anything - and I was wandering around. There were a couple of artsy-type students who had been helping, lying around there in the gallery, and I was looking at it and was astounded. There was an apple on sale there for two hundred quid; I thought it was fantastic - I got the humor in her work immediately. I didn't have to have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, the humor got me straightaway. It was two hundred quid to watch the fresh apple decompose.
But it was another piece that really decided me for or against the artist: a ladder that led to a painting, which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a white canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. I climbed the ladder, looked through the spyglass, and in tiny little letters it said, YES.
So it was positive. I felt relieved. It's a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say NO or FUCK YOU or something.
I was very impressed. John Dunbar introduced us - neither of us knew who the hell each other was. She didn't know who I was; she'd only heard of Ringo; I think it means apple in Japanese. And Dunbar had sort of been hustling her, saying, "That's a good patron; you must go and talk to him or do something." Dunbar insisted she say hello to the millionaire - you know what I mean. And she came up and handed me a card that said BREATHE on it - one of her instructions - so I just went [pants]. This was our meeting.
The second time I met her was at a gallery opening of Claes Oldenburg in London. We were very shy; we sort of nodded at each other - she was standing behind me. I sort of looked away because I'm very shy with people, especially chicks. We just sort of smiled and stood frozen together in this cocktail-party thing.
The next thing was, she came to me to get some backing - like all the bastard underground do - for a show she was going. She gave me her Grapefruit book. I used to read it, and sometimes I'd get very annoyed by it; it would say thing like "paint until you drop dead" or "bleed." Then sometimes I'd be very enlightened by it. I went through all the changes that people go through with her work - sometimes I'd have it by the bed and I'd open it and it would say something nice and it would be all right, and then it would say something heavy and I wouldn't like it.
So I gave her the money to back her show. For this whole thing, everything was in half: There was half a bed, half a room, half of everything, all beautifully cut in half and all painted white. And I said to her, "Why don't you sell the other half in bottles?" having caught on by then to what the game was. And she did that - this is still before we'd had any nuptials - and we still have the bottles from the show; it's my first. It was presented as "Yoko Plus Me" - that was our first public appearance. I didn't even go to see the show; I was too uptight.
Q: When did you realize that you were in love with her?
JL: It was beginning to happen; I would start looking at her book, but I wasn't quite aware what was happening to me. Then she did a thing called Dance Event, where different cards kept coming through the door every day saying BREATHE and DANCE and WATCH ALL THE LIGHTS UNTIL DAWN, and they upset me or made me happy, depending.
I'd get very upset about it being intellectual or all fucking avant-garde, then I'd like it, and then I wouldn't. Then I went to India with the Maharoonie and we corresponded. The letters were still formal, but they just had a little side to them. I nearly took her to India, but I still wasn't sure for what reason; I was still sort of kidding myself, with sort of artistic reasons and all that.
When we got back from India, we were talking to each other on the phone. I called her over; it was the middle of the night and Cynthia [Lennon's first wife] was away, and I thought, well, now's the time if I'm gonna get to know her any more. She came to the house and I didn't know what to do, so we went upstairs to my studio and I played her all the tapes that I'd made, all this far-out stuff, some comedy stuff, and some electronic music. She was suitably impressed, and then she said, "Well, let's make one ourselves." So we made Two Virgins. It was midnight when we started; it was dawn when we finished, and then we made love at dawn. It was very beautiful.
From 'Lennon Remembers'
(Jann Wenner editor of Rolling Stone magazine interviewing John Lennon in December 1970)
The octagon had been a common shape for baptisteries for many centuries since early Christian times.
The number 8 is a symbol of regeneration in Christianity, signifying the six days of creation, the Day of Rest, and a day of re-creation through the Sacrament of Baptism
The eight sides of the ceiling counterclockwise from Christ: 1. Last Judgment. 2. Lantern. 3. Choirs of Angels. 4. Stories from the Book of Genesis. 5. Stories of Joseph. 6. Stories of Mary and Christ. 7. Stories of St. John the Baptist.
Ceiling Bavo cathedral Haarlem The Netherlands. Taken with Google Pixel 2 metering on the bright sides of the scene. Edited in Photomatix.
If you look carefull, you can see faces everywhere... like in this moppingcart.
Check out this set to see more faces I've seen.
Malta.Valletta.
Saint John's Co-Cathedral - Kon-Katidral ta' San Ġwann
The cathedral's interior is extremely ornate, standing in sharp contrast with the façade. The interior was largely decorated by Mattia Preti, the Calabrian artist and knight, at the height of the Baroque period. Preti designed the intricate carved stone walls and painted the vaulted ceiling and side altars with scenes from the life of John the Baptist. Interestingly, the figures painted into the ceiling next to each column initially appear to the viewer as three-dimensional statues, but on closer inspection we see that the artist cleverly created an illusion of three-dimensionality by his use of shadows and placement. Also noteworthy is the fact that the carving was all undertaken in-place (in-situ) rather than being carved independently and then attached to the walls (stucco). The Maltese limestone from which the Cathedral is built lends itself particularly well to such intricate carving. The whole marble floor is an entire series of tombs, housing about 400 Knights and officers of the Order. There is also a crypt containing the tombs of Grand Masters like Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Claude de la Sengle, Jean Parisot de Valette, and Alof de Wignacourt.
The ceiling of the Hypostyle Hall at Dendera Temple is enriched with an incredible amount of figurative detail carved in low relief and painted in subtle shades against a blue background. The subjects include numerous deities and hybrid figures (some familiar, others much less so) and even astrological elements, such as recognisable figures from the zodiac.
Over the centuries the ceiling had become so darkened by dirt and soot to become heavily obscured and hard to read, and this is how I saw it for the first time in the 1990s, when many visitors probably missed it altogether. Now it has been fully cleaned and restored it shines again not only as one of the glories of the temple but one of the most remarkable surviving decorative schemes of ancient Egypt. The contrast with its previous blackened, unrestored condition is dramatic, giving an entirely different impression from our previous visit.
The Temple of Hathor at Dendera is one of Egypt's best preserved and most beautiful ancient shrines. This magnificent edifice dates to the Ptolemaic period, late in Egyptian history, though the site long had been the cult centre for the goddess Hathor for centuries before (the earliest extant remains date to c360BC but a temple is recorded here as far back as c2250BC). Most of the main building dates to the reigns of the last Cleopatras and further decoration and building work within the complex continued in the Roman period up to the reign of Trajan.
The dominant structure in the complex is the Temple of Hathor, an enormous structure with a rectangular facade punctuated by the Hathor-headed columns of the hypostyle hall within. This hall is an architectural wonder, a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian design and decoration, which covers every surface and has been recently cleaned, revealing a superb astrological ceiling in all its original vibrant colours.
Sadly there was much iconoclasm here during the early Christian period and most of the reliefs of the walls and pillars have been defaced. Worse still is the damage to the 24 Hathor-head capitals: not one of the nearly a hundred huge faces of the goddess that once smiled down on this hall has been left unblemished, most with their features cruelly chiselled away.
The main temple building is otherwise structurally intact, and extends into further halls and chapels beyond, again with much relief decoration (much of which is again defaced). In one corner is an entrance to a crypt below, an unusual feature in Egyptian temple architecture consisting of several narrow passages adorned with carved relief decoration in good condition.
There are further sanctuaries and chapels above on the roof of the temple, accessed by a decorated staircase and including the room where the famous Dendera Zodiac was formerly located (today its place in the ceiling taken by a cast of the original, now displayed in Paris). The highest part of the roof complex is no longer accessible to tourists, but I can still recall making the ascent there on our first visit in 1992.
Several other buildings surround the main temple, the most impressive of which is the mammisi or 'birth-house'. This consists of a large rectangluar hall surrounded by a colonnade near the entrance to the site and has some well preserved relief decoration on its exterior. Most of this structure dates to the Roman period, but the ruins of its predecessor built under Nectanebo II (Egypt's last native pharoah) stand nearby.
Dendera temple is one of the most rewarding in Egypt and shouldn't be missed. It is one of the most complete and evocative ancient monuments in the country and its recent restoration has revealed a surprisingly extensive amount of colour surviving within (we were amazed by the dramatic contrast with the soot-blackened ceiling we'd beheld on our previous visit in the 1990s). Despite its relative youth (in Egyptian terms at least!) it is easily one of my favourite sites in Egypt.
Tokyo Station, on the Marunouchi business district of Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan, near the Imperial Palace grounds and the Ginza commercial district, had just gone through a major refit. This is the restored ceiling.
It is the main intercity rail terminal in Tokyo, the busiest station in Japan with over 3,000 Trains per day and is the starting point and terminus for most of Japan's Shinkansen high-speed rail lines as well as being served by many local and regional commuter lines of Japan Railways, along with the Tokyo Metro network.
This gorgeous chapel is perhaps the best preserved example of a medieval church interior in England. I have been in love with it ever since my first childhood visit, and it remains my favourite room in all England.
The chapel is rich in excellent monuments, if which the tomb of Richard Beauchamp, the chapel's founder, is the most impressive with magnificent gilt bronze sculptures, an extremely rare survival.
Equally spectacular is the delightful east window, which is filled with superb 15th century glass by John Prudde, the King's glazier. Much if it is not in situ, since Cromwell's troops wrought havoc with the glass here and the surviving figures were assembled in this window (only the outer pairs of figures in the upper row are in their original positions). The north and south windows retain original glass only in their traceries and the cusped heads of the main lights, andknowing the quality of the surviving elements makes this loss all the more grevious.
A further treasure of this chapel and a miraculous survivor of Cromwells fanatics is the statuary surrounding the east window. This unique display of almost perfectly preserved figure sculpture from the early 15th century is exquisite, and gives an answer to all those empty niches we see in so many medieval churches elsewhere in England. The medieval splendour is further echoed by the use of colour on the sculptures and vaulted ceiling, all redone in the mid 20th century but based on medieval precedents.
Blue light filtering from the outside in contrast with yellow light from the bulb inside ... Chicago Cultural Center, Washington St. side. The building originally housed the Chicago Public Library.
Additional information: This basically is the ceiling of the lobby of the Washington St. side of the Cultural Center - one of the building's showpieces described in their new brochure as "a dazzling light-filled space finished with Cosmati work, or mosaics set into stone in the style of the Italian masters in the palaces of Europe."
More from the brochure:
"The soft-surfaced marble is white Italian Carrara marble, the most expensive available, taken from the same quarries used by Michelangelo for his sculptures. It was selected for its non-reflective finish to contrast witht he sparkling mosaics of glass, gold leaf, mother-of-pearl, and precious stone. The space extends up three stories with a symphony of cris-crossing staircases and expanding spaced decorated with themes relating to books and authors."
And to think this building was scheduled for demolition to accommodate larger library facilities.