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The Great Mosque of Dunaysir (Kochisar): Heavily influenced by the plan of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, this mosque, founded in 1214, exhibits the interaction between Iranian, Classical, and Syrian traditions in the Medieval architecture of Upper Mesopotamia.
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Image courtesy of Nasser Rabbat of the Aga Khan Program at MIT.
MIT OpenCourseWare Course of Origin
4.614 Religious Architecture and Islamic Cultures, Fall 2002
MIT Course Instructor
Rabbat, Nasser O.
MIT Department
Architecture
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Built in the early 13th century, the window had to be rebuilt in 1325-50. The window is "one of the largest examples of curvilinear tracery seen in medieval architecture. The stained glass was smashed out during the campaign against "abusive images" in the English Revolution, and replaced randomly in the 18th century, therefore much of the iconography was lost (unlike the Deans Eye window)."
Source: website "geograph," article "SK9771 : Detail of Bishop's Eye Window, Lincoln Cathedral"
The following is extensively quoted from the online news site "The Independent," from the article "Lincoln Cathedral, South Rose Window, Anonymous: The Bishop's Eye (1330s)," Tom Lubbock, 22 December 2006:
"The Bishop's Eye is unlike the great majority of Gothic rose windows. It doesn't have a revolving structure. Rose windows perform countless variations on the revolve. Their parts are by turns arranged like planets in orbit, spokes of a wheel, radiant beams, exfoliating petals, in cross formations, in star formations - but always the pattern is rotatable. It is focused on the centre point of the circle, and usually there is a central section at this point, the window's heart or hub. These windows picture an eternal, circling, radiating, God-centred universe. Not so the Bishop's Eye.
"To put it geometrically: the circle of this window has been intersected by two arcs with the same diameter. The centres of these arcs lie on opposite sides of the window's circumference. The two arcs touch at the window's centre. They create a pair of upright almond forms. Each almond is then bisected vertically - almost all the way - by a straight line. Within these forms there's a network of tracery, its shapes mainly irregular long-tailed quatrefoils.
"So the layout is essentially binary. Each almond is symmetrical around its vertical axis. The two almonds are symmetrical with each other. Indeed the whole rose (including the bits not within the almonds) is symmetrical around the vertical axis. So, although circular, this rose window does not hold a vision of centred order, nor a snugly interlocking yin-yang either. It presents a balanced division of two separate equal parts, left and right. The Old and the New Testaments, perhaps? The saved and the damned?
"But students of symbolism will already be hot on another trail. Because this almond form, the vesica piscis (fish's bladder) as it's known, has an extremely versatile symbolic repertoire. The "measure of the fish" was considered a mysterious and sacred shape by Pythagoreans. Among pagans it could signify the vagina. Among early Christians, as the "Jesus fish", it signified Christianity itself. And in Christian art, as the Mandorla, it was an aureole or cloud of divine glory.
"Meanwhile, students of the bleeding obvious can see in the Bishop's Eye a couple of leaves. The reason why the window is non-rotatable is that, fundamentally, its structure is not cosmic but biological. It spreads, in the manner of vegetables, in a single direction: upwards.
"Within the almonds, the tracery ramifies like the veins of a leaf or the branches of a tree. The whole formation is cellular. You might even wonder if this binary window holds the secret of life itself - the basic reproductive dividing of cells.
"Whichever reading takes your fancy, the imagery of the window won't help. It's lost. The stained glass was smashed out during the campaign against "abusive images" in the English Revolution. The pieces survived. But when they were returned to the window, in the late 18th century, they were put back higgledy-piggledy. The restorers didn't try to jigsaw the original images together. They had regard only to effects of colour and radiance.
"This is common practice in English stained-glass restoration. If you can get up close to the window, you see a prophet's head spliced against a horse's tail, and an angel's wing and a shard of non-specific blue, and you try to make these fragments work as a consistent scene. But you can't do it."
Salisbury Cathedral and local area the City of Salisbury in Wiltshire England. A Gothic cathedral which was built between 1220 and 1258. The spire is the tallest in the UK and it also has the worlds oldest working clock. Beautiful old city and cathedra. Former British Prime Minister Sir Ted Heath lived near cathedral too.
Holy Rood, the parish church of the Cotswold village of Shilton. Holy Rood is a simple, unadorned buidling of c. 1150. The chancel was added about a century later. Finally a tower was added in the 15th century.
There are still the vestiges of medievel painting and pattern work on some of the nave's arches, together with carved label stops. The building was restored, sensitively, by G. E Street in 1884-8.
Shilton, Oxfordshire, 15 August 2019
www.sdbdesigns.uk A sketch of a beautiful female model smoking a cig, I;m guessing here but she looks French or has that about her by SDB Designs drawn by Sean Broadbent #sdb_designs #architecture #building #construction #design #joinery #carpentry #Sowerby_bridge #Halifax #ironmongery #beautiful_young_girl #female #designer #art #artist #sculpture #medieval #medieval_architecture #listed_properties #traditional #heritage #Sheffield #sean_broadbent #interior_design #Manchester #Leeds #Oxford #Cambridge #London #French_girl
Carcassonne was fortified by the Romans, then later occupied by the Visigoths. Ultimately it became a fortified site under the Viscount Trencavel, a vassal of the King of Aragon. It was besieged by the King of France and fell in the midst of the efforts to subdue the Cathars (an aescetic religious sect which was declared heretical) and bring Occitan under the control of the King of France. The main features of the current site date from the 12th and 13th centuries, as restored in the 19th by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc when the ruinous fortification was in danger of being demolished by the French government.
Rila Monastery, Bulgaria - everywhere I went in Europe there was restoration going on - certainly spoils great pictures!
The wonderful front aspect of Wells Cathedral in the beautiful County of Somerset England, captured on a fine 24 June 2013 day.
Camera: Olympus FE-120 6.0 Digital.
The cobbled streets, quirky passageways and terracotta roofs of medieval Tallinn have earned a reputation as a pearl of Baltic Europe.
Entryway to an out-door cloister walkway. This is one of three cloisters, each with a large central Medieval garden of seasonal flowers and herbs.
Situated on the right bank of the river Olt 75 km from Sibiu, the church was built between 1386-1388 and is one of the most important foundations of the Wallachian ruler Mircea cel Batran (Mircea the Elder). Cozia is one of the most valuable monuments of national medieval art and architecture in Romania.
Mystras, the ‘wonder of the Morea’, lies in the southeast of the Peloponnese. The town developed down the hillside from the fortress built in 1249 by the prince of Achaia, William II of Villehardouin, at the top of a 620 m high hill overlooking Sparta. The Franks surrendered the castle to the Byzantines in 1262, it was the centre of Byzantine power in southern Greece, first as the base of the military governor and from 1348 as the seat of the Despotate of Morea. Captured by the Turks in 1460, it was occupied thereafter by them and the Venetians. After 1834 the inhabitants of Mystras gradually started to move to the modern town of Sparta leaving only the breath-taking medieval ruins, standing in a beautiful landscape.
Source and more information: UNESCO, World Heritage List
Salisbury Cathedral and local area the City of Salisbury in Wiltshire England. A Gothic cathedral which was built between 1220 and 1258. The spire is the tallest in the UK and it also has the worlds oldest working clock. Beautiful old city and cathedral Former British Prime Minister Sir Ted Heath lived near cathedral too.
This sacred monastery (dedicated to Mary, the Queen of All) was founded by a chief minister of the late Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, Giannis Frankopoulos, and was dedicated in September 1428.
It is the only monastery on the site still permanently inhabited. Today it is inhabited by nuns. Its beautifully ornate stone-carved façade is of particular architectural note.
The church and its bell tower reflect a unique combination of Byzantine and gothic styles.
See stbotolphs.org.uk/about-us/church-history There is reference to a church on this site in 1125, although some claim an earlier church may have been here in Saxon times. The church was enlarged in the 15th century, and rebuilt the following century and, though it escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666, by 1741 it had become dilapidated and an Act of Parliament was passed allowing the old church to be pulled down. The church you see today was built in 1744.