View allAll Photos Tagged PRIMACY
Cologne is the fourth-largest city in Germany - and one of the oldest. A Germanic tribe, the Ubii, had a settlement here, this was named by the Romans "Oppidum Ubiorum". In 50 AD, the Romans founded "Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium", the city then became the provincial capital of "Germania Inferior".
After the First Vatican Council those Catholics, who did not accept the decisions (dogmas of the infallibility and the primacy of the pope's jurisprudence), fell into excommunication, these Christians founded the "Old Catholic Church".
In Cologne the Old Catholics erected the parish church in 1906, it got consecrated in 1907. Of this church only the bell tower can be seen here, as after the church got completely destroyed during the 262 separate air raids, conducted on Cologne during WWII (eg "Operation Millenium"), the Old-Catholic parish was unable to rebuild the church. They just did not have the funds.
So the parish erected a small church (to the left) and sold the plot, where an office building got constructed. However the Cologne authorities required that the new building should show the original outline of the church. The silhuette is now well visible - but as well it reminds on a landed ufo.
Seen in the backdrop is the telecommunications tower, named "Colonius". The restaurant up on the tower is meanwhile closed.
Spituk is set atop a hill that overlooks the majestic Indus river on one side and the Leh airport on the other. It was initially constructed in the 11th century AD but has been changing hands amongst the various Buddhist orders and is currently owned and operated by the Gelukpa order.
It is easy to access and not too steep a climb.
From the immediate outside, the stone walls washed a dirty shade of white climb up to reach for the dark azure sky while oblong window fascias cut up the structure in neat geometric patterns with a bit of ochre and red to punctuate the primacy of colors.
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IN ENGLISH BELOW THE LINE
Caminant pels serens carrers de Mdina, es disfruta de la seva magnificencia tot i la calor d'inicis de la tarda.
El centre politic i social de l'illa de Malta fou fins finals de l'edat mitjana, al centre de l'illa, en els turons que dominen la plana central. Aquí, des d'època fenicia s'hi establí LA ciutat de Malta, originariament Melita, pel que sembla. Així continuà durant tota la llarga ocupació romana. Amb les sotragades de l'expansió islamica, aquesta ciutat que havia anat expandint-se, fou arrasada i deshabitada força temps. Després fou habitada per arabs nord-africans, que li posaren un nou nom, Medina, ja que era la única ciutat a tot Malta. Això continuà així fins i tot amb el nou domini primer normand, després angeví i després català de Malta. La ciutat, anomenada localment Mdina, o també Cittá Vecchia - Cittá Notabile, no cedí la primacía política fins que l'Ordre de l'Hospital arribà el 1523 per a establir la nova capital al Gran Port, a Birgu, interesats en el domini naval com estaven ells. Finalment, Valetta agafà el relleu fins als nostres dies.
Però Mdina, amb la seva extensió fora muralles amb un altre nom (Rabat, és a dir, "barriada"). continua essent un pol cultural de Malta. I la seva posició privilegiada es nota quan hi arribes, amb unes vistes fantastiques sobre l'entorn, i una arquitectura noble i serena, literalment de pedra picada. L'anomenen "la ciutat del silenci".
Triq il-Villegaignon vol dir "carrer de Villegaignon".
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While walking through the stone streets of Mdina, even in a hot July afternoon, you can admire it's beautiful serenity.
The political and social center of the island of Malta was until the end of the Middle Ages, in the center of the island, on the hills that dominate the central plain. Here, since Phoenician times, THE city of Malta was established, originally Melita, apparently. It continued like this throughout the long Roman occupation. With the upheavals of Islamic expansion, this city that had been expanding, was razed and uninhabited for quite a while. It was then inhabited by North African Arabs, who gave it a new name, Medina, since it was the only city in all of Malta. This continued even with the new first Norman, then Angevin and then Catalan rule of Malta. The city, locally called Mdina, or also Cittá Vecchia - Cittá Notabile, did not cede political primacy until the Order of the Hospital arrived in 1523 to establish the new capital in the Grand Port, in Birgu, interested in naval dominance as they were. Finally, Valletta took over until today.
But Mdina, with its extension outside the walls with another name (Rabat, meaning "neighborhood"). continues to be a cultural hub of Malta. And its privileged position is noticeable when you arrive, with fantastic views over the surroundings, and a noble and serene architecture, literally of stone masonry. They call it "the city of silence"
Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Lyon, Auvernia-Ródano-Alpes, France.
La Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Lyon, a menudo llamada simplemente catedral de Lyon o Primatiale Saint-Jean-Baptiste-et-Saint-Étienne es la catedral y primado de Lyon (Francia). El término primado viene de Primat des Gaules, título histórico del obispo de Lyon.
Construida entre 1180 y 1480, mezcla el estilo Románico con el Gótico. Cuenta con un reloj astronómico del siglo XIV.
La construcción comenzó en el siglo XII con la pared del monasterio. Las partes más bajas del ábside, las capillas de ambos lados y el transepto fueron construidos entre 1165 y 1180 en estilo Románico. El techo del ábside y el transepto en estilo Gótico, las dos torres orientales, los primeros cuatro tramos de la nave y la bóveda fueron completados entre el siglo XII y el primer tercio del siglo XIII.
A mediados del siglo XIII, las ventanas del coro y los dos rosetones del transepto fueron completados. Entre finales del siglo XII y el primer tercio del siglo XIV, los últimos cuatro tramos y la parte más baja de la fachada fueron completadas. El final del siglo XIV presenció la terminación de los últimos tramos de la bóveda y los rosetones de la fachada en 1392.
En el siglo XV, la parte superior de la fachada y las torres fueron completadas. La estatua de Dios Padre fue ubicada en la parte más alta del frontón en 1481. La capilla de los Borbones (nombrada así por los arzobispos que ordenaron su construcción), de un estilo Gótico tardío, fue construida entre finales del siglo XV y comienzos del siglo XVI.
En 1562, la catedral fue destruida por las tropas calvinistas del barón de Adrets. Las ventanas de la gran nave medieval y del tímpano del largo portal fueron destruidas en el siglo XVIII por orden de los Canónigos. Durante la revolución, la catedral sufrió algunos daños.
Entre 1791 y 1793, el arzobispo Lamourette ordenó la modificación de los coros. Esto incluyó la destrucción del atril.
El coro fue restaurado a su disposición medieval entre 1935 y 1936. Durante la liberación de Lyon en septiembre de 1944, algunas de las vidrieras de colores fueron destruidas.
La fachada fue restaurada en 1982.
The Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Lyon, often called simply Lyon Cathedral or Primatiale Saint-Jean-Baptiste-et-Saint-Étienne is the cathedral and primate of Lyon (France). The term primacy comes from Primat des Gaules, the historical title of the Bishop of Lyon.
Built between 1180 and 1480, it mixes the Romanesque style with the Gothic. It has an astronomical clock from the 14th century.
Construction began in the 12th century with the wall of the monastery. The lower parts of the apse, the chapels on both sides and the transept were built between 1165 and 1180 in the Romanesque style. The roof of the apse and the transept in Gothic style, the two eastern towers, the first four sections of the nave and the vault were completed between the 12th century and the first third of the 13th century.
In the middle of the 13th century, the windows of the choir and the two rose windows of the transept were completed. Between the end of the 12th century and the first third of the 14th century, the last four sections and the lowest part of the facade were completed. The end of the 14th century witnessed the completion of the last sections of the vault and the rose windows of the facade in 1392.
In the 15th century, the upper part of the facade and the towers were completed. The statue of God the Father was located in the highest part of the pediment in 1481. The Bourbon Chapel (named after the archbishops who ordered its construction), of a late Gothic style, was built between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the century XVI.
In 1562, the cathedral was destroyed by the Calvinist troops of Baron Adrets. The windows of the great medieval nave and the tympanum of the long portal were destroyed in the 18th century by order of the Canons. During the revolution, the cathedral suffered some damage.
Between 1791 and 1793, Archbishop Lamourette ordered the modification of the choirs. This included the destruction of the lectern.
The choir was restored to its medieval disposition between 1935 and 1936. During the liberation of Lyon in September 1944, some of the stained glass windows were destroyed.
The facade was restored in 1982.
New, larger family group arrives at the waterhole. The previous occupiers give ground, acknowledging the primacy of the new arrivals
Dedicated to Saint John, the cathedral of Lyon is one of the most prominent churches of France (it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site). Indeed, the archbishop of Lyon has borne the title of “Primate of the Gauls” since the 2nd century, as Lyon was the first bishopric ever created in the “three Gauls”, as the provinces of Lyon and the Alps, the Aquitaine, and Belgium, were known during the times of the Western Roman Empire. Lyon was then the capital of all those vast territories. This “primacy” conferred to the archbishop of Lyon authority over all other bishops, even that of Paris, the secular capital of more recent times. Now, the title is largely honorific.
The Saint-Jean Cathedral is mostly a Gothic church, and as such of limited interest to me. However, having been built over the span of three centuries, from 1175 to 1480, it was begun as a Romanesque church and there are indeed small parts and details that remain from that period, albeit few and far between.
I have visited that church several times, but I went again on the Saturday before Easter (2022) to try and locate a few of those parts and details...
It was also a good opportunity to test my “Brittany Configuration”, i.e., the gear I will bring on my week-long family trip to Brittany at the beginning of May: as I wasn’t sure what kind of equipment would be allowed inside the cathedral, I brought my new 24–120mm ƒ/4 S lens, with the 14–30mm in case of need (I ended up not needing it), and my very small and light Gitzo Series 0 Traveler tripod, which I used for all exposures indoors. That gear worked very satisfactorily. Of course, the tripod is a lot shorter than my usual one (not to mention my big one!), but one has to make do when one must travel light. That was the idea.
Happy Easter to everyone!
This is the southern apsidal chapel. You can see the bandes lombardes running around. All the architecture, as well as the windows, including the rose, are Romanesque, up to where the rib vaulting begins. It was designed to be barrel vaulted, but the whole opus shifted to Gothic under Archbishop Jean Bellesmains in the 1200s, and was continued along the same route by his successor Renaud de Forez.
IN ENGLISH BELOW THE LINE
Caminant pels serens carrers de Mdina, es disfruta de la seva magnificencia tot i la calor d'inicis de la tarda.
El centre politic i social de l'illa de Malta fou fins finals de l'edat mitjana, al centre de l'illa, en els turons que dominen la plana central. Aquí, des d'època fenicia s'hi establí LA ciutat de Malta, originariament Melita, pel que sembla. Així continuà durant tota la llarga ocupació romana. Amb les sotragades de l'expansió islamica, aquesta ciutat que havia anat expandint-se, fou arrasada i deshabitada força temps. Després fou habitada per arabs nord-africans, que li posaren un nou nom, Medina, ja que era la única ciutat a tot Malta. Això continuà així fins i tot amb el nou domini primer normand, després angeví i després català de Malta. La ciutat, anomenada localment Mdina, o també Cittá Vecchia - Cittá Notabile, no cedí la primacía política fins que l'Ordre de l'Hospital arribà el 1523 per a establir la nova capital al Gran Port, a Birgu, interesats en el domini naval com estaven ells. Finalment, Valetta agafà el relleu fins als nostres dies.
Però Mdina, amb la seva extensió fora muralles amb un altre nom (Rabat, és a dir, "barriada"). continua essent un pol cultural de Malta. I la seva posició privilegiada es nota quan hi arribes, amb unes vistes fantastiques sobre l'entorn, i una arquitectura noble i serena, literalment de pedra picada. L'anomenen "la ciutat del silenci".
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While walking through the stone streets of Mdina, even in a hot July afternoon, you can admire it's beautiful serenity.
The political and social center of the island of Malta was until the end of the Middle Ages, in the center of the island, on the hills that dominate the central plain. Here, since Phoenician times, THE city of Malta was established, originally Melita, apparently. It continued like this throughout the long Roman occupation. With the upheavals of Islamic expansion, this city that had been expanding, was razed and uninhabited for quite a while. It was then inhabited by North African Arabs, who gave it a new name, Medina, since it was the only city in all of Malta. This continued even with the new first Norman, then Angevin and then Catalan rule of Malta. The city, locally called Mdina, or also Cittá Vecchia - Cittá Notabile, did not cede political primacy until the Order of the Hospital arrived in 1523 to establish the new capital in the Grand Port, in Birgu, interested in naval dominance as they were. Finally, Valletta took over until today.
But Mdina, with its extension outside the walls with another name (Rabat, meaning "neighborhood"). continues to be a cultural hub of Malta. And its privileged position is noticeable when you arrive, with fantastic views over the surroundings, and a noble and serene architecture, literally of stone masonry. They call it "the city of silence"
Installation of Sol Lewitt wall artworks at AGNSW. Sol is dearly departed (2007) but he believed in the “primacy of the idea.” and made very precise plans with which assistants could execute his work, much as composers create scores for musicians.
History of Notre-Dame de Paris :
The Gothic loftiness of Notre-Dame dominates the Seine and the Ile-de-la-Cité as well as the history of Paris. On the spot where this majestic cathedral now stands, the Romans had built a temple to Jupiter, which was followed by a Christian basilica and then a Romanesque church (the Cathedral of St. Etienne, founded by Childebert in 528).
Maurice de Sully, bishop of Paris, decided to build a new cathedral for the expanding population, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Although construction started in 1163, it was not completed until roughly 180 years later in about 1345. Built in an age of illiteracy, the cathedral retells the stories of the Bible in its portals, paintings, and stained glass.
On completion of the choir in 1183, work was begun on the nave and completed c.1208, followed by the west front and towers c.1225-1250. A series of chapels were added to the nave during the period 1235-50, and to the apse during 1296-1330 (Pierre de Chelles and Jean Ravy). Transept crossings were built in 1250-67 by Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil (also the architect of the Sainte-Chapelle). The six-part rib vaults and the thin elements articulating the wall are typically Early Gothic.
The appearance of the interior was radically transformed in the mid-13th century when the small clerestory windows typical of the Early Gothic style were enlarged downward and filled with High Gothic tracery. The enlargement caused the removal of the unusual triforium. Originally the interior had the four-story elevation common to many Early Gothic churches, and the triforium had large round openings instead of the normal arcades.
Seen from the exterior, the building appears to be High Gothic. Notable features include the profusion of colonnettes and tracery screens, the horizontal and vertical ordering of the facades, the imposing size of the rose windows, and the delicacy of the flying buttresses.
Notre-Dame has had an eventful history over the centuries. Crusaders prayed here before leaving on their holy wars, and polyphonic music developed in the cathedral. Notre-Dame was pillaged during the French revolution, as were a number of other cathedrals throughout France (witness the beheaded saints at the Cathédrale St-Etienne in Bourges, for example): Citizens mistook statues of saints above the portals on the west front for representations of their kings, and, in the midst of their revolutionary fervor, took them down. (Some of these statues were found in the 1970s, almost two hundred years later, in the Latin Quarter.) Many of the cathedral's other treasures were either destroyed or plundered — only the great bells avoided being melted down. Revolutionaries dedicated the cathedral first to the cult of Reason, and then to the cult of the Supreme being. The church interior was used as a warehouse for the storage of food.
It was also here that Napoléon, wishing to emphasize the primacy of the state over the church, crowned himself emperor, and then crowned Joséphine, his Martinique-born wife, as his empress. (The job would normally have been done by an archbishop. Pope Pius VII, there for the occasion, raised no objections.)
During the 19th century, writer Victor Hugo and artists such as Ingres called attention to the dangerous state of disrepair into which the Cathedral had fallen, thus raising a new awareness of its artistic value. Whereas 18th-century neoclassicists had virtually ignored the creations of the Middle Ages — and had even replaced the stained glass at Notre-Dame with normal glass — the 19th-century romantics saw that remote period with new eyes and greater appreciation.
In his restoration of the cathedral (begun in 1844 and lasting 23 years), Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc reinstated the triforium and small clerestory windows in the eastern bay of the nave. The sculpture on the west facade, badly damaged during the French Revolution, was also restored during this period.
Besides bringing new life to the rose windows and the statues, Viollet-le-Duc combined scientific research with his own very personal creative ideas and designed Notre-Dame's spire, a new feature of the building, and the sacristy. Also in the 19th century, Baron Haussmann (Napoléon III's urban planner) evicted those Parisians whose houses cluttered the Cathedral's vicinity. The houses were torn down to permit better views of the edifice.
During the Commune of 1871, the Cathedral was nearly burned by the Communards — and some accounts suggest that indeed a huge mound of chairs was set on fire in its interior. Whatever happened, Notre-Dame survived the Commune essentially unscathed.
Yet it is the art of Notre-Dame, rather than its history, that still awes. The west front contains 28 statues representing the monarchs of Judea and Israel. The three portals depict, from left to right, the Last Judgment; the Madonna and Child; St. Anne, the Virgin's mother; and Mary's youth until the birth of Jesus. The interior, with its slender, graceful columns, is impressive — there is room for as many as 6,000 worshipers. The three rose windows — to the west, north, and south — are masterful, their colors a glory to behold on a sunny day.
In 1768, geographers decided that all distances in France would be measured from Notre-Dame. One hundred and seventy-six years later, when Paris was liberated during World War II, General de Gaulle rushed to the cathedral after his return, to pray in thanksgiving. In many ways, Notre-Dame was and still is the center of France.
Excavations under the parvis have revealed traces of Notre-Dame's history from Gallo-Roman times to the 19th century. Vestiges of Roman ramparts, rooms heated by hypocaust (an ancient system with underground furnaces and tile flues), medieval cellars, and the foundations of a foundling hospital are displayed, as are several fascinating photographs of the surrounding neighborhood before Baron Haussmann's renovations.
Starting in 1991, a 10 year program of general maintenance and restoration was initiated. While work continues, sections of the structure are likely to be shrouded by scaffolds.
For a look at the upper parts of the church, the river, and much of Paris, climb the 387 steps to the top of one of the towers. The south tower holds Notre-Dame's 13-ton bell, which is rung on special occasions.
« Les murs ont des oreilles, dit-on ; ici, ils ont un nez et une bouche. Prisonniers de la pierre, ces visages semblent exprimer la recherche désespérée d’une échappatoire pour pousser un ultime cri. Ont-ils quelque terrible secret à divulguer avant leur disparition dans la gangue qui les enveloppera bientôt ? Dans leur fragilité, leur gratuité, leur susceptibilité au temps, à la dégradation ou au vol, ces pièces sont les témoins éphémères d’un “ici et maintenant” citadin. Elles constituent aussi une tentative d’interrogation sur le statut de l’œuvre d’art ainsi que sur les fondements de sa valeur et de son utilité. Etranger à toute notion de “marché”, mon geste artistique s’approche d’une affirmation de la primauté du rapport direct et intime entre l’œuvre et le regardeur ; je souhaite que ce dernier, mu par la curiosité et sa disposition émotionnelle, se sente invité à un engagement physique. Des transformations résulteront des rencontres avec le public. Presse n’en n’illustre que mieux le fait qu’elle n’existe, qu’elle ne “vaut” que dans et par cette interaction. »
“The walls have ears, they say; here they have a nose and a mouth. Trapped in stone, these faces seem to express the desperate search for an escape route to utter a final cry. Do they have some terrible secret to divulge before their disappearance in the matrix that will soon envelop them? In their fragility, their gratuitousness, their susceptibility to time, degradation or theft, these pieces are fleeting witnesses of a “here and now” city dweller. They also constitute an attempt to question the status of the work of art as well as the foundations of its value and usefulness. Foreign to any notion of "market", my artistic gesture approaches an affirmation of the primacy of the direct and intimate relationship between the work and the viewer; I want the latter, driven by curiosity and his emotional disposition, to feel invited to a physical commitment. Transformations will result from meetings with the public. Press only better illustrates the fact that it exists, that it is only "valid" in and through this interaction. "
Napoli - Panorama
Naples - View
Il Vesuvio costituisce un colpo d'occhio di inconsueta bellezza nel panorama del golfo, specialmente se visto dal mare con la città sullo sfondo. Una celebre immagine da cartolina ripresa dalla collina di Posillipo lo ha fatto entrare di diritto nell'immaginario collettivo della città di Napoli, sebbene dagli abitanti del luogo sia considerato uno stereotipo al pari del celebre sole - mare - mandolino. Non altrettanto stereotipo, ma ben più importante, è il primato che il Vesuvio detiene a livello mondiale: si tratta del vulcano che per primo è stato studiato sistematicamente.
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Naples - View
Vesuvius is a sight of unusual beauty in the landscape of the Gulf, especially when viewed from the sea with the city skyline. A famous picture postcard taken from the hill of Posillipo did get right in the collective imagination of the city of Naples, even by locals is considered a stereotype like the famous sun - sea - mandolin. Not as stereotypes, but more importantly is that Vesuvius has primacy in the world: this is the first volcano that has been studied systematically.
Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, Medzilaborce, Slovakia
Andy Warhol’s Museum is the only one in Europe. A dominant feature is the statue of Andy Warhol with a fountain, standing in front of the museum.
slovakia.travel/en/medzilaborce
slovakia.travel/en/andy-warhol-museum-of-modern-art-medzi...
The small town of Medzilaborce, situated in the south-east of Slovakia, boasts of two European primacies. After the establishment of the first museum named after Andy Warhol, Medzilaborce has also erected the first statue dedicated to this representative of world pop-art.
Nowadays Medzilaborce makes most tourist profit from the fact that the parents of the representative of pop-art Andy Warhol originally came from this town.
In 1991 a unique museum, dedicated to the life and work of the world-wide known avant-garde artist, was opened there.
In November 2002 a fountain with the statue of Andy Warhol was placed here in front of the museum. The author of the statue is the academic sculptor Juraj Bartusz.
The statue in Medzilaborce, made of cast bronze, represents Andy Warhol with an umbrella, in his typical pose. The figure measuring 230cm in height is slightly relaxed and tense at the same time. The artist is hidden behind his glasses and in the imaginary shadow of his umbrella.
Week 5 Musical Interlude (1221 – 1225) 10/10 – 10/15/2021 ID 1225
Joan Snyder American 1940 -
Smashed Strokes Hope, 1971
Oil, acrylic, and spray enamel on canvas
Smashed Strokes Hope belongs to Joan Snyder’s breakthrough series of abstract paintings, sometimes referred to as “stroke paintings” because of the way they emphasize the primacy of the artist’s brushwork. Distinct areas of paint seem to have been sprayed on, smeared on haphazardly (perhaps with a hand or a cloth), or applied carefully to create vertical and horizontal clusters. Prominent drips, smears, and stains appear throughout the canvas. In this riot of color, there is a palpable tension between regularity and irregularity, pattern and chaos, control and spontaneity. Snyder once said, “I wanted to tell a story and I wanted there to be different sections. I wanted a beginning, middle and end, many different parts, happy, sad, tragic parts, many things happening at once, different instruments, different sounds, rhythms.”
Partial and Promised Gift of Stephanie Bernheim 2017 (2018.667)
From the Placard: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Snyder
The Portrait of a Musician is an unfinished painting widely attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, dated to c. 1483–1487. Produced while Leonardo was in Milan, the work is painted in oils, and perhaps tempera, on a small panel of walnut wood. It is his only known male portrait painting, and the identity of its sitter has been closely debated among scholars.
Perhaps influenced by Antonello da Messina's introduction of the Early Netherlandish style of portrait painting to Italy, the work marks a dramatic shift from the profile portraiture that predominated in 15th-century Milan. It shares many similarities with other paintings Leonardo executed there, such as the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks and the Lady with an Ermine, but the Portrait of a Musician is his only panel painting remaining in the city, where it has been in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana since at least 1672. One of Leonardo's best preserved paintings, there are no extant contemporary records of the commission. Based on stylistic resemblances to other works by Leonardo, virtually all current scholarship attributes at least the sitter's face to him. Uncertainty over the rest of the painting arises from the stiff and rigid qualities of the body, which are uncharacteristic of Leonardo's work. While this may be explained by the painting's unfinished state, some scholars believe that Leonardo was assisted by one of his students.
The portrait's intimacy indicates a private commission, or one by a personal friend. Until the 20th century it was thought to show Ludovico Sforza, a Duke of Milan and employer of Leonardo. During a 1904–1905 restoration, the removal of overpainting revealed a hand holding sheet music, indicating that the sitter was a musician. Many musicians active in Milan have been proposed as the sitter; Franchinus Gaffurius was the most favored candidate throughout the 20th century, but in the 21st century scholarly opinion shifted towards Atalante Migliorotti. Other notable suggestions include Josquin des Prez and Gaspar van Weerbeke, but there is no historical evidence to substantiate any of these claims. The work has been criticized for its stoic and wooden qualities, but noted for its intensity and the high level of detail in the subject's face. Scholarly interpretations range from the painting depicting a musician mid-performance, to representing Leonardo's self-proclaimed ideology of the superiority of painting over other art forms, such as music.
This painting was executed in oils and perhaps tempera on a small, 44.7 cm × 32 cm walnut wood panel. It depicts a young man in bust length and three-quarter view, whose right hand holds a folded piece of sheet music. The painting is largely unfinished save for the face and hair, but is in good condition overall, with only the bottom right corner suffering damage. The art historian Kenneth Clark noted that out of Leonardo's surviving works, the Musician is perhaps the best preserved, despite the fading of colors over time.
The bottom of the work may have been slightly trimmed. There is a small amount of retouching, especially towards the back of the head; the art historian Frank Zöllner has noted that this retouching introduced the somewhat unsuccessful shading of the neck and the left side of the lips. With its black background, the portrait is reminiscent of Leonardo's later portraits, the Lady with an Ermine and La Belle Ferronnière, but differs from them in that the sitter's body and head face the same direction. The biographer Walter Isaacson has noted that due to the work's unfinished state, the portrait's shadows are overtly harsh, and the portrait itself features fewer of the thin layers of oil paint typically found in Leonardo's paintings.
The sitter has curly shoulder-length hair, wears a red cap, and stares intently at something outside the viewer's field of vision. His stare is intensified by careful lighting that focuses attention on his face, especially on his large glassy eyes. He wears a tight white undershirt. The painting of his black doublet is unfinished and his brownish-orange stole is only underpainted. The colors are faded, probably due to minor repainting and poor conservation. Technical examination of the work has revealed that the doublet was probably originally dark red, and the stole bright yellow.
The mouth hints at a smile, or suggests that the man is about to sing or has just sung. A notable feature of his face is the effect on his eyes from the light outside the frame. The light dilates the pupils of both eyes, but the proper right far more than the left, something that is not possible. Some have argued that this is simply for dramatic effect, so that the viewer feels a sense of motion from the musician's left to right side of his face. The art historian Luke Syson has written that "the eyes are perhaps the most striking feature of the Musician, sight given primacy as the noblest sense and the most important tool of the painter".
The stiffly folded piece of paper, which is held in an odd and delicate manner, is a piece of sheet music with musical notes and letters written on it. Due to the poor condition of the lower part of the painting, the notes and letters are largely illegible. This has not stopped some scholars from hypothesizing what the letters say, often using their interpretations to support their theory of the musician's identity. The partially erased letters can be made out as "Cant" and "An" and are usually read as "Cantum Angelicum", Latin for 'angelic song', although the art historian Martin Kemp notes that it could be "Cantore Angelico", Italian for 'angelic singer'. The notes have offered little clarity into the painting, other than strongly suggesting that the subject is a musician. They are in mensural notation and therefore probably show polyphonic music. Leonardo's surviving drawings of rebuses with musical notation in the Print Room of Windsor Castle do not resemble the music in the painting. This suggests that this musical composition is not by Leonardo, which leaves the composer and the significance of the music unknown.
Dedicated to Saint John, the cathedral of Lyon is one of the most prominent churches of France (it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site). Indeed, the archbishop of Lyon has borne the title of “Primate of the Gauls” since the 2nd century, as Lyon was the first bishopric ever created in the “three Gauls”, as the provinces of Lyon and the Alps, the Aquitaine, and Belgium, were known during the times of the Western Roman Empire. Lyon was then the capital of all those vast territories. This “primacy” conferred to the archbishop of Lyon authority over all other bishops, even that of Paris, the secular capital of more recent times. Now, the title is largely honorific.
The Saint-Jean Cathedral is mostly a Gothic church, and as such of limited interest to me. However, having been built over the span of three centuries, from 1175 to 1480, it was begun as a Romanesque church and there are indeed small parts and details that remain from that period, albeit few and far between.
I have visited that church several times, but I went again on the Saturday before Easter (2022) to try and locate a few of those parts and details...
It was also a good opportunity to test my “Brittany Configuration”, i.e., the gear I will bring on my week-long family trip to Brittany at the beginning of May: as I wasn’t sure what kind of equipment would be allowed inside the cathedral, I brought my new 24–120mm ƒ/4 S lens, with the 14–30mm in case of need (I ended up not needing it), and my very small and light Gitzo Series 0 Traveler tripod, which I used for all exposures indoors. That gear worked very satisfactorily. Of course, the tripod is a lot shorter than my usual one (not to mention my big one!), but one has to make do when one must travel light. That was the idea.
Happy Easter to everyone!
The altar in the southern apsidal chapel. A very fine piece of Romanesque sculpture, it features Jesus Christ surrounded by archangels Michael, Raphaël and Gabriel, as well as Saint Maurice on the left of the photo.
Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, Medzilaborce, Slovakia
Andy Warhol’s Museum is the only one in Europe. A dominant feature is the statue of Andy Warhol with a fountain, standing in front of the museum.
slovakia.travel/en/medzilaborce
slovakia.travel/en/andy-warhol-museum-of-modern-art-medzi...
The small town of Medzilaborce, situated in the south-east of Slovakia, boasts of two European primacies. After the establishment of the first museum named after Andy Warhol, Medzilaborce has also erected the first statue dedicated to this representative of world pop-art.
Nowadays Medzilaborce makes most tourist profit from the fact that the parents of the representative of pop-art Andy Warhol originally came from this town.
In 1991 a unique museum, dedicated to the life and work of the world-wide known avant-garde artist, was opened there.
In November 2002 a fountain with the statue of Andy Warhol was placed here in front of the museum. The author of the statue is the academic sculptor Juraj Bartusz.
The statue in Medzilaborce, made of cast bronze, represents Andy Warhol with an umbrella, in his typical pose. The figure measuring 230cm in height is slightly relaxed and tense at the same time. The artist is hidden behind his glasses and in the imaginary shadow of his umbrella.
Have the U.S. mainstream media sunk this low? What is the purpose for the Wall Street Journal giving such a full and extensive coverage on Meng Wanzhou's wardrobe? It's so sexist!!
There is no question Ms. Meng is rich. Rich people wear name brand clothing and live luxuriously. It's not unusual that she has nice homes with lots of amenities.
I don't remember reading any news article about Abigail Johnson of Fidelity Investments, for example, detailing her wardrobe or how luxurious her homes are.
While the WSJ article gives every aspect of Ms Meng's wardrobe, there's nothing on why Canada values the two Michaels' arrest so much. After all, when they were arrested in China, there were 300,000 Canadians living in China and Hong Kong and about 200 Canadians were thought to be in custody in China. So why did the U.S. and Canada pay so much attention to these two Michaels? Could it be because they were spies for the Canadian government?
albertapolitics.ca/2020/12/why-did-chinas-government-pluc...
Why did China’s government pluck the Two Michaels from among 300,000 Canadians in China?
This WSJ article fails to mention the omissions and misrepresentations made by the U.S. prosecutor. The fact was HSBC was fully aware of the relationship between Huawei and Skycom, the business entity that sold HP computers to Iran. The prosecutor also omitted a crucial slide in Ms. Meng's Powerpoint presentation.
ca.style.yahoo.com/meng-wanzhous-lawyers-claim-extraditio...
Meng Wanzhou's lawyers claim extradition case riddled with misrepresentations
www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-china-meng-kovrig-spavor-pris...
Inside the Secret Prisoner Swap That Splintered the U.S. and China
Detention of a Chinese executive to stand trial in the U.S. provoked a standoff between global rivals and opened an acrimonious new era
4:30 a.m., Sept. 25, 2021, Tianjin, China
A pair of prison vans approached the terminal at Tianjin Binhai International Airport carrying two Canadians, blindfolded and disoriented from 1,019 days in captivity.
On the moonlit tarmac, an unmarked U.S. Gulfstream jet waited to take them home. Nearby, the Canadian ambassador paced the carpeted lounge.
Fifteen time zones away, an Air China Boeing 777 stood ready at Vancouver International Airport. Armed officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police kept watch in the terminal. A Chinese executive in Manolo Blahnik heels strode past them, carrying a bag with a Carolina Herrera dress shaded the same vibrant red as China’s flag and trailed by an entourage of lawyers, aides and diplomats who called her Madam Meng. She, too, was headed home.
One of the most significant prisoner swaps in recent diplomatic history was under way, after a top-secret negotiation that was three years in the making.
At the Tianjin airport, a Chinese official was on the phone to confirm the woman’s passage through the Vancouver terminal. He then cleared the Canadian prisoners. The Canadian ambassador fumbled for their passports in a yellow envelope and ushered the men to an immigration checkpoint.
A Chinese guard stamped the passports and directed them to the runway.
When Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada in 2018, she was chief financial officer of China’s Huawei Technologies Co., a telecommunications giant founded by her father that was poised to win the race to build 5G networks in most of the world’s largest economies. Canadian authorities took Ms. Meng into custody in Vancouver, British Columbia, on behalf of the U.S., which had filed bank-fraud charges against her.
The detention of the 50-year-old celebrity businesswoman, and U.S. efforts to extradite her for trial in New York, transformed her into a national martyr in China and a symbol of America’s growing hostility to its nearest rival.
Days later, the two Canadians were seized in retaliation for Ms. Meng’s arrest. Michael Kovrig, 50, was on leave from Canada’s Foreign Ministry to work for the International Crisis Group in Hong Kong. Michael Spavor, 46, ran a business that helped students, athletes and academics visit North Korea. During their incarceration and harsh treatment, the two men were sympathetically shorthanded in news reports and by Western leaders as “the two Michaels.” Both men denied any wrongdoing.
The arrests marked a turning point in the growing power competition between the U.S. and China, helping shift it from mutual wariness to full-blown animosity. Unlike last century’s Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the prisoner skirmish reflected a U.S.-China battle for control of the international flow of data and, ultimately, primacy in global commerce.
Negotiations to free the prisoners strained relations between China, U.S. and Canada. Each nation navigated its own security concerns and domestic political pressures. The U.S. pressed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to release the two Canadians and cited their arrest as evidence of Beijing’s disregard for the international rules-based order. Mr. Xi saw Ms. Meng’s detention as another underhanded attempt by the U.S. to contain his country’s advance.
Mr. Xi penned more than 100 notes about her case, and he discussed the Michaels with two U.S. presidents. Mr. Xi refused to free them until Ms. Meng was released. Canada was caught in the middle.
Dominic Barton, the Canadian ambassador, spent hundreds of hours at a whiteboard in an embassy safe room charting proposals to get his countrymen released and visiting them in prison. He delivered coded messages in rapid-fire English he knew eavesdropping guards would struggle to understand. Until the final moments, Canada worried that a news leak or a stray remark from a U.S. senator would scuttle the exchange.
This account is based on interviews with current and former U.S., Canadian and Chinese officials, lawyers and prosecutors, former Huawei officials, people familiar with Ms. Meng’s legal team and her staff, as well as current and former diplomats of the three countries. It draws from court documents, real-estate and corporate records, classified diplomatic cables, unpublished photographs and notes of government officials involved in the negotiations.
A spokesman for the Chinese consulate in New York declined to answer questions. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman has said that Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor were detained and tried in accordance with Chinese law, and their case was unrelated to Ms. Meng’s arrest.
Meng Wanzhou planned to spend only a few hours in Vancouver when she touched down on Dec. 1, 2018. It was one of four cities where she kept a home.
The Huawei CFO checked seven suitcases, packed with presentation material for meetings in four countries, including Mexico. The country’s newly inaugurated president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was open to Huawei building 5G networks in his country, brushing off U.S. security concerns.
Ms. Meng also booked a stop in Buenos Aires, where she would join her father, Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s billionaire founder. Mr. Ren had once announced that none of his three children was visionary enough to succeed him. Ms. Meng, who crisscrossed the world representing her father’s empire, seemed determined to prove him wrong.
Around the time Ms. Meng walked into Hong Kong’s international airport, word of her itinerary passed over a secure line to the Palacio Duhau hotel, site of the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires. A White House lawyer took the call in a soundproof tent set up in a suite. Afterward, the lawyer woke up John Bolton: Ms. Meng was en route.
Mr. Bolton, then-national security adviser in the Trump administration, knew Ms. Meng’s arrest could disrupt the summit’s marquee event that evening, a dinner between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Yet Mr. Bolton, a longtime China hawk, felt it was worth the risk. The president didn’t yet know about the plan. White House staffers later debated whether Mr. Bolton had told Mr. Trump or if it hadn’t fully registered with the president.
While Ms. Meng was on her flight to Vancouver, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents passed along details of her travel outfit: a black Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie, dark sweatpants, her hair just past the shoulders.
Federal prosecutors had a sealed indictment against Ms. Meng and Huawei for bank fraud, alleging she had helped disguise the company’s business dealings in Iran. The evidence was in a PowerPoint presentation Ms. Meng showed an executive of HSBC Holdings PLC in the back room of a Hong Kong restaurant in 2013. Huawei, she claimed in her presentation, wasn’t violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.
The charge was narrow, but it would serve a broader national security objective—to help Washington convince U.S. allies Huawei couldn’t be trusted.
In a briefing room at the Vancouver airport, six Canadian police officers and border guards studied photos of Ms. Meng. “Seize any electronic devices on MENG to preserve evidence, as there will be a request from FBI,” a Canadian constable scrawled in a spiral notebook.
Ms. Meng’s extradition request had arrived from Washington on a password-protected file that Canadian authorities needed more than a day to unlock. The delay meant Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, also attending the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, was told of the request only around the time officers took positions at the Vancouver airport’s Gate 65 jet bridge.
At 11:18 a.m., Cathay Pacific Flight 838 rolled to a stop at the terminal gate.
Two border guards escorted Ms. Meng to a counter where another guard combed through her luggage. Officers asked questions, among them: Did Huawei ever sell products in Iran? They collected her electronics and demanded her passwords. One by one, they slid her devices into security bags, as the U.S. had requested: a red-cased Huawei phone, a black-and-pink 256-gigabyte thumb drive, a pink-framed MacBook and an iPad with a sticker of Winnie-the-Pooh, a character sometimes used on social media to mock Mr. Xi, China’s leader.
“You have committed fraud, we’re arresting you, and then you will be sent back to the United States,” a police officer told Ms. Meng.
“Me?” she said. “You’re saying I committed fraud in the United States?”
“I don’t have details,” another officer replied. “They have a fraud charge against you regarding your company, uh, Huawei?”
An officer added, apologetically, “We’re only assisting the United States.”
At the police station, Ms. Meng was fingerprinted, and allowed a phone call to the only Chinese-speaking lawyer Huawei could find on short notice, a patent attorney. As the attorney dashed to the station, Ms. Meng began to gasp for air, worrying officers who sped her to a hospital.
Messrs. Trump and Xi were dining on Argentine sirloin, accompanied by a 2014 Malbec. The goal of the dinner was to reach a truce in an escalating U.S.-China trade war. Neither man appeared aware of Ms. Meng’s arrest. Mr. Bolton, seated near Mr. Trump, didn’t mention it.
Mr. Xi learned shortly after, according to Chinese government officials, and it struck him as deceptive and an insult. He had just agreed to buy more U.S. food and energy.
Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Bolton days later at a White House Christmas dinner, according to people familiar with the conversation. “Why did you arrest Meng?” the president said. “Don’t you know she’s the Ivanka Trump of China?”
Chinese Foreign Ministry officials briefed Mr. Xi on the arrest when he returned to Beijing on Dec. 6. Ms. Meng, ranked China’s eighth most powerful businesswoman by Forbes magazine, was in custody and under severe distress.
China’s Ministry of Public Security, which had a list of Canadian names, proposed two for him to select. Canada’s ambassador was summoned to a Foreign Ministry office in Beijing and warned China would retaliate.
Two days later, a call came to the Canadian embassy from a man stopped while trying to board a 2 p.m. flight to South Korea from a city in China’s northeast.
“I’m being questioned,” Michael Spavor said.
That night, the embassy got another call, this one about Michael Kovrig. He had been walking in Beijing when he was bundled into a vehicle.
For hours, embassy officials waited to hear from the two men, hoping authorities would release them. Then came the whir of the office fax machine, signaling trouble. Fax was the preferred channel of China’s Foreign Ministry. The machine spat out back-to-back missives announcing the detention of two Canadian citizens suspected of threatening national security.
Canada’s ambassador met with officials in Beijing. They asked for Ms. Meng’s release. “He who ties the knot must untie it,” one of them said.
A month later, Mr. Trudeau cemented his government’s position at a snow-drenched cabinet retreat in Quebec. Arrests of innocent Canadian citizens wouldn’t force Ms. Meng’s release.
“Canada cannot be bullied,” he told his cabinet members.
The prime minister, a liberal leader who in public appearances sometimes appeared boyish, had a harder side. Just before he assumed office, Islamic State militants had abducted two elderly Canadians. Mr. Trudeau later refused to pay a ransom, and they were decapitated.
It was his worst moment as prime minister—and the right decision, Mr. Trudeau said at the cabinet retreat.
When Canada’s ambassador to China said in public remarks that Ms. Meng had a strong case to fight her extradition, Mr. Trudeau fired him.
To free Ms. Meng, Huawei assembled a team of more than a dozen lawyers, including some of the corporate world’s highest-paid. They all agreed she was unfairly trapped in the rivalry between Washington and Beijing.
One of Huawei’s recruits—trial lawyer Reid Weingarten, whose clients had included Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd Blankfein and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—carried a report into a meeting early in 2019 with Justice Department officials. It detailed reasons the defense team believed Ms. Meng would easily win her case.
Elevating a six-year-old PowerPoint presentation to a charge of bank fraud was an overreach the Justice Department would regret, according to Ms. Meng’s lawyers. Some doubted prosecutors had the appetite to go to trial.
Instead, they found little hope for a swift resolution. Federal prosecutors in the case were confident. If Ms. Meng wanted to plead guilty, they were ready to talk. Otherwise, they would see her in court.
The White House had a lot riding on the case. Huawei was on the other side of a contest for control of 5G, the wireless network slated to ferry data to billions of devices worldwide. It was a fight the U.S. didn’t want to lose.
Huawei was offering to deliver its 5G equipment—antennas, base stations and routers—more quickly and less expensively than its Western competitors. The company, a relative newcomer compared with century-old telecom rivals Nokia Corp. and Ericsson AB, had become a world leader.
U.S. national security officials were convinced of a danger other nations thought could be managed—that Huawei was assembling the architecture China could use to conduct worldwide surveillance.
In 2009, U.S. cyberspies had infiltrated the company’s networks. FBI analysts, worried Beijing could use those same networks to spy, alerted their bosses. Defense Department officials urged U.S. telecom companies to steer clear of Huawei. A 2012 congressional investigation concluded China could use Huawei equipment for espionage but didn’t find clear evidence it had.
By the time of the Trump administration, Huawei had built a seemingly insurmountable lead over its rivals. An analysis that circulated among intelligence officials warned Huawei would control 80% of the global market for 5G equipment. National security officials feared that would hand China a surveillance tool with the potential to collect all manner of secrets, from the blueprints of nuclear plants to military plans of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Defense officials and diplomats reached out to America’s closest foreign partners and pushed for Huawei bans. The company dispatched its own lobbyists, lawyers and public-relations firms to say it had never conducted espionage and never would. Huawei challenged the Trump administration to reveal the evidence it claimed to hold, material the U.S. said was secret to protect its sources and methods.
The White House instead offered a slim thread of evidence. In 2017, Beijing had introduced an intelligence law that said “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.”
Huawei, the Trump administration argued, was bound by law to spy. The company countered that it applied only in China.
U.S. diplomats took printouts of the law to allies around the world, reading it aloud to officials caught up in what many saw as a feud between superpowers. The U.K., South Korea, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Canada balked at pressure to ban the company. Some were baffled by the escalating campaign.
Huawei said it was a Chinese success story whose founder was motivated not by rivalry with America but admiration for it.
Mr. Ren, a former army engineer, started out in 1987 selling telecom switches from an apartment in Shenzhen, a small city overshadowed by neighboring Hong Kong. In his telling, a 1993 Greyhound bus trip across the U.S. stirred grand ambitions.
In Dallas, Mr. Ren recalled visiting the 60,000-acre headquarters of Texas Instruments Inc. Employees there clocked overtime to take him on a daylong tour of research facilities, revealing technical details of new high-speed devices.
At National Semiconductor in California, at the time one of the world’s leading chip makers, he saw an exhibition of optical devices and 3G network switching technologies.
Mr. Ren hired a taxi to drive around the Silicon Valley research facility of International Business Machines Corp. to calculate how many square kilometers it encompassed. He felt “the United States will prosper forever,” he recalled in a blog post.
A quarter-century later, his company was a leader in artificial-intelligence research and had a smartphone brand that sold more units than Apple Inc. Huawei opened a 4-square-mile campus outside Shenzhen that featured Swiss-style trams zipping past replicas of European castles and landmarks of Paris and Verona, Italy, that housed Huawei offices and research labs.
As the company grew, it was stalked by allegations—from former employees, rival corporations and U.S. officials—that its advance relied on deceit. Huawei denied the allegations and said it was committed to complying with laws in global markets. The company settled lawsuits with competitors that accused it of stealing trade secrets, among them Cisco Systems Inc. and Quintel Technology Ltd.
Paperwork for search warrants and interview notes piled up in a Justice Department office in New York. Some companies were afraid China would retaliate if they took Huawei to court, feeding a view at the department that Huawei’s competitive advantage was impunity.
A bank ended up providing investigators with evidence for the government’s first case, which originated in the Brooklyn, N.Y., office.
In 2013, HSBC had asked Huawei to explain a news report claiming it secretly owned and operated a company that sold its products in Iran. Afterward, Ms. Meng then told the HSBC executive in the Hong Kong restaurant that Huawei adhered to U.S. sanctions.
Months after the meeting, border agents searching Ms. Meng’s electronics during a transit through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York recovered a text file of her talking points concerning Iran. It had been deleted but not erased from the hard drive.
The file became useful when HSBC, on the hook for its own legal missteps, had to give federal prosecutors a dossier on its business with Huawei, including what Ms. Meng had said about her company’s dealings in Iran.
Federal investigators assigned a code name to keep the probe secret. HSBC and other banks cooperating with the Justice Department feared for the safety of their executives in China, as well as business ties there.
Prosecutors in April 2017 served Huawei with a subpoena to answer questions about whether it conducted business in sanctioned countries, and company executives subsequently halted travel to the U.S.
In August 2018, prosecutors readied an indictment against Huawei and Ms. Meng. They kept it under seal until she landed in a country within their reach.
Ms. Meng’s jail in Vancouver was a $4.2 million house facing the North Shore Mountains. It was the smaller of her two homes in the city.
U.S. officials had hoped Canada would keep Ms. Meng behind bars until her extradition. The billionaire’s daughter, who had been issued at least seven passports, was a flight risk, prosecutors argued during her December 2018 bail hearing.
Instead, a judge had granted her bail, set at 10 million Canadian dollars, equivalent to $7.5 million, and imposed a curfew from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Otherwise, she was free to roam. A GPS monitor on her ankle kept Ms. Meng tethered to authorities.
Later, she received court permission to move, for security reasons, to a $12.3 million, seven-bedroom villa, two doors from the home of the U.S. consul general. Mr. Ren dispatched a team of Huawei employees to help with public relations and his daughter’s defense.
A vice president from the Brazil office and a China-based legal director were the first to arrive. They stayed in a villa nearby. A PR manager from Huawei’s headquarters followed, and he began holding impromptu news conferences on the courthouse steps, irritating Ms. Meng and her legal advisers. They worried his public statements could jeopardize the case, but Mr. Ren overruled their objections.
By April, Huawei had a more senior team in place, including Mr. Ren’s translator and personal assistant, who served as a liaison.
The former head sales executive in Europe directed Ms. Meng’s daily Zumba classes and yoga workouts. Personal chefs prepared health-conscious meals. A florist arranged bouquets for the dining table. Mr. Ren tried to prod his daughter into pursuing a Ph.D. while she waited for her release.
The cast of helpers and aides was known as Sabrina’s Team, after one of the English-language names she used.
When Ms. Meng stepped out, a set of court-appointed bodyguards, stationed in a tent pitched on the property, trailed her. Fashion boutiques accommodated her private shopping tours. She dined with friends at the Dynasty Seafood restaurant, where the city’s Chinese elite enjoyed dim sum and city views.
Huawei had built a foothold in Canada’s telecom market, including a 5G research center. Shortly after Ms. Meng’s arrest, the company ramped up its advertising around the city, draping bus stops, billboards and shopping malls in banners, many in Chinese, featuring its latest slogan—Huawei: a higher intelligence.
On March 6, 2019, three months after her arrest, bodyguards and TV cameras followed Ms. Meng into court for her extradition hearing.
On the courthouse steps, protesters opposing Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong set fire to a Chinese flag. Some held placards scrawled in all caps, “EXTRADITE MENG!”
The court hearing lasted just a few minutes, marking the start of a protracted legal battle. Each time Ms. Meng went to court, she passed a Chinese nurse, a member of China’s Uyghur minority, holding pictures of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor, the two Michaels, to protest their detention.
In the northeastern city of Dandong, on the North Korea border, Michael Spavor lived with some 20 other inmates in Cell 315. At night, they slept side by side like sardines. The overflowing compound was sweltering on hot days and cold after dark. Meals were meager and unchanging: cabbage, eggs and rice.
Mr. Spavor, a Calgary native, traveled to South Korea at age 21 and taught English. He became fascinated with the authoritarian state of North Korea and began arranging tours. In 2013 and 2014, he planned three trips for Dennis Rodman, the former Chicago Bulls basketball star who had his own interest in the secretive country and its leader, Kim Jong Un.
Mr. Spavor impressed party guests in South Korea with his pitch-perfect North Korean accent.
The two Michaels had met once at a dinner in Beijing. The expatriates chatted about China, North Korea and relations between the two countries.
Mr. Kovrig had gone to Budapest after college in the mid-1990s, joining a wave of Westerners who flooded into once-closed Central European countries. He worked as a reporter and sang in a punk band before returning home to join Canada’s diplomatic service.
Fluorescent lights glowed 24 hours a day in Mr. Kovrig’s windowless cell at Beijing’s No. 1 Detention Center. For almost six months, he was confined without a whiff of fresh air. To break the monotony, he devised a daily workout of push-ups, six-minute planks and 7,000 steps around the tiny space.
Prison authorities spent the first months of Mr. Kovrig’s incarceration conducting interrogations that stretched to 10 hours. Over and over, they questioned his work at the Canadian embassy in Beijing.
In June 2019, after more than 150 days in prison, Mr. Kovrig was allowed to send a batch of letters home. The embassy scanned the stack of handwritten notes and emailed them to his wife in Toronto.
Vina Nadjibulla, a 44-year-old international security analyst, met Mr. Kovrig while they were studying international relations at Columbia University in 2001. She was raised in wartime Kabul, the daughter of a Soviet Jew and an Afghan Muslim, and had found her calling in conflict prevention at the United Nations. Mr. Kovrig proposed to her in the U.N. Assembly Hall.
He entered Canada’s foreign service, and she worked on the reconstruction of postwar Sierra Leone. The couple had separated by the time of Mr. Kovrig’s arrest. But each had promised to help the other if they were ever kidnapped during their work abroad.
Ms. Nadjibulla put her life on hold, flying between Toronto, Washington and Ottawa to petition officials who could help free Mr. Kovrig. In June, Mr. Trudeau invited Ms. Nadjibulla to his office, and she read from her husband’s letters to his family.
“If there is one faint silver lining to this hell, it’s this: trauma carved caverns of psychological pain through my mind,” one letter said. “I find myself filling those gulfs with a love for you and for life that is vast, deep and more profound and comforting than what I’ve ever experienced.”
“Come sit with me and walk with me in spirit,” Mr. Kovrig wrote. “Help me feel less isolated. Let me share the love I have for you and we’ll get through this together.”
About a week later, Mr. Trudeau arrived in Osaka, Japan, for the G-20 summit. He set out to lobby the one person who could release his two countrymen—Mr. Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
In meetings with Western leaders, Mr. Xi seldom joked and rarely smiled. He usually began with a monologue of talking points almost identical to his public statements. He so resolutely stuck to scripted remarks that his interpreter simply read aloud from a prepared English text. When finished, Mr. Xi would ask, “Don’t you agree?”
White House officials analyzing transcripts from closed-door talks often struggled to understand whether Mr. Xi had said anything of substance beyond his prepared statements.
In their conversations, Mr. Trump would try six or seven ways of bluntly asking a specific question, and Mr. Xi would repeat the same vague responses.
Other world leaders traded small talk and called each other by their first names—Donald, Angela, Vladimir. Even behind closed doors, Mr. Xi stuck to “Mr. President” or “Madam Prime Minister” and other honorifics.
Throughout the first half of 2019, Mr. Trudeau had failed to get an audience with Mr. Xi. His diplomats in China were frozen out. The Chinese reply to Mr. Trudeau was frustrating: It would breach protocol for Mr. Xi, China’s head of state, to speak with Mr. Trudeau, merely the head of government of Canada, whose head of state was Queen Elizabeth II.
Beijing expressed itself through trade restrictions. China blocked shipments of Canadian canola oil at its ports. In May, it barred pork from two of Canada’s top slaughterhouses. Three days ahead of the G-20 summit, it stopped all Canadian meat from entering China.
Mr. Trudeau asked Mr. Trump to speak up for Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor when the U.S. president met with the Chinese leader at the summit in Osaka.
At their meeting, Mr. Trump handed Mr. Xi a sheet of paper that listed the names of Americans being held in China. The names, written in Chinese and English, also included Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
“It would be a great gesture,” Mr. Trump said with a stroke of flattery, if China could help these people get home.
Scanning the names, Mr. Xi pointedly noted that the last time the two leaders had met was the day of Ms. Meng’s arrest.
Mr. Trudeau got his opening by chance. Chile was a guest at the G-20 meeting, but its representative didn’t attend a scheduled assembly. That left Canada seated alphabetically between China and Brazil—and Mr. Xi seated to the right of Mr. Trudeau.
The Canadian prime minister passed a note, handwritten in Chinese, to Mr. Xi. “We have to communicate,” it said. Mr. Trudeau proposed they select two confidants to begin backchannel talks.
The two men stepped to the side of a conference floor, exchanged pleasantries through a translator and clasped hands.
Days later, Dominic Barton, the former global managing partner of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., carried a thin folder of notes into the gated Diaoyutai state guesthouse in Beijing. His meeting was unofficial and secret. He told his secretary he was on vacation.
The 60-year-old Canadian had risen in the slipstream of China’s economic miracle, and through more than a decade living and working in the country had ties with Chinese entrepreneurs, executives and party leaders. He had written two books on China and taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Mr. Barton wasn’t a diplomat. Yet Mr. Trudeau believed he could break the diplomatic logjam and bring home the two Michaels.
An adviser had informed the prime minister that there was a 40% chance Mr. Barton’s first meeting with Chinese officials would go well, a 40% chance it would go well enough for a second visit and a 20% chance it would go sour.
The silver-haired executive smiled at a pair of Foreign Ministry officials when he and the adviser entered the meeting room. An elderly Communist Party official began reading from a stack of pages, pausing with dramatic effect for the translator to catch up.
“You have arrested Madam Meng.”
“You are lapdogs of the United States.”
Mr. Barton interrupted, and the ministry official, appointed by Mr. Xi, looked up and flipped back to the first page. Then he began rereading from the beginning. For three hours, the official read from an invective-laced script, circling back to the top each time Mr. Barton protested.
Calling for a timeout, Mr. Barton stepped into the hallway. “I think we’re in the 5%,” the adviser said, acknowledging the worse-than-expected outcome.
Mr. Barton held his tongue through the last hour of hectoring. The Chinese official focused on Section 23(3) of Canada’s 1999 Extradition Act, which gave the country’s justice minister authority to cancel an extradition.
“You don’t even know your own law!” the official said.
At the end of the meeting, Mr. Barton asked if China’s Foreign Ministry would attend a second meeting in Ottawa. No, the official said. But the Canadians were welcome to return to Beijing.
That was the only good news Mr. Barton had for the prime minister.
“OK,” Mr. Trudeau said in their phone call. “Well, that’s something.”
Weeks later, Mr. Barton was named Canada’s ambassador to China. His first test was a meeting with Mr. Xi in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The ambassador delivered a short speech in his halting Mandarin during an exchange that lasted barely a minute.
“My mission here is to resolve this issue,” Mr. Barton said. “I want to get Madam Meng and our people home.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Mandarin,” Mr. Xi said.
“I don’t…that’s the only Mandarin I know,” the executive replied.
Mr. Xi smiled. “It takes two people to repair a relationship,” he said.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, then offered his own rough-edged advice.
“You got a lot of work to do,” Mr. Wang said, slapping Mr. Barton’s back. “You better exercise hard!”
Shortly after, Mr. Barton made his first visit to a Chinese prison. Guards escorted him past an interrogation room holding a metal chair with straps.
Guards told Mr. Spavor that he had a visitor.
The two men met in a reception room, and they were told not to discuss Mr. Spavor’s case. Mr. Barton leaned across a table toward the handcuffed prisoner. “I’m going to talk to you very fast to be able to smuggle some stuff in about the case,” he said. “Here are the four things I want to discuss. But first, is there anything you want to put on the agenda?”
Mr. Spavor, struggling with sleep, looked numb. “How long will this go on?” he said. “Every day I wake up, and it’s the same.”
Mr. Barton said he didn’t know. He spoke rapidly about efforts to free him and of the health of Mr. Spavor’s father in Calgary, who had fallen seriously ill.
When guards caught mention of Ms. Meng, they interrupted, and Mr. Barton switched subjects before returning to the case.
Mr. Barton also went to the Beijing prison to see Mr. Kovrig, who was livid and gesturing at guards he said were abusive. They had taken away his glasses, citing rules against metal objects.
“Take their numbers!” he said, his 6-foot-4 frame stretching out of his too-small prison uniform. “Write them down!”
In his letters, Mr. Kovrig had called the prison a concrete desert.
He also demanded to know about his release. “When will this get done?”
Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor were headed toward their second Christmas behind bars when NATO leaders mingled at a Dec. 3, 2019, Champagne reception in Buckingham Palace.
It was hosted in the Green Drawing Room, a long, crimson-carpeted hallway decorated with silk wallpaper and gold-framed pictures of England’s monarchs. Kate Middleton and Prince William filtered through the crowd of NATO officials charged with defending the West. Mr. Trudeau spoke privately with the queen.
The prime minister’s chief foreign policy adviser, David Morrison, grabbed a word with White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. Earlier in the day, the prime minister had told Mr. Trump about the ordeal the two Michaels were enduring. The U.S. agreed to a meeting in Washington, an opening Canada welcomed.
The White House had already resumed prisoner-exchange talks with Beijing. National security adviser Robert O’Brien, who followed Mr. Bolton, had recently been in Bangkok for a meeting of Asian leaders.
He surprised China’s premier, Li Keqiang, at the meeting with books for the two Canadian prisoners: “Unbroken,” Laura Hillenbrand’s profile of World War II prisoner Louis Zamperini, for Mr. Kovrig, a C.S. Lewis novel for Mr. Spavor and a Bible for each. The books contained handwritten notes reassuring the two captives that the world knew of their suffering.
As Mr. O’Brien passed on the books, he also relayed a diplomatic message: Washington wanted to talk.
Days later, China’s deputy chief of mission in Washington met discreetly with National Security Council staff at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. Washington had no right to demand the Canadians’ release, the Chinese delegate said: “This is not a U.S. matter.”
Beijing, however, was willing to consider another exchange first, to build trust. The U.S. could accelerate the deportation of Bank of China Ltd. manager Xu Guojun, who was sought by Chinese authorities for corruption-related charges.
In return, the Americans wanted David Lin, a Taiwanese-American pastor imprisoned for life after proselytizing in China, and Kai Li, a Chinese-American businessman from Long Island, N.Y., who was serving 10 years for espionage.
A few days before Christmas, a Canadian delegation met in Mr. Mulvaney’s office at the White House, where administration officials were preoccupied with Mr. Trump’s first impeachment hearings.
Canada’s acting ambassador to Washington, Kirsten Hillman, and Messrs. Barton and Morrison squeezed next to John Demers, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for national security, and Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser. The sooner Ms. Meng was extradited, Mr. Pottinger said, the sooner the two Michaels could be freed.
The Canadian delegation said Ms. Meng’s appeal could last years and would almost certainly end in a plea deal. If so, they said, the sooner the U.S. agreed to a plea deal, the better for Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor.
After several videoconference calls through the spring of 2020, Mr. Demers told the Canadian diplomats that the Justice Department was considering a deferred prosecution agreement: Prosecutors wouldn’t move forward with charges if Ms. Meng pledged not to commit other federal crimes.
The sticking point was that Ms. Meng would have to admit wrongdoing. Her lawyers said she would never agree because she had done nothing wrong.
Mr. Barton and his closest aides in Beijing frequently worked in a room below the Canadian embassy that had metal-coated walls to repel electronic surveillance. It was named the Salle de Deux Innocents—the Room of Two Innocents—for a travelogue written by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau after he hitchhiked with a friend across Mao-era China.
In meetings, Mr. Barton and the aides toggled through flipboard pages with names of officials they hoped could persuade China to see the logic of settling Ms. Meng’s case with the Justice Department.
Months before her arrest, the two countries had pursued a free-trade agreement. Now, the invitations to state functions slowed to a trickle. Mr. Barton, known for his ability to strike deals in China, couldn’t get calls returned, even from longtime acquaintances. “We have come to expect this from the U.S., but we have a 50-year relationship with you,” one official said.
The mission wasn’t just faltering, Mr. Barton confided to a colleague. It was lurching toward humiliation.
In spring 2020, Mr. Barton hoped for better luck with Mr. Ren, the Huawei founder. He secured an appointment at the company’s Shenzhen headquarters, where he found Mr. Ren upbeat about his daughter’s prospects.
Madam Meng would be home soon, Mr. Ren said through his translator. Her lawyers had many grounds to appeal her extradition, and they believed one would stick. “I trust the Canadian legal system will do the right thing,” he said.
Ms. Meng, her legal team and Huawei were so confident of a win that they had her bags packed and chartered the 787th Boeing 787 ever made, a commemorative Dreamliner jet that would bring her home from Vancouver.
Days before Ms. Meng’s May 27, 2020, court hearing, her assistants staged a rehearsal for a planned photo on the steps of British Columbia’s Supreme Court building. Huawei colleagues and household staff joined Ms. Meng, flashing victory signs in front of an imagined crowd of supporters.
On the morning of the hearing, they were met instead by a jeering crowd hoisting signs: “Boycott Huawei” and “Free Canadians Michael Kovrig, Michael Spavor.”
In the courtroom, Ms. Meng’s lawyers told the judge that the U.S. extradition request was faulty. Under Canadian law, the extradition could proceed only if the offense was a crime in both Canada and the U.S.
Although U.S. prosecutors had charged Ms. Meng with bank fraud, the lawyers said, the case was in fact about U.S. sanctions on Iran, and Canada had no such sanctions. The judge declined the appeal.
Vina Nadjibulla, Mr. Kovrig’s wife, was watching the judgment and taking notes. She had spent hundreds of hours following the case. After the judge’s decision, she went to Washington to brief officials.
Each month, she sent Mr. Kovrig a letter with regards from friends. She included such cryptic messages as, “I was walking in our old stomping grounds,” meaning she had been lobbying officials at the U.N.
Ms. Nadjibulla sent nutritional and fitness advice. Mr. Kovrig began sprinkling milk powder and sesame powder from the prison canteen on meals for a protein boost; he tried pistol squats to strengthen his core. His life was so closed he didn’t understand that a pandemic was disrupting the world.
Mr. Kovrig read 20 to 30 books a month—on philosophy and geopolitics, classics from Tolstoy to Kafka and Nelson Mandela’s prison autobiography, “The Long Walk to Freedom.” He and Mr. Spavor read copies of Viktor Frankl’s meditation on life in Auschwitz, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
Mr. Spavor shared his books with cellmates, who were rarely allowed them. In return, they helped him learn to write Chinese characters.
Mr. Kovrig’s letters home included book reviews, and Ms. Nadjibulla forwarded his recommendations to an informal book club of friends and colleagues in the U.S., Canada and Asia.
After months of requests, Chinese prison guards allowed Mr. Kovrig to call his family. Ms. Nadjibulla answered.
“V, is that you?” he said.
In the summer of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread worldwide, FBI agents arrested five academic researchers, most of them charged with lying on visa applications. Trump administration officials believed the students were exploiting U.S. research to advance China’s military. All pleaded not guilty.
The arrests prompted China to resuscitate secret prisoner-swap discussions with the U.S., which had gone silent in the pandemic. Beijing wanted its researchers back. Washington wanted its Americans—and the two Michaels.
A videoconference linked officials from the National Security Council, State Department and Justice Department with Chinese Foreign Ministry diplomats and the Ministry of Public Security. The U.S. insisted on using Microsoft Teams rather than Chinese software for the meeting.
“They are students,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry official said. “They are just studying.”
The U.S. offered to return the researchers, as well as speed up the deportation of Xu Guojun, the banker sought by China on corruption charges.
In return, the Americans wanted Kai Li, the businessman, and David Lin, the pastor, as well as Victor Liu and Cynthia Liu, American siblings blocked from leaving China since 2018. The U.S. also asked China to allow the exit of another three U.S. citizens, including two children.
The proposed exchange—seven Chinese for seven Americans, plus the two Canadians—would make it one of the largest prisoner swaps since the Cold War.
When U.S. officials raised the names of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor, a Ministry of Public Security official said, “The Chinese people would not allow the Michaels to go home unless Madam Meng does.”
A Justice Department official encouraged the Chinese officials to talk with Ms. Meng’s lawyers about accepting the offer from federal prosecutors: freedom in exchange for an admission of wrongdoing. Persuade her to sign, the U.S. official said.
The talks fizzled. The U.S. wouldn’t bring home the Americans without the two Canadians. Ms. Meng wasn’t interested in the prosecutors’ offer.
The Chinese executive told her lawyers she would never admit wrongdoing. She was willing to remain in Vancouver for years, if necessary, while her legal team fought the U.S. extradition. The company’s reputation was at stake.
That summer, Huawei swept past Samsung Electronics Co. to become the world’s top smartphone maker. As chief financial officer, Ms. Meng had to protect the empire her father had built.
But Huawei was already tipping.
Mr. Trump, who began referring to Huawei as “Spyway,” signed off on new export restrictions in 2020 that blocked the company from buying computer chips produced with U.S. tools. The restrictions extended to manufacturers using American technology worldwide. Huawei started to run low on chips it needed to churn out smartphones, which made up around half its revenue.
Huawei also lost the license to load Google software on its phones and tablets. As sales plunged, Huawei considered shifting into electric cars.
Canada discussed the arrest of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor at NATO counterintelligence briefings. Western leaders who spoke with Mr. Trudeau heard about the harrowing prison conditions endured by the two Michaels. Many of the details came from Ms. Nadjibulla.
One by one, the world’s wealthiest countries gravitated toward the U.S. position and cut ties with Huawei.
In July 2020, the U.K. announced it would ban the company from its networks by 2027. Two weeks later, France said it would stop renewing licenses for Huawei 5G equipment, effectively barring the company. By October, the U.K. Parliament’s defense committee said it would accelerate the Huawei ban.
Huawei’s head of public affairs in North America, Vincent Peng, bounced between the U.S., Canada and China, scouting for lobbyists to reach lawmakers and diplomats to help free Ms. Meng.
Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election in November, and as the clock ticked down to a new administration, Mr. Peng called Mr. Barton a few days before Christmas. He said Huawei was going to try its luck with Joe Biden.
Mr. Biden’s first bilateral meeting as president was with Canada on Feb. 23, 2021. The first item on Mr. Trudeau’s meeting agenda was the release of Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor. “These two guys are in prison,” the prime minister said. “They are there because we are living up to our commitments to you….We need to get them out.”
“I will not interfere with the judicial process,” Mr. Biden replied. “Everything else, I am here for you.”
Ms. Meng’s detention was one area where Mr. Xi hoped he could reset U.S.-China relations under the new president. Yet from all appearances, the relationship remained volatile.
At a March 2021 meeting in Alaska, China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, publicly accused the U.S. of persuading other countries to attack China. In private, Secretary of State Antony Blinken brought up the two Michaels, saying serious countries don’t kidnap people to use as bargaining chips.
That month, Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor were tried for espionage in closed-door hearings. Verdicts and sentences wouldn’t be announced until later.
As Mr. Biden took office, the Chinese leader came to see the case as an obstacle to restoring U.S.-China ties under the new administration. Mr. Xi felt his country had demonstrated sufficient resolve against Western provocation.
He tapped Xie Feng, a vice foreign minister, to bring the prisoner standoff to an end. Mr. Xi by then had sent more than 100 handwritten notes to underlings about Ms. Meng’s case.
In July 2021, the Justice Department dropped charges against the five Chinese researchers, a decision that lowered tensions between the two countries. Days later, Mr. Xie joined a gathering of senior U.S. and Chinese officials in Tianjin, the first such meeting in more than three months.
Between testy exchanges about Covid-19 and human rights, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said her department wouldn’t block Ms. Meng’s return home if she settled with U.S. prosecutors.
That was the assurance Mr. Xie was seeking.
Two weeks after the Tianjin meeting, Mr. Barton learned that Mr. Spavor would be sentenced in Dandong. The ambassador’s team invited diplomats from allied countries to gather at the courthouse. If Canada couldn’t stop the sentencing, it wanted the world as a witness.
Mr. Barton was joined by diplomats from the U.S., Japan, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. In the courtroom, Mr. Barton opened a video call to the Canadian embassy in Beijing and narrated the proceedings.
The judge sentenced Mr. Spavor to an 11-year term for espionage, based on the number of incriminating photos authorities claimed they found on his phone. Mr. Barton called Mr. Spavor’s family and then spoke to reporters.
“Our collective presence and voice sends a strong signal to China and the Chinese government that all the eyes of the world are watching,” the ambassador said.
A month later, Mr. Barton was summoned to the U.S. Embassy safe room to read transcripts of a call between Messrs. Biden and Xi. The two leaders had again pressed each other to release the prisoners.
It was, according to Beijing, “the consensus of the two presidents.”
Mr. Barton got an unexpected call while he was wrapping up a visit to an organization serving children with special needs in Qinghai, one of China’s poorest provinces. An aide handed him a phone and said, “Xie Feng wants to speak to you now!” Mr. Barton stepped into a blue van.
Mr. Xie spoke through a translator and quizzed Mr. Barton over details for completing the deferred prosecution agreement with Ms. Meng. The snag was how the U.S. would characterize her wrongdoing. Mr. Barton relayed some potential wording, and Mr. Xie cut him off, breaking into English.
That’s good, he said.
Ms. Meng wouldn’t explicitly admit to lying—only that the statements she had made to HSBC were “untrue.”
Mr. Barton plugged in a phone charger and called off his next visit. He kept Mr. Xie on the phone to go over logistics of a deal that could easily collapse. It all hinged on one overriding question: Would Xi Jinping approve?
The decision arrived in a handwritten note from the General Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Xi gave his consent.
On the evening of Sept. 19, one of Ms. Meng’s new lawyers emailed a statement of facts to the Justice Department. The Huawei executive would concede that what she told the HSBC banker in 2013 was untrue.
Five days later, Ms. Meng joined a Brooklyn, N.Y., court hearing in a videoconference call from Vancouver. She pleaded not guilty to the indictment and accepted the deferred prosecution agreement.
The same day, Mr. Barton arrived for a prison visit with Mr. Kovrig. He learned he would speak to the two Michaels in video calls. Mr. Spavor had already arrived in Beijing by train.
“You will have the honor of telling them they’re going home,” a security official told Mr. Barton.
Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor appeared on the calls, one after the other. Mr. Barton tried to keep his voice from breaking in his call to Mr. Spavor.
“You’re going home,” he said.
Mr. Spavor looked bewildered.
“Are you serious?”
Nervous that any snag could derail the prisoner exchange, only a few select diplomats in Canada’s Beijing embassy knew what was afoot. Embassy staff worked out travel arrangements. A diplomat’s wife volunteered to bake peanut-butter cookies for the trip home.
In Vancouver, Ms. Meng and her lawyers had a 4 p.m. deadline on Sept. 24 to complete paperwork for the agreement with the Justice Department.
After the U.S. case was done, Canada invoked Section 23(3), the article allowing the government to terminate Ms. Meng’s custody.
In China, Messrs. Spavor and Kovrig, handcuffed and blindfolded, arrived at the Tianjin airport. Mr. Barton waited in the VIP lounge.
As the Canadians cleared the immigration checkpoint in China, officers at the Vancouver airport handed Ms. Meng her own freshly stamped passport. She hugged a lawyer and bid farewell to Chinese consular officers.
Ms. Meng learned during her flight that Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor had also been freed.
After a nighttime landing, Ms. Meng descended the airplane stairs at Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport. She wore a Chinese flag pinned to her red Carolina Herrera dress and waved to a waiting crowd. Projectors flashed her name across skyscrapers in Shenzhen.
From a red carpet placed on the tarmac for her arrival, Ms. Meng raised her hands in victory and thanked one person, Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Messrs. Kovrig and Spavor touched down in Anchorage, Alaska. On the rain-washed runway, Mr. Kovrig bent to kiss the ground. Mr. Spavor joked they should hold their kisses until they reached Canada.
Mr. Trudeau and a small entourage greeted their return in Calgary, Mr. Spavor’s hometown. They were welcomed with to-go cups of Tim Hortons coffee.
Mr. Kovrig flew on to Toronto. Ms. Nadjibulla met him there, and they embraced beside a Royal Canadian Air Force jet.
The next day, China allowed the Liu siblings to return to the U.S.
Once home, Mr. Spavor found it hard to sleep in his own bed, having grown accustomed to contorting himself in a cell beside dozens of inmates. He remains in Canada and regularly speaks by phone with Mr. Barton.
Mr. Kovrig and Ms. Nadjibulla spent weeks together writing a book on the ordeal during her stays in Spain, Canada and the Netherlands. They hope the book offers a road map for other prisoners and their families. Despite their divorce plans, they are in some ways closer now than ever, friends said.
Mr. Barton resigned his post as ambassador three months after the two Michaels returned home. He became chairman of Rio Tinto PLC, the Anglo-Australian mining conglomerate. China, long locked in a trade dispute with Australia, agreed last month to develop a $2 billion iron-ore project with his new company.
Ms. Meng was recently promoted to a six-month rotation as Huawei’s chairwoman. She no longer sets foot in Western countries.
The U.S. and Canada persuaded 66 other countries to sign a declaration against arbitrary detention to forestall similar international disputes.
The resurgence of what the U.S. has called hostage diplomacy—by China but also Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Turkey—has reached such proportions that Mr. Biden this summer declared it a national emergency. He signed an executive order authorizing the U.S. to impose sanctions on anyone involved in wrongfully detaining Americans abroad.
Huawei has pleaded not guilty to the bank-fraud and other charges in the U.S. case. On Monday, prosecutors unsealed charges against two Chinese intelligence officers accused of trying to bribe a U.S. law-enforcement employee for confidential information about what people familiar with the case said was the Huawei investigation.
Canada in May declared Huawei a national security risk and banned it from building 5G networks in the country. It was a political decision, a Huawei spokesman said, resulting from U.S. pressure.
“We used to embrace the ideal of globalization and aspire to serve all mankind,” Mr. Ren wrote in an August company memo. “What is our ideal now? Survive and earn some money wherever we can.”
The company has since been expelled from most European and North American 5G networks.
Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art, Medzilaborce, Slovakia
Andy Warhol’s Museum is the only one in Europe. A dominant feature is the statue of Andy Warhol with a fountain, standing in front of the museum.
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The small town of Medzilaborce, situated in the south-east of Slovakia, boasts of two European primacies. After the establishment of the first museum named after Andy Warhol, Medzilaborce has also erected the first statue dedicated to this representative of world pop-art.
Nowadays Medzilaborce makes most tourist profit from the fact that the parents of the representative of pop-art Andy Warhol originally came from this town.
In 1991 a unique museum, dedicated to the life and work of the world-wide known avant-garde artist, was opened there.
In November 2002 a fountain with the statue of Andy Warhol was placed here in front of the museum. The author of the statue is the academic sculptor Juraj Bartusz.
The statue in Medzilaborce, made of cast bronze, represents Andy Warhol with an umbrella, in his typical pose. The figure measuring 230cm in height is slightly relaxed and tense at the same time. The artist is hidden behind his glasses and in the imaginary shadow of his umbrella.
The sunset could not have gotten any better. Talk about Divine Intervention. All one could do was stand and admire. Oh, and shoot a few pictures!
I loved every minute of my travels. And like all good things, I never wanted them to end. We originally planned for a half day at the Vatican, but as you can see, that half day turned into a full! We got there first thing in the morning, then Jamie's glasses broke! We tried to tape the glasses back together, but Jamie couldn't comfortably walk through the Vatican's art treasures with obstructed vision. So we ended up telling the Vatican administrators who then stamped our ticket to allow us re-entry while we made plans to either go back to the hotel or find a repair shop. We luckily stumbled upon an eyeglass shop near the Vatican Metro station. They popped his lenses out and stuck them into a new $35 Euro frame. Then, off we returned to the Vatican and re-started our walk through their extensive collection.
According to the Vatican Guide, they have 4 miles worth of museum! I have to say we walked 4 miles, but not through the entire museum. I insisted on seeing the Sistine Chapel twice... and the only way to the chapel was to walk the entire length of the holdings again. I figured I didn't know when I would see Michelangelo's masterpiece again... so I had to milk it for every second! From there, we exited to St. Peter's Basilica. We listened to a downloaded audio guide... then decided to hike up the Dome/Cupola. I could not have asked for a better view or better skies!
About: The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome. The primacy of Rome makes its bishop the worldwide leader of the church, otherwise known as the Pope. Diplomatically, the Holy See acts and speaks for the whole Roman Catholic Church.
São Miguel dos Milagres é um município brasileiro do estado de Alagoas. Sua população estimada em 2004 era de 6.354 habitantes.
Chamava-se, antes, Freguesia de Nossa Senhora Mãe do Povo. Mudou sua denominação, segundo a tradição, depois que um pescador encontrou na praia uma peça de madeira coberta de musgos e algas marinhas. Ao levá-la para casa e fazer sua limpeza, descobriu que se tratava de uma imagem de São Miguel Arcanjo, provavelmente caída de alguma embarcação. Ao terminar o trabalho de limpeza, o pescador descobriu espantado, que uma ferida persistente que o afligia há tempos estava totalmente cicatrizada.
A notícia logo se espalhou, fazendo com que aparecessem pessoas em busca de cura para suas doenças e de novos milagres. Sua colonização tomou corpo durante o período da invasão holandesa, quando moradores da sofrida Porto Calvo fugiram em busca de um lugar seguro para abrigar suas famílias e de onde pudessem avistar com antecipação a chegada dos inimigos batavos. A capela inicial, que deu origem à freguesia estabelecida pela Igreja Católica, foi dedicada a Nossa Senhora Mãe do Povo.
Sua história está ligada, pela proximidade, à de Porto de Pedras e à de Porto Calvo, antigo Santo Antônio dos Quatro Rios ou, ainda, Bom Sucesso. Disputa com Porto de Pedras a primazia de ser a sede do Engenho Mata Redonda, onde ocorreu a célebre batalha do mesmo nome travada, entre o exército holandês e as forças luso-espanholas e vencida pelo General Artikchof. É compreensível a querela, uma vez que os atuais municípios não estavam formados e os limites eram imprecisos. Por muito tempo, o Engenho Democrata foi destaque na produção de açúcar na região. Igualmente, o povoado foi líder na produção de cocos, quando ainda pertencia a Porto de Pedras.
Foi elevado à vila em 09 de junho de 1864 e, a partir de 1941, um grupo de moradores, entre eles Augusto de Barros Falcão, José Braga, Aderbal da Costa Raposo e João Moraes vinham reivindicando sua emancipação do município de Porto de Pedras. A emancipação política começou no dia 6 de junho de 1960. E pela Lei 2.239, de 07 de junho de 1960, São Miguel dos Milagres emancipa-se, separando-se de Porto de Pedras.
Texto by: pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Miguel_dos_Milagres
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São Miguel dos Milagres is a municipality in the state of Alagoas. Its estimated population in 2004 was 6,354 inhabitants.
His name was before, Parish of Our Lady Mother of the People. It changed its name, according to tradition, after a fisherman found the beach a piece of wood covered with mosses and seaweed. To take it home and do your cleaning, she discovered that it was an image of St. Michael the Archangel probably fallen in some vessel. When you finish the cleaning work, the fisherman discovered amazed that a persistent wound that afflicted him for days was totally healed.
The news soon spread, causing appeared people seeking cures for their diseases and new miracles. Colonization took shape during the period of Dutch invasion when residents suffered Porto Calvo fled in search of a safe place to house their families and where they could sight in advance the arrival of the Batavians enemies. The original chapel, which gave rise to the parish established by the Catholic Church was dedicated to Our Lady Mother of the People.
Its history is linked by proximity to the Porto de Pedras and Porto Calvo, former St. Anthony of the Four Rivers, or even Bom Sucesso. Dispute with Porto de Pedras the primacy of being the seat of the Engenho Mata Redonda, where there was the famous battle of the same name fought between the Dutch army and the Luso-Spanish forces and won by General Artikchof. the complaint, since the current municipalities were not formed were inaccurate and limits is understandable. For a long time, the Democratic Engenho was featured in sugar production in the region. Also, the town was the leading producer of coconuts, when still belonged to Porto de Pedras.
It was elevated to the village on June 9, 1864, and from 1941, a group of residents, among them Augusto de Barros Falcão, José Braga, Adherbal Costa Raposo and John Moraes came claiming emancipation of Porto de Pedras municipality. Political emancipation began on June 6, 1960. And by Law 2239 of 07 June 1960, São Miguel dos Milagres is emancipated, by separating from Porto de Pedras.
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Today, 9 July, is the feast of St John of Cologne and his companion martyrs. St John was a Dominican priest, one of nineteen religious who were hanged by militant Calvinists in Holland for defending Church teaching. In 1572 the town of Gorkum had just been captured by the Gueux, an extremist group of Dutch Calvinists who had continued a war of independence from Spain through acts of piracy. Hearing of the local priests’ plight, John left the safety of his parish and went to Gorkum in disguise to give whatever assistance he could. Several times he entered the town to administer the Sacrament to priests who were being cruelly tortured. Eventually he too was taken prisoner and tortured. Although the priests had been offered their freedom in return for denying Catholic teaching on Eucharistic and papal primacy, they refused to do so. The site of their martyrdom soon became a place of pilgrimage.
This mosaic of the Saint is found next to the tabernacle at the High Altar of St Dominic's Priory church in London.
+++++++++++++ FROM WIKIPEDIA ++++++
Bagan ပုဂံ Pagan
Bagan is located in MyanmarBaganBagan
Location of Bagan, Myanmar
Coordinates: 21°10′N 94°52′E
CountryMyanmar
RegionMandalay Region
Foundedmid-to-late 9th century
Area
• Total104 km2 (40 sq mi)
Population
• EthnicitiesBamar
• ReligionsTheravada Buddhism
Time zoneUTC+6.30 (MST)
Bagan (Burmese: ပုဂံ; MLCTS: pu.gam, IPA: [bəɡàɴ]; formerly Pagan) is an ancient city located in the Mandalay Region of Myanmar. From the 9th to 13th centuries, the city was the capital of the Pagan Kingdom, the first kingdom that unified the regions that would later constitute modern Myanmar. During the kingdom's height between the 11th and 13th centuries, over 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries were constructed in the Bagan plains alone, of which the remains of over 2,200 temples and pagodas still survive to the present day.
The Bagan Archaeological Zone is a main attraction for the country's nascent tourism industry. It is seen by many as equal in attraction to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.[1]
Etymology
Bagan is the present-day standard Burmese pronunciation of the Burmese word Pugan (ပုဂံ), derived from Old Burmese Pukam (ပုကမ်). Its classical Pali name is Arimaddanapura (အရိမဒ္ဒနာပူရ, lit. "the City that Tramples on Enemies"). Its other names in Pali are in reference to its extreme dry zone climate: Tattadesa (တတ္တဒေသ, "parched land"), and Tampadīpa (တမ္ပဒီပ, "bronzed country").[2] The Burmese chronicles also report other classical names of Thiri Pyissaya (သီရိပစ္စယာ; Pali: Siripaccaya) and Tampawaddy (တမ္ပဝတီ; Pali: Tampavatī).[3]
History
9th to 13th centuries
Main articles: Early Pagan Kingdom and Pagan Kingdom
Bagan's prosperous economy built over 10,000 temples between the 11th and 13th centuries.
Pagan Empire c. 1210
According to the Burmese chronicles, Bagan was founded in the second century AD, and fortified in 849 AD by King Pyinbya, 34th successor of the founder of early Bagan.[4] Mainstream scholarship however holds that Bagan was founded in the mid-to-late 9th century by the Mranma (Burmans), who had recently entered the Irrawaddy valley from the Nanzhao Kingdom. It was among several competing Pyu city-states until the late 10th century when the Burman settlement grew in authority and grandeur.[5]
From 1044 to 1287, Bagan was the capital as well as the political, economic and cultural nerve center of the Pagan Empire. Over the course of 250 years, Bagan's rulers and their wealthy subjects constructed over 10,000 religious monuments (approximately 1000 stupas, 10,000 small temples and 3000 monasteries)[6] in an area of 104 square kilometres (40 sq mi) in the Bagan plains. The prosperous city grew in size and grandeur, and became a cosmopolitan center for religious and secular studies, specializing in Pali scholarship in grammar and philosophical-psychological (abhidhamma) studies as well as works in a variety of languages on prosody, phonology, grammar, astrology, alchemy, medicine, and legal studies.[7] The city attracted monks and students from as far as India, Sri Lanka and the Khmer Empire.
The culture of Bagan was dominated by religion. The religion of Bagan was fluid, syncretic and by later standards, unorthodox. It was largely a continuation of religious trends in the Pyu era where Theravada Buddhism co-existed with Mahayana Buddhism, Tantric Buddhism, various Hindu (Saivite, and Vaishana) schools as well as native animist (nat) traditions. While the royal patronage of Theravada Buddhism since the mid-11th century had enabled the Buddhist school to gradually gain primacy, other traditions continued to thrive throughout the Pagan period to degrees later unseen.[7]
The Pagan Empire collapsed in 1287 due to repeated Mongol invasions (1277–1301). Recent research shows that Mongol armies may not have reached Bagan itself, and that even if they did, the damage they inflicted was probably minimal.[8] However, the damage had already been done. The city, once home to some 50,000 to 200,000 people, had been reduced to a small town, never to regain its preeminence. The city formally ceased to be the capital of Burma in December 1297 when the Myinsaing Kingdom became the new power in Upper Burma.[9][10]
14th to 19th centuries
A hot-air balloon flying over a pagoda in Bagan
Bagan survived into the 15th century as a human settlement,[11] and as a pilgrimage destination throughout the imperial period. A smaller number of "new and impressive" religious monuments still went up to the mid-15th century but afterward, new temple constructions slowed to a trickle with fewer than 200 temples built between the 15th and 20th centuries.[6] The old capital remained a pilgrimage destination but pilgrimage was focused only on "a score or so" most prominent temples out of the thousands such as the Ananda, the Shwezigon, the Sulamani, the Htilominlo, the Dhammayazika, and a few other temples along an ancient road. The rest—thousands of less famous, out-of-the-way temples—fell into disrepair, and most did not survive the test of time.[6]
For the few dozen temples that were regularly patronized, the continued patronage meant regular upkeep as well as architectural additions donated by the devotees. Many temples were repainted with new frescoes on top of their original Pagan era ones, or fitted with new Buddha statutes. Then came a series of state-sponsored "systematic" renovations in the Konbaung period (1752–1885), which by and large were not true to the original designs—some finished with "a rude plastered surface, scratched without taste, art or result". The interiors of some temples were also whitewashed, such as the Thatbyinnyu and the Ananda. Many painted inscriptions and even murals were added in this period.[12]
20th century to present
The original Bupaya seen here in 1868 was completely destroyed by the 1975 earthquake. A new pagoda in the original shape, but gilded, has been rebuilt.
Bagan, located in an active earthquake zone, had suffered from many earthquakes over the ages, with over 400 recorded earthquakes between 1904 and 1975.[13] A major earthquake occurred on 8 July 1975, reaching 8 MM in Bagan and Myinkaba, and 7 MM in Nyaung-U.[14] The quake damaged many temples, in many cases, such as the Bupaya, severely and irreparably. Today, 2229 temples and pagodas remain.[15]
Many of these damaged pagodas underwent restorations in the 1990s by the military government, which sought to make Bagan an international tourist destination. However, the restoration efforts instead drew widespread condemnation from art historians and preservationists worldwide. Critics are aghast that the restorations paid little attention to original architectural styles, and used modern materials, and that the government has also established a golf course, a paved highway, and built a 61-meter (200-foot) watchtower. Although the government believed that the ancient capital's hundreds of (unrestored) temples and large corpus of stone inscriptions were more than sufficient to win the designation of UNESCO World Heritage Site,[16] the city has not been so designated, allegedly mainly on account of the restorations.[17]
Bagan today is a main tourist destination in the country's nascent tourism industry, which has long been the target of various boycott campaigns. The majority of over 300,000 international tourists to the country in 2011 are believed to have also visited Bagan.[citation needed] Several Burmese publications note that the city's small tourism infrastructure will have to expand rapidly even to meet a modest pickup in tourism in the following years.
On 24 August 2016, a major earthquake hit central Burma and again did major damage in Bagan; this time almost 400 temples were destroyed. The Sulamani and Myauk Guni (North Guni) were severely damaged. The Bagan Archaeological Department has started a survey and reconstruction effort with the help of UNESCO experts. Visitors are prohibited from entering 33 damaged temples.
Geography
Map of the Bagan area showing the locations of the temples, hotels and transportation hubs
The Bagan Archaeological Zone, defined as the 13 x 8 km area centred around Old Bagan, consisting of Nyaung U in the north and New Bagan in the south,[16] lies in the vast expanse of plains in Upper Burma on the bend of the Irrawaddy river. It is located 290 kilometres (180 mi) south-west of Mandalay and 700 kilometres (430 mi) north of Yangon. Its coordinates are 21°10' North and 94°52' East.
Climate
Bagan lies in the middle of the "dry zone" of Burma, the region roughly between Shwebo in the north and Pyay in the south. Unlike the coastal regions of the country, which receive annual monsoon rainfalls exceeding 2500 mm, the dry zone gets little precipitation as it is sheltered from the rain by the Rakhine Yoma mountain range in the west.
Available online climate sources report Bagan climate quite differently.
Architecture
Bagan stands out for not only the sheer number of religious edifices of Myanmar but also the magnificent architecture of the buildings, and their contribution to Burmese temple design. The artistry of the architecture of pagodas in Bagan proves the achievement of Myanmar craftsmen in handicrafts. The Bagan temple falls into one of two broad categories: the stupa-style solid temple and the gu-style (ဂူ) hollow temple.
Stupas
A stupa, also called a pagoda, is a massive structure, typically with a relic chamber inside. The Bagan stupas or pagodas evolved from earlier Pyu designs, which in turn were based on the stupa designs of the Andhra region, particularly Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda in present-day south-eastern India, and to a smaller extent to Ceylon.[20] The Bagan-era stupas in turn were the prototypes for later Burmese stupas in terms of symbolism, form and design, building techniques and even materials.[21]
Ceremonial umbrellas at a Bagan temple
Originally, a Ceylonese stupa had a hemispheric body (Pali: anda "the egg"), on which a rectangular box surrounded by a stone balustrade (harmika) was set. Extending up from the top of the stupa was a shaft supporting several ceremonial umbrellas. The stupa is a representation of the Buddhist cosmos: its shape symbolizes Mount Meru while the umbrella mounted on the brickwork represents the world's axis.[22] The brickwork pediment was often covered in stucco and decorated in relief. Pairs or series of ogres as guardian figures ('bilu') were a favourite theme in the Bagan period.[23]
The original Indic design was gradually modified first by the Pyu, and then by Burmans at Bagan where the stupa gradually developed a longer, cylindrical form. The earliest Bagan stupas such as the Bupaya (c. 9th century) were the direct descendants of the Pyu style at Sri Ksetra. By the 11th century, the stupa had developed into a more bell-shaped form in which the parasols morphed into a series of increasingly smaller rings placed on one top of the other, rising to a point. On top the rings, the new design replaced the harmika with a lotus bud. The lotus bud design then evolved into the "banana bud", which forms the extended apex of most Burmese pagodas. Three or four rectangular terraces served as the base for a pagoda, often with a gallery of terra-cotta tiles depicting Buddhist jataka stories. The Shwezigon Pagoda and the Shwesandaw Pagoda are the earliest examples of this type.[22] Examples of the trend toward a more bell-shaped design gradually gained primacy as seen in the Dhammayazika Pagoda (late 12th century) and the Mingalazedi Pagoda (late 13th century).[24]
Hollow temples
"One-face"-style Gawdawpalin Temple (left) and "four-face" Dhammayangyi Temple
In contrast to the stupas, the hollow gu-style temple is a structure used for meditation, devotional worship of the Buddha and other Buddhist rituals. The gu temples come in two basic styles: "one-face" design and "four-face" design—essentially one main entrance and four main entrances. Other styles such as five-face and hybrids also exist. The one-face style grew out of 2nd century Beikthano, and the four-face out of 7th century Sri Ksetra. The temples, whose main features were the pointed arches and the vaulted chamber, became larger and grander in the Bagan period.[25]
Innovations
Although the Burmese temple designs evolved from Indic, Pyu (and possibly Mon) styles, the techniques of vaulting seem to have developed in Bagan itself. The earliest vaulted temples in Bagan date to the 11th century, while the vaulting did not become widespread in India until the late 12th century. The masonry of the buildings shows "an astonishing degree of perfection", where many of the immense structures survived the 1975 earthquake more or less intact.[22] (Unfortunately, the vaulting techniques of the Bagan era were lost in the later periods. Only much smaller gu style temples were built after Bagan. In the 18th century, for example, King Bodawpaya attempted to build the Mingun Pagoda, in the form of spacious vaulted chambered temple but failed as craftsmen and masons of the later era had lost the knowledge of vaulting and keystone arching to reproduce the spacious interior space of the Bagan hollow temples.[21])
Another architectural innovation originated in Bagan is the Buddhist temple with a pentagonal floor plan. This design grew out of hybrid (between one-face and four-face designs) designs. The idea was to include the veneration of the Maitreya Buddha, the future and fifth Buddha of this era, in addition to the four who had already appeared. The Dhammayazika and the Ngamyethna Pagoda are examples of the pentagonal design.[22]
Notable cultural sites
Bagan at dawn
Bagan at sunrise
NamePictureBuiltSponsor(s)Notes
Ananda TempleAnanda-Temple-2.JPG1105King KyansitthaOne of the most famous temples in Bagan
Bupaya PagodaPagan-Buphaya-pagoda-Nov-2004-00.JPGc. 850King PyusawhtiIn Pyu style; original 9th century pagoda destroyed by the 1975 earthquake; completely rebuilt, now gilded
Dhammayangyi TempleBAGAN PIRAMIDE ESCALONADA.jpg1167–1170King NarathuLargest of all temples in Bagan
Dhammayazika PagodaDhamma-Yazaka.JPG1196–1198King Sithu II
Gawdawpalin TempleGawdawpalin Temple Bagan Myanmar.jpgc. 1211–1235King Sithu II and King Htilominlo
Gubyaukgyi Temple (Wetkyi-in)Early 13th CenturyKing Kyansittha
Gubyaukgyi Temple (Myinkaba)Gubyaukgyi-Bagan-Myanmar-02-gje.jpg1113Prince Yazakumar
Htilominlo TempleHtilominlo Temple Bagan Myanmar.jpg1218King HtilominloThree stories and 46 meters tall
Lawkananda PagodaLawkananda-Bagan-Myanmar-01-gje.jpgc. 1044–1077King Anawrahta
Mahabodhi TempleMahabodhi Temple, Bagan.jpgc. 1218King HtilominloSmaller replica of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya
Manuha TempleManuha.JPG1067King Manuha
Mingalazedi PagodaMingalazedi-Bagan-Myanmar-02-gje.jpg1268–1274King Narathihapate
Minyeingon TempleMi Nyein Gone-Bagan-Myanmar-06-gje.jpg
Myazedi inscriptionMyazedi-Inscription-Burmese.JPG1112Prince Yazakumar"Rosetta Stone of Burma" with inscriptions in four languages: Pyu, Old Mon, Old Burmese and Pali
Nanpaya TempleNanpaya-Bagan-Myanmar-01-gje.jpgc. 1160–1170Hindu temple in Mon style; believed to be either Manuha's old residence or built on the site
Nathlaung Kyaung TempleNat-Hlaung Kyaung Vishnu Statute.JPGc. 1044–1077Hindu temple
Payathonzu TempleBagan, Hpaya-thon-zu-Group.JPGc. 1200in Mahayana and Tantric-styles
Seinnyet Nyima Pagoda and Seinnyet Ama PagodaSeinnyet temple.jpgc. 11th century
Shwegugyi TempleShwegugyi-Bagan-Myanmar-01-gje.jpg1131King Sithu ISithu I was assassinated here; known for its arched windows
Shwesandaw PagodaShwesandaw Pagoda Bagan Myanmar.jpgc. 1070King Anawrahta
Shwezigon PagodaShwezigon.jpg1102King Anawrahta and King Kyansittha
Sulamani TempleSulamani Temple.jpg1183King Sithu II
Tharabha GateTharaba Gate.JPGc. 1020King Kunhsaw Kyaunghpyu and King KyisoThe only remaining part of the old walls; radiocarbon dated to c. 1020[26]
Thatbyinnyu TempleThatByinNyu Temple.jpgc. 1150Sithu IAt 61 meters, the tallest temple in Bagan
Tuywindaung PagodaTuywindaung Pagoda.JPGAnawrahta
Museums
Old palace site in Old Bagan. A new completely conjectural palace has been reconstructed since 2003.
The Bagan Archaeological Museum: The only museum in the Bagan Archaeological Zone, itself a field museum a millennium old. The three-story museum houses a number of rare Bagan period objects including the original Myazedi inscriptions, the Rosetta stone of Burma.
Anawrahta's Palace: It was rebuilt in 2003 based on the extant foundations at the old palace site.[27] But the palace above the foundation is completely conjectural.
Transport
Nyaung U Airport is the gateway to the Bagan region
Bagan is accessible by air, rail, bus, car and river boat.
Air
Most international tourists fly to the city. The Nyaung U Airport is the gateway to the Bagan region. Several domestic airlines have regular flights to Yangon, which take about 80 minutes to cover the 600 kilometres. Flights to Mandalay take approximately 30 minutes and to Heho about 40 minutes.[28] The airport is located on the outskirts of Nyaung U and it takes about 20 minutes by taxi to reach Bagan.
Rail
The city is on a spur from the Yangon-Mandalay rail line. Myanmar Railways operates a daily overnight train service each way between Yangon and Bagan (Train Nos 61 & 62), which takes at least 18 hours. The trains have a sleeper car and also 1st Class and Ordinary Class seating.[29] Between Mandalay and Bagan there are two daily services each way (Train Nos 117,118,119 & 120) that take at least 8 hours. The trains have 1st Class and Ordinary Class seating.[29]
Buses and cars
Overnight buses and cars also operate to and from Yangon and Mandalay taking approximately 9 and 6 hours respectively.[28]
Boat
An 'express' ferry service runs between Bagan and Mandalay. Following the Irrawaddy river the fastest ferry takes around 9 hours to travel the 170 kilometres. The service runs daily during peak periods and slower sailings with overnight stops are also available.
Economy
Workers at a lacquerware factory
Bagan's economy is based mainly on tourism. Because of boycotts against the previous military government, the Bagan region's tourism infrastructure is still quite modest by international standards. The city has a few international standard hotels and many family-run guesthouses. Bagan is also the center of Burmese lacquerware industry, which to a large degree depends on tourist demand. Much of the lacquerware is destined for souvenir shops in Yangon, and to the world markets. Moreover, the lacquerware-making process itself has become a tourist draw.
Demographics
The population of Bagan in its heyday is estimated anywhere between 50,000[30] to 200,000 people.[31] Until the advent of tourism industry in the 1990s, only a few villagers lived in Old Bagan. The rise of tourism has attracted a sizable population to the area. Because Old Bagan is now off limits to permanent dwellings, much of the population reside in either New Bagan, south of Old Bagan, or Nyaung-U, north of Old Bagan. The majority of native residents are Bamar.
Administration
The Bagan archaeological zone is part of Nyaung-U District, Mandalay Region.
In 192 BC, the Romans conquered the area and founded the outpost Toletum. Due to its iron ore deposits, Toledo developed into an important settlement. Since the first barbarian invasions, the ancient walls were reinforced. In 411 the Alans and later the Visigoths conquered the city. Toledo was the capital of the Visigoths' empire from about 531 to 711.
The Moors conquered the place in 712. Toledo experienced its heyday during the period of Moorish rule as Ṭulayṭula during the Caliphate of Córdoba until its conquest by Alfonso VI in 1085, after a four-year siege. In 1088, only a few years after the conquest, Archbishop Bernard of Toledo obtained confirmation from Pope Urban II that Toledo should hold the "primatus in totis Hispaniarum regnis" (primacy in all the kingdoms of the Iberian dominions). The Archbishop of Toledo is still today the Primate of the Catholic Church of Spain.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Toledo school of translators translated ancient philosophical writings (Plato, Aristotle) that had been translated from Greek into Arabic, but also genuinely Arabic writings from the fields of astronomy, mathematics, Islamic religion and theology into Latin.
After the conquest by Alfonso VI, Toledo became the residence of the Kingdom of Castile in 1087 and remained the capital of Spain until 1561.
The Museo de Santa Cruz is housed in an architecturally significant 16th-century building, the Hospital de Santa Cruz. The hospital was founded in order to centralize assistance to orphaned and abandoned children in the city.
The museum was created in 1844. In 1919, the Provincial Museum of Archaeology was moved to this location. A Fine Arts section was created in 1961, and the museum was then renamed as Museo de Santa Cruz.
The cloister of the former hospital
Dedicated to Saint John, the cathedral of Lyon is one of the most prominent churches of France (it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site). Indeed, the archbishop of Lyon has borne the title of “Primate of the Gauls” since the 2nd century, as Lyon was the first bishopric ever created in the “three Gauls”, as the provinces of Lyon and the Alps, the Aquitaine, and Belgium, were known during the times of the Western Roman Empire. Lyon was then the capital of all those vast territories. This “primacy” conferred to the archbishop of Lyon authority over all other bishops, even that of Paris, the secular capital of more recent times. Now, the title is largely honorific.
The Saint-Jean Cathedral is mostly a Gothic church, and as such of limited interest to me. However, having been built over the span of three centuries, from 1175 to 1480, it was begun as a Romanesque church and there are indeed small parts and details that remain from that period, albeit few and far between.
I have visited that church several times, but I went again on the Saturday before Easter (2022) to try and locate a few of those parts and details...
The cute little lion biting at the bottom torus of this column in the choir also comes directly from the Romanesque bestiary...
Portland's Tip Top Cleaners has gone to the great Main Street in the sky, but its iconic sign remains. The space where generations of Portlanders dropped off laundry and picked up dry cleaning is now occupied by a mini vintage mall.
One of the 12 vendors sells rugs, including the Afghan war rugs seen here. In my opinion, they're priced to take you to the cleaners. In any case, it was my first exposure to this genre. I went in search of answers to the many questions these rugs provoked. My quest was successful.
Before going into that, here is information about the dates on the rug. No explanation is needed for the first date, 9/11/01. If the date weren't self explanatory, the images of the twin towers would be. (How long will it be until they, too, require an explanation?)
Next is 11:9:01. Since next date on the rug, 19=8=03, appears in the European format of day/month/year, it's not clear whether this date in 2001 meant to be November 9 or September 11. We know what happened on September 11, 2001. It has already appeared on the rug.
What about November 9? Well, nothing of note relating to the US in Afghanistan occurred in 2001, so the date 11:9:01 must be a duplicate of 9/11/01. The word "Toraboba" on the map of Afghanistan no doubt refers to the Battle of Tora Bora of December, 2001.
The next date is August 19, 2003. It is significant as the date of the Canal Hotel Bombing:
The Canal Hotel bombing was a suicide truck bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in the afternoon of August 19, 2003. It killed 22 people, including the United Nations' Special Representative in Iraq Sérgio Vieira de Mello, and wounded over 100, including human rights lawyer and political activist Dr. Amin Mekki Medani. The blast targeted the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq created just five days earlier.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Hotel_bombing
========================================================
Now, onto the meaning of Afghan war rugs:
"Ultimately, Afghan war rugs are produced for the market. It’s that simple."
The real story behind Afghanistan’s war rugs
The war rugs are distinctive and dynamic, but they’re often wildly misunderstood.
By Jamal J. Elias
Fast Company
9 September 2021
The end of the U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan has resulted in the withdrawal of most foreign aid workers and contractors.
It may well also spell the demise of the country’s war rug industry.
As a specialist in the visual and material culture of the Islamic world, I first became aware of war rugs when I was working on a book on truck decoration in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Since that time, I’ve followed changes in this industry and cultivated relationships with Pakistani and Afghan rug sellers.
War rugs – with symbols of war – are distinctive and dynamic in their styles. But they’re often misunderstood by buyers, journalists and curators.
The growth of the war rug market
There is no evidence of the existence of Afghan war rugs prior to the late-20th century.
The earliest rugs seem to have emerged shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 from refugee camps in Pakistan, where millions of Afghans had relocated.
Featuring guns, helicopters and tanks, they were small and shoddily made with coarse wool. Rug sellers and souvenir shops pitched them to workers for non-government organizations and Western government officials.
The designs have become more sophisticated over the years.
English words were added, intentionally or accidentally garbled with Cyrillic words and letters to evoke a Soviet connection.
After 9/11, fixed patterns started to emerge – a sign that weavers were adhering to templates provided by rug merchants.
The images made it clear that they were hoping to primarily appeal to an American souvenir market.
One popular design commemorates the 9/11 attacks, pointing out that it was not Afghans who were responsible, but terrorists from other countries.
Another depicts a map of Afghanistan, professing Afghanistan’s friendship with the U.S. with text and images. It has the misspelled word “terrarism” written on the region of the country associated with the Taliban.
The writing on some rugs declares that they’re made in Sheberghan, a city in northern Afghanistan famous for its Turkmen weavers.
It’s unlikely that they’re all made there. However, whether they’re made in northern Afghanistan or in Afghan settlements in Pakistan, the word “Shebergan,” written in English, is supposed to signal that these rugs are authentically Afghan.
Such rugs are readily available on eBay and were – until recently – sold by souvenir sellers in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan’s cities with the largest number of foreign workers and tourists.
With the Taliban’s return to power, it remains unclear what the future of rug making and its market will be.
Over the years, war motifs have found their way into higher-quality, larger carpets, with small tanks appearing where rows of medallions might traditionally have been. Other rugs feature a more comprehensive integration of modern and traditional patterns.
While these larger carpets take substantially more time to make and cost more money than the far more common smaller, coarser rugs, they nevertheless don’t meet the standards of fine carpets, which suggests they’re geared more to souvenir collectors than those seeking luxury home furnishings.
Misreading the meaning of the rugs
Over the past 20 years, Afghan war rugs have garnered considerable attention.
Books in German and English describe, catalog and contextualize them. Magazines and major newspapers have run features on them, and university art galleries have exhibited them.
Within the coverage, there’s a tendency to see war rugs as a reflection of the emotional lives of the weavers, who, wracked by war and violence, felt compelled to incorporate these motifs into their designs.
Articles and exhibits often ignore the reality that rug brokers and dealers – not weavers – are the ones who are attuned to fickle market tastes.
Studies on labor in the rug industry note that they’re normally the ones who supply weavers with new patterns, color schemes and yarn. I’ve seen the same dynamic in my own long-term observations.
Yet you’ll still see exhibit curators describe war rugs as combining “ancient practice with the latest in the daily lives of the weavers,” or as windows into the perspectives of everyday Afghans – the “underdogs” in a country subsumed by strife.
In 2014, The New York Times reported that weavers had incorporated “the grim realities of life in a war zone into their traditional craft.”
Six years earlier, Smithsonian Magazine buried a brief acknowledgment that the rugs are for tourists under claims – with scant evidence – that the earliest war rugs were intended for Afghan buyers who resented the Soviet invasion. Later, the writer notes that female weavers drew from their own lives when they incorporated symbols of violence.
The appeal of the trauma market
With so much evidence showing that Afghan war rugs are produced in response to market demand, why do claims that they’re based on the weavers’ experiences of war persist?
Part of the answer lies in the global market for handicrafts. Buyers want to feel like they’re purchasing artisanal products when, in reality, they’re sold by the thousands in chain stores and through online storefronts such as Ten Thousand Villages or Etsy.
Implying that rugs are a source of income for traumatized and destitute Afghan women ignores the reality that the overwhelming majority of profits go to middlemen and dealers.
A work-from-home model encourages workers to devote all available time to rug production. It also encourages child labor: Children are either tasked with making the crude rugs or are forced to take up the responsibilities of adults.
The appeal of war rugs – and the insistence that their designs represent a victim’s experience of war – seems to reflect a vicarious desire to peer into the emotional experience of Afghan civilians.
In reality, though, this gives primacy not to the actual experiences of Afghans, but to the viewers’ and customers’ ideas of victimhood.
The granular realities of the loss of home and animals, family deaths or food insecurity aren’t represented in the rugs. Nor should we assume weavers would wish to put their own traumas on display for the world.
Modern rugs are not venues for self-expression, and the designs tend to contain an index of symbols that reflect an outsider’s understanding of war: AK-47s, 9/11, security politics and drones.
Nowhere in the rugs do we see the well-documented psychological and health impacts on Afghanistan’s population caused by decades of deprivation and violence.
Real trauma is not only hard to turn into a commodity, it is also hard to live with – even in souvenirs.
www.fastcompany.com/90678962/the-real-story-behind-afghan...
Jamal J. Elias is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Dedicated to Saint John, the cathedral of Lyon is one of the most prominent churches of France (it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site). Indeed, the archbishop of Lyon has borne the title of “Primate of the Gauls” since the 2nd century, as Lyon was the first bishopric ever created in the “three Gauls”, as the provinces of Lyon and the Alps, the Aquitaine, and Belgium, were known during the times of the Western Roman Empire. Lyon was then the capital of all those vast territories. This “primacy” conferred to the archbishop of Lyon authority over all other bishops, even that of Paris, the secular capital of more recent times. Now, the title is largely honorific.
The Saint-Jean Cathedral is mostly a Gothic church, and as such of limited interest to me. However, having been built over the span of three centuries, from 1175 to 1480, it was begun as a Romanesque church and there are indeed small parts and details that remain from that period, albeit few and far between.
I have visited that church several times, but I went again on the Saturday before Easter (2022) to try and locate a few of those parts and details...
It was also a good opportunity to test my “Brittany Configuration”, i.e., the gear I will bring on my week-long family trip to Brittany at the beginning of May: as I wasn’t sure what kind of equipment would be allowed inside the cathedral, I brought my new 24–120mm ƒ/4 S lens, with the 14–30mm in case of need (I ended up not needing it), and my very small and light Gitzo Series 0 Traveler tripod, which I used for all exposures indoors. That gear worked very satisfactorily. Of course, the tripod is a lot shorter than my usual one (not to mention my big one!), but one has to make do when one must travel light. That was the idea.
Happy Easter to everyone!
This niche carved into the bandes lombardes is on the northern side of the choir. I don’t know what it was meant for but among other great presents, I was given by work colleagues when I retired this enormous book on the Saint-Jean Cathedral which may contain the answer. I’ll post it as an edit below if I find anything about it.
That coffee table book is terribly heavy and unwieldy but enthralling to read, with excellent photos by Lyonnais photographer Jean-Pierre Gobillot. Here it is on Amazon: www.amazon.fr/LYON-GRACE-DUNE-CATHEDRALE-COLLECTIF/dp/271....
Vienna Baroque
Doris Binder
The center of Baroque art was undisputable Vienna, as a special promoter appeared the Emperor Charles VI., under whose reign not only the Karlskirche was built, but also numerous buildings have been newly planned or built. The passion for building of the High Baroque is not only founded by the destructions of the Turks, but also has its causes in the backward economic structure and its lack of production plants. Whether nobleman, cleric or commoner, all those with sufficient capital put it rather in construction funds into practice than not make use of it. Responsible for this was a deep distrust to the imperial fiscal policy and concern about the currency and a possible bankruptcy.
The Baroque emerged within the civil peace (*) Burgfrieden) of the city of Vienna, had at the beginning of the High Baroque era still dominated religious buildings, so the cityscape changed in just four decades. Vienna was transformed into a "palace city", by the year 1740, the number of pleasure palaces, gardens and belvederes had doubled. The Baroque style, which by crown, church and nobility was forced upon the citizens, is considered of Felix Czeike as "authority art". The existing social gap should be camouflaged by the rubberneck culture in festivities, receptions and parades.
*) Burgfrieden (The term truce or Castle peace referred to a jurisdiction in the Middle Ages around a castle, in which feuds, so hostilities of private individuals among themselves, under penalty of ostracism were banned. Today the term is mainly used in a figurative sense.
Due to the return of Fischer von Erlach to Vienna in 1686 and a decade later, Lukas von Hildebrandt, the primacy of the Italians in architecture was broken and the victory parade of Austrian Baroque began. The connection between the spiritual and secular powers found its mode of expression in the Baroque, which the appearance of the city of Vienna should characterize in a decisive manner.
Construction of Charles Church
The Karlskirche was built by Emperor Charles VI. commemorating the plague saint, Charles Borromeo. In 1713 the plague raged in Vienna and claimed about 8,000 human lives, in February 1714 the plague disappeared and as a sign of gratitude was began with the construction of the church, this should become the most important religious building of Vienna in the 18th century.
In a contest was decided on the builder - participants were Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt and Ferdinando Galli-Bibienas. As winner emerged the famous architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, he died in 1723 and did not live to the achievement of the Church. The supervision was transferred to the imperial court architect Anton Erhard Martinelli, as Fischer von Erlach died, his son, Joseph Emmanuel, finished his work. On 28 October 1737 St. Charles Church was solemnly by the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Sigismund Count Kollowitz, inaugurated. The spiritual care ceded Emperor Karl VI. to the chivalric Order of the Cross with the Red Star, since 1783 is the Karlskirche imperial patronage parish.
The church at that time lay still behind the regulated river Wien (Wienfluss) and in the open field. The directed towards the city face side of the Charles Church, which stood on the edge of the suburb of Wieden, was target point of a line of sight the Hofburg and St. Charles Church in the sense of a "via triumphalis" connecting. On the temple-like front building of the Karlskirche the dedication inscription is clearly visible "Vota mea Reddam in conspectu timentium Deum" - "I will fulfill my vow before those who fear God."
Already during the construction by Fischer von Erlach (senior), there were several project phases, three of which have been preserved:
1. Medaillon by Daniel Warou for the groundbreaking ceremony
2. Fore stitches in Fischer's draft of a historical architecture 1721
3. Viennese view of work by Klein and Pfeffel 1722 (1724)
Due to the death of Fischer von Erlach, occured recent changes made by his son, Joseph Emmanuel most of all being concerned the dome (much higher and steeper), the priest choir (omitted) and the interior (simpler). The entire project took a total of 21 years and the costs amounted to 304 045 guilders and 22 ¼ cruisers. The construction costs were shouldered by all crown lands of the Empire, but also Spain, Milan and the Netherlands had to make a contribution.
The Karlskirche is the most important Baroque building of the city and represents the most convincing the so-called Empire style in which for the last time an empire awareness in the architecture of the capital of the Holy Roman Empire after the victorious ended wars against the Turks and the French was expressed.
Symbolism of the Karlskirche
The Karlskirche consists of a central rotunda with a dome, preceded by a column structure like a Greek temple, of two high pillars illustrated on the model of Trajan's Column in Rome and of two lateral gate pavilions. The illustrated columns represent Charles VI. as a wise and strong secular ruler, the two great pillars were created by Marder and Matielli. The columns are crowned by golden eagles, symbolizing the two virtues of the Emperor - fortitudo (bravery) and constantia (resistance). The two pillars are evocative of the two pillars before the temple in Jerusalem - Jachin and Boaz. However, the illustration of the two columns does not match the model of the Trajan columns in Rome, portraying war deeds, but these tell the life story of St. Borromeo. In the front view of the Karlskirche a wide range of different symbols become one whole - the Roman emperors Trajan and Augustus, the Temple of Solomon, St. Peter's Church in Rome, Hagia Sophia, Charlemagne and the Empire of Charles V. - through the skillfully used symbols should be shown the claim of the house of Habsburg to the European domination.
The plan view of the church is, as in baroque typical, ellipsoid. In the interior of the Karlskirche the great Baroque sculpture is immediately noticeable, representing St. Borromeo. At the base the four Latin Fathers of the Church are depicted. The interior of the Karlskirche is dominated by the tremendous fresco in the oval dome room, it was created by the eminent Baroque painter Johann Michael Rottmayr between 1725-1730. The fresco shows the Mother of God representing the intercession of the patron Saint of the Church to help head off the plague, surrounded is the scene by the cardinal virtues (faith, hope and love). In the left entrance wing is situated the tomb for the Austrian poet Heinrich Joseph von Collin (17771-1811).
Inside the St. Charles Church, there is a museum where the most valuable pieces are exhibited.
These include: the vestments of St. Borromeo, a reliquary of gold and silver - a donation of Emperor Charles VI. and a rococo monstrance (1760) containing a drop of blood of the saint. Thomas Aquinas.
Even the image of the architect Fischer von Erlach, painted by Jacob von Schuppen, is one of the church treasures.
The iconographic program of the Charles Church was written by Carl Gustav Haerus, by this the Saint Charles Borromeo should be connected to the imperial founder.
www.univie.ac.at/hypertextcreator/ferstel/site/browse.php...
IN ENGLISH BELOW THE LINE
Caminant pels serens carrers de Mdina, es disfruta de la seva magnificencia tot i la calor d'inicis de la tarda.
El centre politic i social de l'illa de Malta fou fins finals de l'edat mitjana, al centre de l'illa, en els turons que dominen la plana central. Aquí, des d'època fenicia s'hi establí LA ciutat de Malta, originariament Melita, pel que sembla. Així continuà durant tota la llarga ocupació romana. Amb les sotragades de l'expansió islamica, aquesta ciutat que havia anat expandint-se, fou arrasada i deshabitada força temps. Després fou habitada per arabs nord-africans, que li posaren un nou nom, Medina, ja que era la única ciutat a tot Malta. Això continuà així fins i tot amb el nou domini primer normand, després angeví i després català de Malta. La ciutat, anomenada localment Mdina, o també Cittá Vecchia - Cittá Notabile, no cedí la primacía política fins que l'Ordre de l'Hospital arribà el 1523 per a establir la nova capital al Gran Port, a Birgu, interesats en el domini naval com estaven ells. Finalment, Valetta agafà el relleu fins als nostres dies.
Però Mdina, amb la seva extensió fora muralles amb un altre nom (Rabat, és a dir, "barriada"). continua essent un pol cultural de Malta. I la seva posició privilegiada es nota quan hi arribes, amb unes vistes fantastiques sobre l'entorn, i una arquitectura noble i serena, literalment de pedra picada. L'anomenen "la ciutat del silenci".
Triq il-Villegaignon vol dir "carrer de Villegaignon".
====================================
While walking through the stone streets of Mdina, even in a hot July afternoon, you can admire it's beautiful serenity.
The political and social center of the island of Malta was until the end of the Middle Ages, in the center of the island, on the hills that dominate the central plain. Here, since Phoenician times, THE city of Malta was established, originally Melita, apparently. It continued like this throughout the long Roman occupation. With the upheavals of Islamic expansion, this city that had been expanding, was razed and uninhabited for quite a while. It was then inhabited by North African Arabs, who gave it a new name, Medina, since it was the only city in all of Malta. This continued even with the new first Norman, then Angevin and then Catalan rule of Malta. The city, locally called Mdina, or also Cittá Vecchia - Cittá Notabile, did not cede political primacy until the Order of the Hospital arrived in 1523 to establish the new capital in the Grand Port, in Birgu, interested in naval dominance as they were. Finally, Valletta took over until today.
But Mdina, with its extension outside the walls with another name (Rabat, meaning "neighborhood"). continues to be a cultural hub of Malta. And its privileged position is noticeable when you arrive, with fantastic views over the surroundings, and a noble and serene architecture, literally of stone masonry. They call it "the city of silence"
Enochian is an angelic language used by angels in Heaven. They communicate over angel radio using this language, though in more recent years, they began communicating in English predominately. The angels, the Knights of Hell, and the Men of Letters are also familiar with an archaic dialect of the angelic language called "Pre-Enochian" or "Old Enochian". Castiel used sigils from this Enochian dialect to bind Alastair in a devil's trap he made. The Knights of Hell like Abaddon used the old Enochian sigil associated with them as their crest, leaving it behind in areas where they strike. Belphegor reveals that very few demons like Lilith, Crowley, and Abaddon have been known to understand Enochian. Enochian sigils are powerful glyphs that can be used against angels and demons and protect an area from angelic and demonic interference. Throughout Season 5, Castiel uses one to conceal Sam, Dean, and Adam from every angel in creation by carving it into their ribs.
www.supernaturalwiki.com/Enochian
Enochian has also been used in reciting various spells that can be used against some of the most dangerous creatures in all creation. Lily Sunder became a practitioner of Enochian Magic after Ishim taught her all their secrets, using spells that burn off pieces of her soul in exchange for longevity and access to angelic powers until it's completely burned away. The Whore of Babylon uses what appears to be an Enochian spell to harm Castiel. Lucifer's Cage can be opened and closed with the rings of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and an Enochian phrase. When angels are reverted to their "factory settings", they relay any information hidden in their minds encrypted in Enochian.
The Two of Swords shows a blindfolded woman, Pamela Smith has become an impetrant, she begins her initiation into Enochian magic, the artist is dressed in a white dress, holding two crossed swords. The blindfold tells us that Pamela is confused about her inner light and cannot clearly see either the problem or the solution. She may also be missing relevant information that would make her decision much clearer if she were to get it. The swords she holds are in perfect balance, suggesting that she is weighing her thoughts and addressing both sides of the situation to find the best resolution.
Behind the woman is a body of water dotted with rocky islets. Water represents emotions, and while the costume of swords is traditionally associated with the mind and intellect, its presence shows that Pamela must use both her head and her heart to weigh her options. The islands represent obstacles in his path and suggest that his decision is not as clear cut as it seems. It will have to consider the situation as a whole. The crescent moon to her right is a sign that Pamela should trust her intuition to make her choice. Pamela is also alone on the beach. His eyes are blindfolded, his arms are tied. Eight swords planted in the ground form a prison around her. However, the circle is not completely closed. So there is an exit that the blindfold prevents you from seeing. The Two of Swords indicates that you are faced with a difficult decision, but you do not know which option to take. Both possibilities may seem equally good – or equally bad – and you don't know which will lead you to the better result. You need to be able to weigh the pros and cons of each choice and then make a conscious judgment. Use both your head (your mind and intellect) and your heart (your feelings and intuition) to choose the path that is most in alignment with your Higher Self.
Pamela Smith represented in this card wears a blindfold, indicating that she cannot see the entirety of her circumstance. You may lack the information you need to make the right decisions. You may be missing something, such as the threats or potential risks, alternative solutions or critical pieces of information that would help guide you in a particular direction. Once you remove the blindfold and see the situation for what it really is, you will be in a much better position to find your best path forward. Research your options more, seek outside opinions and feedback and ask yourself what you might be missing.`` Alone, far from the city and its ramparts, this woman seems very isolated. The sky is gray, the landscape is bleak. There emerges from the Card a feeling of uncertainty and absence of hope. The Eight of Swords symbolizes the feeling of helplessness of the Consultant. Lost, disoriented, the Consultant does not know what to do to overcome the obstacles or challenges of his environment. The Consultant experiences the very unpleasant feeling of being “stuck”, trapped. However – and this is important to stress – the Eight of Swords is not a fatalistic card. On the Map, the young woman could free herself from her fabric ties and remove the blindfold covering her eyes. She could regain the comfort and safety of the city behind her. The blockage, the "prison" of these Swords planted in a circle therefore symbolize first of all a situation created by the Consultant himself. Quite logically, he or she could get rid of it and get by on his own. The blockage is notably due to limiting beliefs on the part of the Consultant. These limiting beliefs go on and on: “You are not capable of…”; “A man like that, caring about you!? Do not even think about it ! » ; "Returning to training at your age to change paths will never work..." These limiting thoughts end up defining our possibilities and therefore we are no longer able to do otherwise, innovate or find solutions. It also happens that the feeling of helplessness is generated by external circumstances. The Consultant “wakes up”, dissatisfied with his environment and his life and wonders how he or she could have come to this.The Eight of Swords reveals that you feel trapped and restricted by your circumstances. You believe your options are limited with no clear path out. You might be in an unfulfilling job, an abusive relationship, a significant amount of debt or a situation way out of alignment with your inner being. You are now trapped between a rock and a hard place, with no resolution available. However, take note that the woman in the card is not entirely imprisoned by the eight swords around her, and if she wanted to escape, she could. She merely needs to remove the blindfold and free herself from the self-imposed bindings that hold her back. When the Eight of Swords appears in a Tarot reading, it comes as a warning that your thoughts and beliefs are no longer serving you. You may be over-thinking things, creating negative patterns or limiting yourself by only considering the worst-case scenario. The more you think about the situation, the more you feel stuck and without any options. It is time to get out of your head and let go of those thoughts and beliefs holding you back. As you change your thoughts, you change your reality. Replace negative thoughts with positive ones, and you will start to create a more favourable situation for yourself. The Eight of Swords assures you there is a way out of your current predicament – you just need a new perspective. You already have the resources you need, but it is up to you to use those resources in a way that serves you. Others may be offering you help, or there may be an alternative solution you haven’t yet fully explored. Be open to finding the answer rather than getting stuck on the problem. The Eight of Swords is often associated with a victim mentality. You surrendered your power to an external entity, allowing yourself to become trapped and limited in some way. You may feel that it isn’t your fault – you have been placed here against your will. You may feel like the victim, waiting to be rescued, but is this energy serving you? If not, it is imperative you take back your power and personal accountability and open your eyes to the options in front of you. The fact is you do have choices, even if you do not like them. You are not powerless. At times, the Eight of Swords indicates that you are confused about whether you should stay or go, particularly if you are in a challenging situation. It is not as clear-cut as you would like, making the decision very difficult. You have one foot in, hoping things can work out, but your other foot is out the door, ready to leave. The trouble is that you worry either option could lead to negative consequences, and so you remain stuck where you are. Again, this card is asking you to get out of your head and drop down into your gut and your intuition so you can hear your inner guidance. Your thoughts are not serving you right now, but your intuition is. Trust yourself. In any case, it is necessary to "take back control" of the circumstances and to remember that in life, we always have a choice. The possibilities in front of you may not be ideal, easy or desired… but they exist! You have to be able to look them in the face, and choose the best… or the least bad.
www.biddytarot.com/tarot-card-meanings/minor-arcana/suit-...
www.biddytarot.com/tarot-card-meanings/minor-arcana/suit-...
In 1903 Waite succeeded Yeats as Grand Master of the Golden Dawn. His first act under his new status was a reform of the fundamental principles of the Order: he proclaimed the primacy of spiritual achievement (emphasis on esoteric knowledge and the search for Truth) over material fulfillment (which occultism in general, and magic in particular, presupposes). Seeing in this act of negating the very foundation of the Golden Dawn (namely the practice of the occult sciences) the outright annihilation of the Order, former Grand Master Yeats strongly opposed Waite.
Two camps were then formed: one bringing together the supporters of the reform and represented by William Alexander Ayton, (relatively fearful in terms of operability), Waite's right-hand man, and the other bringing together, alongside the former Grand Mr. Yeats, the curators. The feud lasted two years, after which the Yeats camp ended up going on to found its own order (La Stella Matutina, the "Morning Star")—a perfect transposition of the Golden Dawn before Waite's reform, seceding from what took then the name of Holy Order of the Golden Dawn ("Holy Order of the Golden Dawn"; the expression "holy order" illustrating more the new mystical tendencies instilled by Waite) and which continued to be shaken by internal strife until disbanded in 1915, following Waite's departure.
After this "schism of 1905", which was the real coup de grace for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, certain initiates who had remained neutral in the struggle between Camp Yeats and Camp Ayton preferred to go and found, alone or in groups, their own brotherhood.
Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942), wanted to be a true scholar in occultism. He wrote, among other things, "The Holy Kaballah" and "The Key to the Tarot", published in London in 1910. For Waite, symbolism is the key to the Tarot. In "The Key to the Tarot" he says, "True tarot is symbolic; it uses no other languages or other signs". One of the unique characteristics of the Arthur Edwart Waite tarot and one of the main reasons for its popularity is that all the cards, including those of the Minor Arcana, depict scenes complete with figures and symbols. The images of all Pamela Coman-Smith's cards lend themselves to an interpretation based on the conscious and unconscious reading of the scene, without the need to consult explanatory texts.
What is striking in the Tarot Rider-Waite, therefore, is above all the Minor Arcana, which are difficult to translate with the Tarot of Marseilles for most of those interested, but have suddenly become emblematic with the Tarot that Waite offers us. Therefore, these mysteries illustrated with scenes are easier to interpret.The Tarots of Wirth and Knapp Hall are to be considered to be Tarots based on "hermetic science". A science which will be strongly included in the broad fields of esoteric exploration to which the golden dawn will give access...The first decks that can be designated as decks born from the ideologies of the Golden Dawn and created according to their cosmogony is undoubtedly the Tarot Rider-Waite... It is the result of a long and meticulous research on esoteric symbols and their correspondence.
But the first member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to have designed a Tarot is obviously doctor Gérard Encausse, Papus, who joined the members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1895. The Papus tarot would have been designed around 1899... At the beginning, it was certainly reserved for a few insider circles only... It was seen for the first time in illustration in the works of Papus, among others in "Le Tarot des Bohémiens , absolute key to the occult sciences" (1889), but the book will only be really known and accessible to the general public from its 3rd edition published in 1926. Then will follow the work "The divinatory tarot. Key to card printing and fates" (1909), reissued in large circulation also the same year of 1926. From then on, the Tarot of Papus will gain much popularity and the public will seek to obtain it... The Tarot of Papus will be diffused little by little print from the 1930s.
While the tarots of Papus, Wirth and the Knapp Hall were appearing almost simultaneously, the renowned house of Grimaud, for its part, was preparing to publish the Tarot which would become the reference for the general public, it was this famous modified reproduction of the Conver, proposed by Paul Marteau. It will appear in 1930 and will become the most fashionable tarot... Despite the modifications made to this Tarot, it has no affiliation with occult groups and is intended to be a Tarot in the tradition of the Tarot de Marseille.
That said, the Tarot which will set the tone and which will be the reference for the members of the Golden Dawn is undoubtedly the Tarot developed by Rider and Waite.
There are already a hundred decks that derive directly from the tarot originally designed by Rider-Waite. Not to mention pirated copies, clones, etc... This tarot has long been a reference for budding occultists and kabbalists... It still is...
So, in fact, there are many tarots that were designed in the ideology of the Golden Dawn!!!
It will first be the Tarot of Aleister Crowley which, following the Rider-Waite, will stand out and bring modifications to the "esoteric" Tarot, always with reference to the Golden Dawn, to the Kabbalah, to ancient Egypt initiates, etc... With in addition, references to sexual magic...The members of the Golden Dawn mainly used the Tarot of Waite, but during the 1950s, 1960s, they put a lot of effort into creating a Tarot that could finally be directly linked to the precepts and esoteric teachings of the Golden Dawn... A Tarot which originally wanted to be, once again, a Tarot exclusively reserved for members of the Order. This is the famous "Tarot of the Golden Dawn", so the Tarot which wants to be "officially" attested by the order...
But beware !! This name known as "Tarot of the Golden Dawn" is confusing... Several Tarots are decked out with the label "of the Golden Dawn"...
In truth, of all these tarot cards there is only one that is truly recognized by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and as such, and that is the one developed by Israel Regardie and Robert Wang from esoteric works of Samuel Liddel Matthers.
Robert Wang will also create the "Jungian Tarot", very appreciated also by the followers of the Golden Dawn; and perhaps even more by those interested in "modern theosophy" and in the principles elaborated by Jung.
The "Jungian Tarot" is quite similar to the so-called "Golden Dawn" Tarot, but is intended more for "personal evolution" than for the initiatory journey of the Order, strictly speaking... In truth these two tarots are the results of extensive research in matters of esotericism, research that has been carried out by the study centers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Its construction, on the basis of the four elements, the celestial phenomena, the Holy Kabbalah, and a highly evolved psychology, can apparently lead its followers into the inner recesses of psychic and intuitive awareness.
Above all, this tarot can be used as a basis for occult study, in order to learn to possess all the aspects of the traditional "center-wisdom", and "high-science" kabbalistic... (There are many Rosicrucian references , and also references to Freemasonry and alchemy).
Originally, the Golden Dawn Tarot was only reserved for members of the official Order. It began to be broadcast from 1975.
Despite the claim of these creators, it should still be known that the vast majority of members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, will study the Tarot from the "Tarot B.O.T.A.", or the original Rider-Waite. What is striking in the Tarot Rider-Waite, therefore, is above all the Minor Arcana, which are difficult to translate with the Tarot of Marseilles for most of those interested, but have suddenly become emblematic with the Tarot that Waite offers us. Therefore, these mysteries illustrated with scenes are easier to interpret.
THE TAROT B.O.T.A.
It is actually a very special version of the Rider-Waite Tarot presented in a "black and white" version, and the members were invited to color their own tarots... The study of symbolism esoteric was first done using this Tarot Rider-Waite in its original version (in black and bench). Indeed, the Waite-Rider Tarot in its black and white version is the most used by Golden Dawn followers and should be considered the official Golden Dawn Tarot.
A nearly similar version is still used by members of the B.O.T.A. and followers of hermetic schools. (The initials B.O.T.A. mean "Builders of the Adytum", it is a traditional and fraternal association founded by Paul Foster Case, continued and extended by Ann Davies...
A popular theory is that author William Walker Atkinson co-wrote the legendary "Kybalion" tome with Paul Foster Case. This theory is often defended by members of the "Builders of the Adytum". B.O.T.A. offers courses and techniques based on the study of the mystical teachings of the Holy Qabalah and TAROT. In fact, this confusing story about the Tarot B.O.T.A. and writing the "Kybalion", seems to have started with a breakaway group from the B.O.T.A., "The Brotherhood of Hidden Light" (which emphasizes the "secret (or lost) knowledge of the sages of Atlantis") .
The members of the Golden Dawn like the members of the B.O.T.A., consider that the Rider-Waite tarot is the ultimate "reference"...
secretsdutarot.blogspot.com/2013/01/les-tarots-dits-de-la...
This dissertation seeks to define the importance of Waite’s interpretation of mediaeval and Renaissance esoterica regarding the contacting of daemons and its evolution into a body of astrological and terrestrial correspondences and intelligences that included a Biblical primordial language, or a lingua adamica. The intention and transmission of John Dee’s angel magic is linked to the philosophy outlined in his earlier works, most notably the Monas Hieroglyphica, and so this dissertation also provides a philosophical background to Dee’s angel magic. The aim of this dissertation is to establish Dee’s conversations with angels as a magic system that is a direct descendant of Solomonic and Ficinian magic with unique Kabbalistic elements. It is primarily by the Neoplatonic, Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and alchemical philosophy presented in the Monas Hieroglyphica that interest in Dee’s angel magic was transmitted through the Rosicrucian movement. Through Johann Valentin Andreae’s Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459, the emphasis on a spiritual, inner alchemy became attached to Dee’s philosophy. Figures such as Elias Ashmole, Ebenezer Sibley, Francis Barret, and Frederick Hockley were crucial in the transmission of interest in Dee’s practical angel magic and Hermetic philosophy to the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
Enochian Angel Magic: From John Dee to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn www.academia.edu/921740/Enochian_Angel_Magic_From_John_De...
The rituals of the Golden Dawn utilized Dee’s angel magic, in addition to creative Kabbalistic elements, to form a singular practice that has influenced Western esoterica of the modern age. This study utilizes a careful analysis of primary sources including the original manuscripts of the Sloane archives, the most recent scholarly editions of Dee’s works, authoritative editions of original documents linked to Rosicrucianism, and Israel Regardie’s texts on Golden Dawn practices."In Whose hands the Sun is as a sword, and the Moon as a through- thrusting fire." An elegant equation, defining the parameters of the. creation. The god declares dominion over planetary forces (Sun-Moon) and elemental forces (fire-air). He also declares control over the two types of dualities: those in which one pole is projective and the other responsive (Sun-Moon) and over those in which two forces of similar polarity are balanced (fire-air). Within the area of creation, the positive pole is attributed to the element of swords, Air, and the anti-positive pole is attributed to the element of Fire. This is reflected in the precedence followed by the elements throughout the Tablets and Calls: Air first, then Water, Earth, and Fire. "Which measure your garments in the midst of my vestures..." The word translated here as "garments" is used uniformly to mean "creation" or "being" elsewhere in the Keys. Another word is used for
"garments" in the next sentence of this same Key. Another word is also used for "midst" further on in this Key. So the translation here is questionable. A magickal image given to define this phrase shows the scene through the god's eyes as he pulls endless threads of living light out of a lamen on his chest.
Enochian magic is a system of ceremonial magic based on the 16th-century writings of John Dee and Edward Kelley, who wrote that their information, including the revealed Enochian language, was delivered to them directly by various angels. Dee's journals contain the record of these workings, the Enochian script, and the tables of correspondences used in Enochian magic. Dee and Kelley believed their visions gave them access to secrets contained within Liber Logaeth, which Dee and Kelley referred to as the "Book of Enoch".In the early 1580s, John Dee had become discontented with his progress in learning the secrets of nature. Dee wrote: I have from my youth up, desired and prayed unto God for pure and sound wisdom and understanding of truths natural and artificial, so that God's wisdom, goodness, and power bestowed in the frame of the world might be brought in some bountiful measure under the talent of my capacity... So for many years and in many places, far and near, I have sought and studied many books in sundry languages, and have conferred with sundry men, and have laboured with my own reasonable discourse, to find some inkling, gleam, or beam of those radical truths. But after all my endeavours I could find no other way to attain such wisdom but by the Extraordinary Gift, and not by any vulgar school, doctrine, or human invention. Enochian magic involves the evocation and commanding of various spirits.He subsequently began to turn energetically towards the supernatural as a means to acquire knowledge. He sought to contact spirits through the use of a scryer or crystal-gazer, which he thought would act as an intermediary between himself and the angels. Dee's first attempts with several scryers were unsatisfactory, but in 1582 he met Edward Kelley (1555–1597/8), then calling himself Edward Talbot to disguise his conviction for "coining" or forgery, who impressed him greatly with his abilities.Dee took Kelley into his service and began to devote all his energies to his supernatural pursuits. These "spiritual conferences" or "actions" were conducted with intense Christian piety, always after periods of purification, prayer and fasting. Dee was convinced of the benefits they could bring to mankind. The character of Kelley is harder to assess: some conclude that he acted with cynicism, but delusion or self-deception cannot be ruled out. Kelley's "output" is remarkable for its volume, intricacy and vividness. Through Kelley, the angels laboriously dictated several books in this way, some in a previously unknown language which Dee called Angelical — now more commonly known as Enochian.The two pillars of modern Enochian magic, as outlined in Liber Chanokh, are the Elemental Tablets (including the "Tablet of Union") and the Keys of the 30 Aethyrs. The Enochian model of the universe is depicted by Dee as a square called "The Great Table" (made up of the 4 Elemental Tablets and incorporating the Tablet of Union), surrounded by 30 concentric circles representing the 30 Aethyrs or Aires. The Angelical Keys:
The essence of Enochian magic involves the recitation of one or more of nineteen Angelical Keys, which are also referred to as Calls. These keys are a series of rhetorical exhortations which function as evocations when read in the Enochian language. They are used to effect the "opening of 'gates' into various mystical realms." The first eighteen keys are used to 'open' the realms of the elements and sub-elements, which are mapped onto the quadrants and sub-quadrants of the Great Tablet.[clarification needed][citation needed]. The nineteenth key is used to 'open' the Thirty Aethyrs. The Aethyrs are conceived of as forming a map of the entire universe in the form of concentric rings which expand outward from the innermost to the outermost Aethyr. The Great Table: The angels of the four quarters are symbolized by the Elemental Tablets — four large magical word-square Tables (collectively called "The Great Table"). Most of the well-known Enochian angels are drawn from the Elemenal Tablets of the Great Table. Each of the four tablets (representing the Elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water), is collectively "governed" by a hierarchy of spiritual entities which runs (as explained in Crowley's Liber Chanokh) as the Three Holy Names, the Great Elemental King, the Six Seniors (aka Elders) (these make a total of 24 Elders as seen in the Revelation of St. John), the Two Divine Names of the Calvary Cross, the Kerubim, and the Sixteen Lesser Angels. Each tablet is further divided into four sub-quadrants (sometimes referred to as 'sub-angles') where we find the names of various Archangels and Angels who govern the quarters of the world. In this way, the entire universe, visible and invisible, is depicted as teeming with living intelligences. Each of the Elemental tablets is also divided into four sections by a figure known as the Great Central Cross. The Great Central cross consists of the two central vertical columns of the Elemental Tablet (the Linea Patris and Linea Filii) and the central horizontal line (known as the Linea Spiritus Sancti). In addition to the four Elemental Tablets, a twenty-square cell known as the Tablet of Union (aka The Black Cross, representing Spirit) completes the representation of the five traditional elemental attributes used in magic - Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Spirit. The Tablet of Union is derived from within the Great Central Cross of the Great Table. The Thirty Æthyrs : The 30 Aethyrs are numbered from 30 (TEX, the lowest and consequently the closest to the Great Table) to 1 (LIL, the highest, representing the Supreme Attainment. Magicians working the Enochian system record their impressions and visions within each of the successive Enochian Aethyrs. Each of the 30 Aethyrs is populated by "Governors" (3 for each Aethyr, except TEX which has four, thus a total of 91 Governors). Each of the governors has a sigil which can be traced onto the Great Tablet of Earth.
The Holy Table: a table with a top engraved with a Hexagram, a surrounding border of Enochian letters, and in the middle a Twelvefold table (cell) engraved with individual Enochian letters. According to Duquette and Hyatt, the Holy Table "does not directly concern Elemental or Aethyrical workings. Angels found on the Holy Table are not called forth in these operations."
The Seven Planetary Talismans: The names on these talismans (which are engraved on tin and placed on the surface of the Holy Table) are those of the Goetia. According to Duquette and Hyatt, "this indicates (or at least implies) Dee's familiarity with the Lemegeton and his attempt, at least early in his workings, to incorporate it in the Enochian system."] As with the Holy Table, Spirits found on these talismans are not called forth in these operations. The Sigillum dei Aemeth, Holy Sevenfold Table, or 'Seal of God's Truth': The symbol derives from Liber Juratus (aka The Sworn Book of Honorius or Grimoire of Honorius, of which Dee owned a copy). Five versions of this complex diagram are made from bee's wax, and engraved with the various lineal figures, letters and numbers. The four smaller ones are placed under the feet of the Holy Table. The fifth and larger one (about nine inches in diameter) is covered with a red cloth, placed on the Holy Table, and is used to support the "Shew-Stone" or "Speculum" (crystal or other device used for scrying). Scrying is an essential element of the magical system. Dee and Kelly's technique was to gaze into a concave obsidian mirror. Crowley habitually held a large topaz mounted upon a wooden cross to his forehead. Other methods include gazing into crystals, ink, fire or even a blank TV screen.Little else became of Dee's work until late in the nineteenth century,[citation needed] when it was incorporated by a brotherhood of adepts in England. The rediscovery of Dee and Kelley's material by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s led to Mathers developing the material into a comprehensive system of ceremonial magic. Magicians invoked the Enochian deities whose names were written on the tablets. They also traveled in their bodies of light into these subtle regions and recorded their psychic experiences. The two major branches of the system were then grafted on to the Adeptus Minor curriculum of the Golden Dawn.
According to Aleister Crowley, the magician starts with the 30th aethyr and works up to the first, exploring only so far as his level of initiation will permit. According to Chris Zalewski's 1994 book, the Golden Dawn also invented the game of Enochian chess, in which aspects of the Enochian Tablets were used for divination. They used four chessboards without symbols on them, just sets of colored squares, and each board is associated with one of the four elements of magic. Florence Farr founded the Sphere Group which also experimented with Enochian magic.Aleister Crowley's work with Enochian magick generally follows the Golden Dawn system. He is known primarily for his explorations of the 30 Aethyrs, published in "The Vision and the Voice". This work established the idea that Aethyr might represent a means of initiation, and set a standard for methodical exploration, which few have equaled. It also fixed Crowley's particular perspective on the process of transcendence in the minds of many students of the occult. Crowley envisioned the Aethyr as being related to the sephiroth of the tree of life in groups of three. He also mentions that each Aethyr "bends" into the next Aethyr above it, in a way, so that in progressing through the Aethyrs from the last to the first, one also withdraws one's being from the lower levels and already experienced (this is parallel to the technique he describes in the Liber Yod, in which the magician achieves union with the deity by gradually banishing all other levels and powers.Under this conception the Aethyrs ZAX, whose parts have names formed from the cross of union, is the highest of the three attributed to Chesed. Thus, it is the last Aethyr encountered before entering the Supernal Triad and achieving transcendence. Crowley envisioned this movement as crossing an "abyss" or space, during which the magician encounters an Enochian devil named Choronzon dwelling therein. Crowley's other contribution to Enochian magick was adapting the pyramid system of the GD for use with the sex magick of the O.T.O. In this technique, physical representations of the pyramids are made for an angel's name, but inverted to form the square "cups". These serve as talismans, which are charged using the end product of the sex magick operation.
Paul Foster Case (1884–1954), an occultist who began his magical career with the Alpha et Omega, was critical of the Enochian system. According to Case, the system of Dee and Kelley was partial from the start, an incomplete system derived from an earlier and complete Qabalistic system, and lacked sufficient protection methods. Case believed he had witnessed the physical breakdown of a number of practitioners of Enochian magic, due to the lack of protective methods. When Case founded his own magical order, the Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.), he removed the Enochian system and substituted elemental tablets based on Qabalistic formulae communicated to him by Master R.The first Enochian Key or Call is a recapitulation of the steps by which the creator of the system brought it into being. The Key follows the same macrocosmic-to-microcosmic progression used in the example consecration ritual, but then supplements this with a response from the microcosm directed at the macrocosm. Note that the description of the downward current contains seven significant phrases, suggesting the planets and sun, the macrocosm, while the description of the response contains five significant phrases, suggesting the four elements and elemental spirit, the microcosm."...and trussed you together as the palms of my hands." The magickal image continues by showing the god gathering the fibers of light into a bundle or cable. The god concentrates the energies within the area of work in preparation for shaping."Whose seats I garnished with the fire of gathering, which beautified your garments with admiration." Having generated the positive or spiritual pole of the creation, the god now looks to the anti-positive or material pole. The "seats" are the squares of the tablets in their two-dimensional form. The god embodies a part of his will in the Tablets, defining the order and place to which the spiritual energies will be attracted and attached. When the energies are attached to the Tablets, the pattern of will embodied in the Tablets extends back along their path to the positive pole, conditioning all the perceptible expressions (the "garments") of the energies.. The usual assumption of later magicians (which is not universally accepted) is that the remaining Calls refer to the "Minor Angles" within the Tablets.
The Golden Dawn method of associating the Callings with the tablets and Lesser Angles has become the accepted "standard". Donald Tyson recently proposed an alternative method which has received some attention
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian_magic
SUMMARY OF PATH POSITIONS IN ACHAD'S TREE OF LIFE
Path Trump Connects with:
Aleph The Fool Malkuth Yesod
Beth The Magician Malkuth Hod
Gimel The Priestess Yesod Hod
Daleth The Empress Malkuth Netzach
Heh The Emperor Tiphereth Geburah
Vav The Hierophant Hod Netzach
Zain The Lovers Hod Tiphereth
Cheth The Chariot Yesod Netzach
Teth Strength Netzach Tiphereth
YodT he Hermit Hod Geburah
Kaph The Wheel of Fortune Kether Chokmah
Lamed Justice Netzach Chesed
Mem The Hanged Man Yesod Tiphereth
Nun Death Geburah Chesed
Samek Temperance Chesed Chokmah
AyinThe DevilTiphereth Binah
PehThe Tower Geburah Binah
Tzaddi The Star Binah Chokmah
Qoph The Moon Tiphereth Chesed
Resh The Sun Tiphereth Chokmah
Shin Judgement Kether Tiphereth
TauT he Universe Kether Binah
"To whom I made a law to govern the holy ones," The word translated as "holy ones" appears to derive from the same root as the enochian words for "fire", suggesting that the holy ones are those who possess the spiritual will. The god specifies the manner in which his creation will respond to the mages and adepts."Moreover, you lifted up your voices and sware obedience and faith..."The connection between the two poles having been made, and the conditions of their interaction being set, the angels of the creation voice their response to the god, swearing to continue to follow the god's will. "...to him that liveth and triumpheth," The spirits of the Tablets affirm the existence of their creator by saying that he lives, and affirm the success of the act of creation by saying that he triumphs. The echoing of the god's statements by the spirits of the tablets also suggests that the conditions the god laid on the creation as a whole
are reflected in miniature within the creation. It shall be shown that this is the case with the Tablets as we proceed.In the remainder of the Key, the magician using it calls upon the
spirits to respond to him fully and openly. The word translated here as "servant" might be better rendered as "minister" or "representative". The magician asserts that he has a right to demand a response from the spirits because his acts are in accord with the will of their creator.
www.sacred-texts.com/eso/enoch/1stkey.txt
Angelic chatter, but very little solid information. Additionally, the reader must deal with forays into apocalyptic religion, Elizabethan politics, Dee's and Kelly's personal issues, and the various irrelevant issues Dee insisted on inserting into the work. Chronologically, Dee and Kelly's work falls into three highly productive periods separated by months when nothing of particular value was received. The material received in each period generally stands on its own, and is only loosely related to that of the other periods. but the term is often applied to all work. First Period: The Heptarchia Mystica. Equipment: Ring, Lamen, and Holy Table The angels claimed that the ring they designed for Dee was the same one used by Solomon to control demons. The ring had a full band, to which was attached a rectangular plate. The letters PELE (coming from Latin for "he will do miracles") were inscribed in the four corners. In the center was a circle crossed by a horizontal line, with the letter "V" inscribed above and the letter "L" below. Two different lamens were given to Dee. The first bears a generic resemblance to various sigils of goetia being an assortment of free-form lines and oddly placed letters. The giving being indicated that it was to be made of gold and worn every time and place for the purpose of protection. given by an evil spirit. During the spring session of 1583, the angels indicated that a session had been scheduled in which detailed instructions would be given for the use of Heptarchic magick. If this session took place, it is not in the records that have survived; but some idea of the general technique can be gathered from the comments in other parts of the recording. The magician would be seated at the Holy Table, wearing the ring and lamen. table in front of him. He would hold an appropriate Heptarchic king's talisman in one hand, with a talisman of the names of the king's ministers placed beneath his feet. The magician would then invite the king with petition and prayer, followed by petitions to his prince, and invocations of the six chief ministers. They would appear in the stone of clairvoyance, whereupon the magician would instruct them to accomplish the task he desired.The Liber Loagaeth is the most mysterious part of Dee and Kelly's work. It is also known by different names like
book of Enoch and the Liber Mysteriorum Sextus et Sanctus. So far no one has seriously attempted to use it, or to understand its nature, beyond what is found in the diaries. According to the angels, "loagaeth" means "speech of God", this book is supposed to be, literally, the words by which God created all things. It is supposed to be the language in which the "true names" of all things are known, giving power over them. As described in the Liber Mysteriorum Quintis, the book was to consist of 48 "leaves", of which each contains a 49x49 grid. Infact, the book actually presented to Kelly is somewhat different. It contains 49 "invocations" in an unknown language, 95 square tables filled with letters and numbers, 2 similar tables not filled, and 4 drawn tables twice the width of the others. 2 "leaves" are recorded, but these are not included in the final book, and apparently serve as an introduction or prologue to the work. this term. There is no translation by which this could be judged in detail, but the text lacks the logical repetitions and word placements which are characteristic of the 48 Enochian invocations given in later years. There is no apparent grammar in the text. Donald Laycock remarks that the language is strongly alliterative and repetitively rhyming, while Robert Turner calls it "glossolalic". many "languages", all being spoken immediately. The purpose of the Loagaeth has been said to be the unleashing/introduction of a new age on earth, the last age before the end of all things. Instructions for use for this purpose were never given; the angels continually put it off, saying that only God could decide when the time has come. During the presentation of the two leaves of the Liber Mysteriorum Quintis, in the stone of clairvoyance an angel moved successively towards letters, and Kelly pronounced the names of the angelic character. Dee transcribed a version using the Roman alphabet, apparently with the intention of redoing it in angelic characters at a later date. of Kelly; this light was seen by both of them. Once the light entered Kelly's head, his consciousness was transformed so that he could understand the text as he read it. He was strongly commanded not to provide a translation, explaining that God would choose the time for it to be revealed. He provided the translation of a few of the words, but it was insufficient to capture the meaning of the text as a whole. When the light withdrew from Kelly's head, he immediately ceased to understand the text, and could no longer see it in the stone. On a few occasions, the light continued to work within him for a short time after the session ended, and at those times Dee noticed that Kelly said many wonderful (and unrecorded) things about the nature of the texts. But the moment the light went out, Kelly couldn't understand it anymore, nor remember what he had said during the previous moment. The record indicates that the 23rd line of the first leaf was a preface to the creation and distinction of the angels, and the 24th line a pleasant invitation to the good angels. Nothing else is recorded concerning the purpose of this book.
Enochian Magic and the Apocalypse
There are 2 major threads of thought in Christian millennialism. One thread, called postmillennialism, is largely utopian in nature. He sees the millennium as the beginning of a period of progressive perfection of conditions on Earth; the basic principle is that the world must be perfected and the city of God built on earth before Christ returns, and only after Christ returns will the world end. Two decades after Dee, this form of millennialism was the driving force behind the religious groups shoeing the English colonization of America. Dee's own thought contains many post-millennial ideals in the search for Enochian magick, one of his goals was to gain means to bring earthly governments and societies to God's design, thereby bringing the return of Christ closer. quickly. The other thread, called premillennialism, is the more catastrophic variety. In this version, the typical scenario is the return of Christ, and then mankind's current "evil" societies will be destroyed in worldwide disasters, while the elect are preserved from evil. After the world is destroyed, Christ will join the faithful in a city built by God to rule over the earth for a thousand years. While there is a strong millennial flavor to the angel's statements, they are almost uniformly of the postmillennial variety. The angels divided the world into four ages. The first of these ages began with the creation and ended with the flood; the second ended with the appearance of Christ. The revelation of Liber Loagaeth ended the third age and triggered the final age, in which the world would be brought to perfection before Christ's return. . A particular passage makes this clear.
The Enochian Magical System of Golden Dawn
Regardie, Israel, The Golden Dawn, Llewellyn Publications, 1971, St Paul, MN. Reprinted at regular intervals. Contains detailed descriptions of the Enochian Magical System developed from GD. Zalewski, Pat. Golden Dawn Enochian Magic, Llewellyn Certainly there are influences of the Qabalah (the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the communications of Uriel, Michael...) but this is not the originality and the strength of the system. Some practitioners of Enochian magic said that it was a Qabala (when I hear a Qabala I tend to write Kabbalah, like in the theater) that put into action the world of Atziluth, the highest of the four Qabalah classic. It's quite difficult to verify...even ! (See the introduction to the Necrono-micon at Belfond Editions).
But back to Enochian magick proper. The successors of the G.. D.. today reorganize its system and Schueler in his Enochian Magic) gives the material and the rituals "step by step" ("step by step"). Americans (and us too) like to practice if it is simple and impressive... The investigation by Enochian magic generally gives results, we cannot really say that they are controllable since they do not correspond to any standard of experiences already lived by the inventors of this practice.
Be that as it may, the Enochian, this language with its grammar and its syntax, this magical system and its original Theogony, remains a mystery that should not be taken for a simple variant of this or that traditional system already known. It is therefore useful when approaching it to master the fundamental elements which are used for its use without being subservient to the rituals of the pentagrams and hexagrams, to their signs, to the notions of Qabala of the G., D.., etc. This will make it possible to know what is original or what is borrowed in the Enochian, and what one can think of such or such contemporary development. A culture that will provide some points of reference in our consumer society where the practice of magic has much in common with video games or the daily television session.
In this, the most honorable goal (if it can be a question of honour) is the success of the experience known as the "Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel", i.e. contact with one's true will, devoid of intention, in other words his heart. But it also applies to solving the various problems of life. After all, a magic is white or black only according to the use that is made of it... Let's say that we are still far from the religious John Dee. In fact not, for if Dee's conscious aims and methods were very far from those of our contemporaries, would ultimately the adventures and misadventures of his life, the problem of his relationship with Kelly evidently culminating in the ritually ordered exchange what they did with their wives would not be indications that this practice was beginning to ferment the elements of their consciences into a quintessential non-conformist?
MATTHEW LEON.
This text constitutes the introduction to the "Book of the gathering of forces" Editions RAMUEL 1994
Today we can no longer answer, lacking the benchmarks of a conventional morality no longer existing in the heart of the modern magician. But what is left? On what do we base ourselves if our practice has not yet allowed us an unambiguous contact with our heart, if our magical training lets us wander in the imagination that we have shaped? Publications 1990, St Paul, MN.
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme–color synesthesia or color–graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored.In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (e.g., 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways. Little is known about how synesthesia develops. It has been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time. This hypothesis—referred to as semantic vacuum hypothesis—could explain why the most common forms of synesthesia are grapheme-color, spatial sequence, and number form. These are usually the first abstract concepts that educational systems require children to learn. The earliest recorded case of synesthesia is attributed to the Oxford University academic and philosopher John Locke, who, in 1690, made a report about a blind man who said he experienced the color scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet. However, there is disagreement as to whether Locke described an actual instance of synesthesia or was using a metaphor. The first medical account came from German physician Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812. The term is from the Ancient Greek σύν syn, 'together', and αἴσθησις aisthēsis, 'sensation'.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
When Pamela Coleman Smith was attending the Pratt Institute of Art, she realized that she possessed a high degree of sound-color synesthesia, i.e., she was able to visualize colors and forms while listening to music and could transmit those visualizations into tangible works of art. Modern psychologists define synesthesia as a crossing-over of sensory input. Depending upon the type of synesthesia, individuals are able to hear colors, see music, smell words, etc. Many people, particularly artists, possess this phenomenon to some extent; however, Pamela possessed sound-color synesthesia to an exceptionally high degree. She was able to create sound paintings just by unconsciously drawing while listening to passages of music. She embodied the Symbolist ideal in this area. Many examples of her work in this area have survived, including three watercolors in the possession of the Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive. In July 1908, an article appeared in The Strand Magazine entitled "Pictures in Music." The article included six black and white images of her music paintings (see below) and provided a long quotation by her which described how her art was created. A pertinent excerpt from that article is as follows: Do you see pictures in music? When you hear a Beethoven symphony or a sonata by Schumann, do mystic human figures and landscapes float before your eyes ? It is by no means new or uncommon for a composer to have a distinct picture in his mind when he sets himself to create a work. Schumann saw children at play in an embowered wood, dancing merrily until, lo ! the sudden advent of a satyr sent them shrieking to their homes. Few, however, have been able to delineate their hallucinations born of music.
Mendelssohn, who was no mean draughtsman, was often asked to do so, but always refused. "It is like asking a sculptor to paint a portrait of his statue," he once said. " All art is one, just as the human body is one, but each of the members has its functions. It is the function of music to hear, not to see." Nevertheless, it is highly interesting to see music translated in the terms of a sister art, and this is what a clever artist, Miss Pamela Colman Smith, has done, in pictures which are published now for the first time in The Strand Magazine. Many of the compositions selected by the artist will instantly be recognized as conveying, in quite a surprising way, a vivid idea of the music as a whole. Every reader can ascertain for himself whether he possesses this peculiar psychic gift—this power of conjuring up music pictures. When you next hear a famous sonata, close your eyes and see what, if any, "pictures" pass before the eye of your brain. Under the magical influence of music the soul has glimpses of wondrous shapes, lit by the light that never was on sea or land. "You ask me how these pictures are evolved," said Miss Colman Smith. "They are not pictures of the music theme — pictures of the flying notes—not conscious illustrations of the name given to a piece of music, but just what I see when I hear music—thoughts loosened and set free by the spell of sound. "When I take a brush in hand and the music begins, it is like unlocking the door into a beautiful country. There, stretched far away, are plains and mountains and the billowy sea, and as the music forms a net of sound the people who dwell there enter the scene; tall, slow-moving, stately queens, with jewelled crowns and garments gay or sad, who walk on mountain - tops or stand beside the shore, watching the water - people. These water-folk are passionless, and sway or fall with little heed of time; they toss the spray and, bending down, dive headlong through the deep. "There are the dwellers, too, of the great plain, who sit and brood, made of stone and motionless; the trees, which slumber till some elf goes by with magic spear and wakes the green to life ; towers, white and tall, standing against the darkening sky— Those tall white towers that one sees afar, Topping the mountain crests like crowns of snow. Their silence hangs so heavy in the air That thoughts are stifled. "Then huddling crowds, who carry spears, hasten across the changing scene. Sunsets fade from rose to grey, and clouds scud across the sky. "For a long time the land I saw when hearing Beethoven was unpeopled; hills, plains, ruined towers, churches by the sea. After a time I saw far off a little company of spearmen ride away across the plain. But now the clanging sea is strong with the salt of the lashing spray and full of elemental life; the riders of the waves, the Queen of Tides, who carries in her hand the pearl-like moon, and bubbles gleaming on the inky wave. "Often when hearing Bach I hear bells ringing in the sky, rung by whirling cords held in the hands of maidens dressed in brown. There is a rare freshness in the air, like morning on a mountain-top, with opal-coloured mists that chase each other fast across the scene. "Chopin brings night ; gardens where mystery and dread lurk under every bush, but joy and passion throb within the air, and the cold moon bewitches all the scene. There is a garden that I often see, with moonlight glistening on the vine-leaves, and drooping roses with pale petals fluttering down, tall, misty trees and purple sky, and lovers wandering there. A drawing of that garden I have shown to several people and asked them if they could play the music that I heard when I drew it. They have all, without any hesitation, played the same. I do not know the name, but— well, I know the music of that place."
« Les murs ont des oreilles, dit-on ; ici, ils ont un nez et une bouche. Prisonniers de la pierre, ces visages semblent exprimer la recherche désespérée d’une échappatoire pour pousser un ultime cri. Ont-ils quelque terrible secret à divulguer avant leur disparition dans la gangue qui les enveloppera bientôt ? Dans leur fragilité, leur gratuité, leur susceptibilité au temps, à la dégradation ou au vol, ces pièces sont les témoins éphémères d’un “ici et maintenant” citadin. Elles constituent aussi une tentative d’interrogation sur le statut de l’œuvre d’art ainsi que sur les fondements de sa valeur et de son utilité. Etranger à toute notion de “marché”, mon geste artistique s’approche d’une affirmation de la primauté du rapport direct et intime entre l’œuvre et le regardeur ; je souhaite que ce dernier, mu par la curiosité et sa disposition émotionnelle, se sente invité à un engagement physique. Des transformations résulteront des rencontres avec le public. Presse n’en n’illustre que mieux le fait qu’elle n’existe, qu’elle ne “vaut” que dans et par cette interaction. »
“The walls have ears, they say; here they have a nose and a mouth. Trapped in stone, these faces seem to express the desperate search for an escape route to utter a final cry. Do they have some terrible secret to divulge before their disappearance in the matrix that will soon envelop them? In their fragility, their gratuitousness, their susceptibility to time, degradation or theft, these pieces are fleeting witnesses of a “here and now” city dweller. They also constitute an attempt to question the status of the work of art as well as the foundations of its value and usefulness. Foreign to any notion of "market", my artistic gesture approaches an affirmation of the primacy of the direct and intimate relationship between the work and the viewer; I want the latter, driven by curiosity and his emotional disposition, to feel invited to a physical commitment. Transformations will result from meetings with the public. Press only better illustrates the fact that it exists, that it is only "valid" in and through this interaction. "
Dedicated to Saint John, the cathedral of Lyon is one of the most prominent churches of France (it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site). Indeed, the archbishop of Lyon has borne the title of “Primate of the Gauls” since the 2nd century, as Lyon was the first bishopric ever created in the “three Gauls”, as the provinces of Lyon and the Alps, the Aquitaine, and Belgium, were known during the times of the Western Roman Empire. Lyon was then the capital of all those vast territories. This “primacy” conferred to the archbishop of Lyon authority over all other bishops, even that of Paris, the secular capital of more recent times. Now, the title is largely honorific.
The Saint-Jean Cathedral is mostly a Gothic church, and as such of limited interest to me. However, having been built over the span of three centuries, from 1175 to 1480, it was begun as a Romanesque church and there are indeed small parts and details that remain from that period, albeit few and far between.
I have visited that church several times, but I went again on the Saturday before Easter (2022) to try and locate a few of those parts and details...
It was also a good opportunity to test my “Brittany Configuration”, i.e., the gear I will bring on my week-long family trip to Brittany at the beginning of May: as I wasn’t sure what kind of equipment would be allowed inside the cathedral, I brought my new 24–120mm ƒ/4 S lens, with the 14–30mm in case of need (I ended up not needing it), and my very small and light Gitzo Series 0 Traveler tripod, which I used for all exposures indoors. That gear worked very satisfactorily. Of course, the tripod is a lot shorter than my usual one (not to mention my big one!), but one has to make do when one must travel light. That was the idea.
Happy Easter to everyone!
The lower level of lovely blind arcatures around the choir and apse is crowned by a frieze of marble and inlaid red cement. All of that is from the Romanesque period.
Vienna Baroque
Doris Binder
The center of Baroque art was undisputable Vienna, as a special promoter appeared the Emperor Charles VI., under whose reign not only the Karlskirche was built, but also numerous buildings have been newly planned or built. The passion for building of the High Baroque is not only founded by the destructions of the Turks, but also has its causes in the backward economic structure and its lack of production plants. Whether nobleman, cleric or commoner, all those with sufficient capital put it rather in construction funds into practice than not make use of it. Responsible for this was a deep distrust to the imperial fiscal policy and concern about the currency and a possible bankruptcy.
The Baroque emerged within the civil peace (*) Burgfrieden) of the city of Vienna, had at the beginning of the High Baroque era still dominated religious buildings, so the cityscape changed in just four decades. Vienna was transformed into a "palace city", by the year 1740, the number of pleasure palaces, gardens and belvederes had doubled. The Baroque style, which by crown, church and nobility was forced upon the citizens, is considered of Felix Czeike as "authority art". The existing social gap should be camouflaged by the rubberneck culture in festivities, receptions and parades.
*) Burgfrieden (The term truce or Castle peace referred to a jurisdiction in the Middle Ages around a castle, in which feuds, so hostilities of private individuals among themselves, under penalty of ostracism were banned. Today the term is mainly used in a figurative sense.
Due to the return of Fischer von Erlach to Vienna in 1686 and a decade later, Lukas von Hildebrandt, the primacy of the Italians in architecture was broken and the victory parade of Austrian Baroque began. The connection between the spiritual and secular powers found its mode of expression in the Baroque, which the appearance of the city of Vienna should characterize in a decisive manner.
Construction of Charles Church
The Karlskirche was built by Emperor Charles VI. commemorating the plague saint, Charles Borromeo. In 1713 the plague raged in Vienna and claimed about 8,000 human lives, in February 1714 the plague disappeared and as a sign of gratitude was began with the construction of the church, this should become the most important religious building of Vienna in the 18th century.
In a contest was decided on the builder - participants were Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt and Ferdinando Galli-Bibienas. As winner emerged the famous architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, he died in 1723 and did not live to the achievement of the Church. The supervision was transferred to the imperial court architect Anton Erhard Martinelli, as Fischer von Erlach died, his son, Joseph Emmanuel, finished his work. On 28 October 1737 St. Charles Church was solemnly by the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Sigismund Count Kollowitz, inaugurated. The spiritual care ceded Emperor Karl VI. to the chivalric Order of the Cross with the Red Star, since 1783 is the Karlskirche imperial patronage parish.
The church at that time lay still behind the regulated river Wien (Wienfluss) and in the open field. The directed towards the city face side of the Charles Church, which stood on the edge of the suburb of Wieden, was target point of a line of sight the Hofburg and St. Charles Church in the sense of a "via triumphalis" connecting. On the temple-like front building of the Karlskirche the dedication inscription is clearly visible "Vota mea Reddam in conspectu timentium Deum" - "I will fulfill my vow before those who fear God."
Already during the construction by Fischer von Erlach (senior), there were several project phases, three of which have been preserved:
1. Medaillon by Daniel Warou for the groundbreaking ceremony
2. Fore stitches in Fischer's draft of a historical architecture 1721
3. Viennese view of work by Klein and Pfeffel 1722 (1724)
Due to the death of Fischer von Erlach, occured recent changes made by his son, Joseph Emmanuel most of all being concerned the dome (much higher and steeper), the priest choir (omitted) and the interior (simpler). The entire project took a total of 21 years and the costs amounted to 304 045 guilders and 22 ¼ cruisers. The construction costs were shouldered by all crown lands of the Empire, but also Spain, Milan and the Netherlands had to make a contribution.
The Karlskirche is the most important Baroque building of the city and represents the most convincing the so-called Empire style in which for the last time an empire awareness in the architecture of the capital of the Holy Roman Empire after the victorious ended wars against the Turks and the French was expressed.
Symbolism of the Karlskirche
The Karlskirche consists of a central rotunda with a dome, preceded by a column structure like a Greek temple, of two high pillars illustrated on the model of Trajan's Column in Rome and of two lateral gate pavilions. The illustrated columns represent Charles VI. as a wise and strong secular ruler, the two great pillars were created by Marder and Matielli. The columns are crowned by golden eagles, symbolizing the two virtues of the Emperor - fortitudo (bravery) and constantia (resistance). The two pillars are evocative of the two pillars before the temple in Jerusalem - Jachin and Boaz. However, the illustration of the two columns does not match the model of the Trajan columns in Rome, portraying war deeds, but these tell the life story of St. Borromeo. In the front view of the Karlskirche a wide range of different symbols become one whole - the Roman emperors Trajan and Augustus, the Temple of Solomon, St. Peter's Church in Rome, Hagia Sophia, Charlemagne and the Empire of Charles V. - through the skillfully used symbols should be shown the claim of the house of Habsburg to the European domination.
The plan view of the church is, as in baroque typical, ellipsoid. In the interior of the Karlskirche the great Baroque sculpture is immediately noticeable, representing St. Borromeo. At the base the four Latin Fathers of the Church are depicted. The interior of the Karlskirche is dominated by the tremendous fresco in the oval dome room, it was created by the eminent Baroque painter Johann Michael Rottmayr between 1725-1730. The fresco shows the Mother of God representing the intercession of the patron Saint of the Church to help head off the plague, surrounded is the scene by the cardinal virtues (faith, hope and love). In the left entrance wing is situated the tomb for the Austrian poet Heinrich Joseph von Collin (17771-1811).
Inside the St. Charles Church, there is a museum where the most valuable pieces are exhibited.
These include: the vestments of St. Borromeo, a reliquary of gold and silver - a donation of Emperor Charles VI. and a rococo monstrance (1760) containing a drop of blood of the saint. Thomas Aquinas.
Even the image of the architect Fischer von Erlach, painted by Jacob von Schuppen, is one of the church treasures.
The iconographic program of the Charles Church was written by Carl Gustav Haerus, by this the Saint Charles Borromeo should be connected to the imperial founder.
Composite image, made up of several shots in portrait orientation, stitched together using the excellent freeware utility, Hugin.
Built in 1937, this Usonian Modern house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, whom would go on to commission Wright to design a second home for them further west about a decade later. The house is considered Wright’s first Usonian-style house, a departure from his previous Prairie School work in both aesthetics and in clientele, as the Jacobs family were Wright’s first clients who were middle class, rather than wealthy. The house was built during the Great Depression, and is the result of Herbert Jacobs, a friend of Wright, challenging the architect to design an affordable and decent home for $5,000. Wright took on the project, and created a design philosophy from it known as “Usonian,” which takes its name for Wright’s proposed moniker for people, places, and things from the United States of America, distinguishing it from the long-established phrase “American” which, confusingly, can refer to either people, places and things from either the United States of America, or the North American and South American continents. Wright envisioned a new form of architecture with the Usonian philosophy that would be affordable and not be beholden to traditions derived from Europe, responding instead to the American landscape. Wright designed his Usonian homes to not feature shrubbery, prominent foundations, chimneys, or front porches, and instead, directly connect to the surrounding landscape, and utilized materials including glass, stone, wood, and brick in the design and construction of the houses. The Jacobs House I became the prototype typical house for Wright’s envisioned “Broadacre City” concept that intended to drastically alter the form of human settlement in North America, which somewhat influenced suburban development in the United States, but did not ever get realized in anything close to resembling what Wright had intended. The Usonian houses grew more elaborate over time, eventually becoming far less affordable than they were intended, but the Jacobs House I was the first of these houses, and the most true to form, embodying the underlying design philosophy. At the time of the house’s construction, Herbert Jacobs was a young journalist who had just took on a position at the Madison Capital Times, and had a wife, Katherine Jacobs, and a young daughter. The Jacobs family lived in the small house until they outgrew it, moving out and selling the house in 1942, moving to a farm nine miles west of Madison, where they commissioned Wright to design them a new house, the Jacobs House II, in 1946-1948, which he dubbed his “Solar Hemicycle House,” which featured a more curvilinear form meant to follow the path of the sun and take advantage of passive solar heating in the winter and daylighting in the summer. The Jacobs family remained in Madison until Herbert retired in 1962, after which they lived in California until their deaths.
The L-shaped house is clad in wood and brick with a low-slope roof and wide overhanging eaves. The simple form of the house is a result of the Usonian philosophy of economical design, with small ribbon windows on the front offering privacy, contrasting with the much larger windows in the rear, which open to the rear garden. One end of the front facade features a carport that is open on two sides with a cantilevered roof supported by brick walls that run along the portions of the carport’s perimeter that adjoin the rest of the house. The house’s entrance is off the carport, as the design recognizes the primacy of the automobile in accessing the house, rather than walking to it from somewhere nearby. The house’s exterior accentuates its horizontality with its banded wooden cladding, roofline, and front facade windows, carrying over from Wright’s earlier Prairie School work. Inside the house, it is divided into two distinct areas, with the rear wing being quieter and more private spaces with the bedrooms and study inside this wing of the house. By contrast, the front wing has the more public areas, with an open-plan living room and dining room, the kitchen in a nook behind the fireplace, a terrace with large glass doors looking out at the rear garden, and the bathroom sitting between the two sections of the house. The interior features the same materials as the exterior, with brick and wood cladding, including economical prefabricated sandwich drywall, and wooden trim, and a stained concrete floor throughout containing heat conduits based on the Korean “Ondol” or “warm stone” system of heating, which consisted of pipes in a layer of sand below the house’s floor slab. The house does not feature an attic or basement except for a small cellar containing a boiler under the kitchen and bathroom, and was built utilizing a version of the simple slab-on-grade construction that became popular in the following decades for suburban middle class housing. The only major difference between this house’s four-inch slab foundation and conventional slab-on-grade construction is that it lacks any footings except at the large masonry fireplace, as the heating system prevents the ground under the house from freezing, eliminating the need for a footing below the frost line to prevent frost heave.
The house was a sensation when it was built, and the Jacobs family allowed tours of the house early on. The house was prominently featured in magazines and publications, and influenced the design of the ranch house that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s with its open kitchen, dining room, and living room. After the Jacobs family moved out, the house was cared for inconsistently by subsequent owners. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, owing to its major historical significance, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2003. In 1982, the house was purchased by James Dennis, an Art History professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, who subsequently restored the house’s exterior and interior to their original appearance, and updating the building systems, which had worn out. The house remains in excellent condition today under the careful stewardship of multiple owners. The house is occasionally open for tours through the owner’s partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Wisconsin Heritage Tourism Program, Inc. One of the latest developments in the significant house’s history came in 2019, when it became one of eight Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings in the United States to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, known as “The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright”, alongside other notable buildings including Taliesin and Taliesin West, the Hollyhock House, Unity Temple, the Robie House, Fallingwater, and the Guggenheim Museum. The house’s influence on 20th Century modern residential architecture cannot be overstated, as it was the first time that such design quality really became attainable for the average person. The house, along with Fallingwater and the Johnson Wax Complex, marked a renaissance in Wright’s career, making him the well-known historical figure he is today, rather than as a derivative of Louis Sullivan he would likely have been viewed as had he ended his career at an age when most people retire.
Dedicated to Saint John, the cathedral of Lyon is one of the most prominent churches of France (it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site). Indeed, the archbishop of Lyon has borne the title of “Primate of the Gauls” since the 2nd century, as Lyon was the first bishopric ever created in the “three Gauls”, as the provinces of Lyon and the Alps, the Aquitaine, and Belgium, were known during the times of the Western Roman Empire. Lyon was then the capital of all those vast territories. This “primacy” conferred to the archbishop of Lyon authority over all other bishops, even that of Paris, the secular capital of more recent times. Now, the title is largely honorific.
The Saint-Jean Cathedral is mostly a Gothic church, and as such of limited interest to me. However, having been built over the span of three centuries, from 1175 to 1480, it was begun as a Romanesque church and there are indeed small parts and details that remain from that period, albeit few and far between.
I have visited that church several times, but I went again on the Saturday before Easter (2022) to try and locate a few of those parts and details...
It was also a good opportunity to test my “Brittany Configuration”, i.e., the gear I will bring on my week-long family trip to Brittany at the beginning of May: as I wasn’t sure what kind of equipment would be allowed inside the cathedral, I brought my new 24–120mm ƒ/4 S lens, with the 14–30mm in case of need (I ended up not needing it), and my very small and light Gitzo Series 0 Traveler tripod, which I used for all exposures indoors. That gear worked very satisfactorily. Of course, the tripod is a lot shorter than my usual one (not to mention my big one!), but one has to make do when one must travel light. That was the idea.
The lower level of lovely blind arcatures alternating with pilasters all around the choir and apse. All from the Romanesque period.
Madhav Khosla, B. R. Ambedkar Academic Fellow, Columbia Law School, Author, The Indian Constitution;
Sheri Berman, Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Author, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century;
Robert Doar, Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies, American Enterprise Institute, Former Commissioner, Human Resources Administration, City of New York;
Yascha Mounk, Senior Fellow, Political Reform Program, New America, Author, The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State
Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Lyon, Auvernia-Ródano-Alpes, France.
Reloj astronómico
Originario del siglo XVI.
Indica: la fecha, las posición de la luna, del sol y de la Tierra, además de la de las estrellas sobre Lyon. Está construido bajo los conocimiento de la época, en la que se afirmaba que el sol gira alrededor de la Tierra.
Sobre el reloj, una serie de autómatas comienzan a moverse varias veces al día: animales y una escena que representa la Anunciación.
La Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Lyon, a menudo llamada simplemente catedral de Lyon o Primatiale Saint-Jean-Baptiste-et-Saint-Étienne es la catedral y primado de Lyon (Francia). El término primado viene de Primat des Gaules, título histórico del obispo de Lyon.
Construida entre 1180 y 1480, mezcla el estilo Románico con el Gótico. Cuenta con un reloj astronómico del siglo XIV.
La construcción comenzó en el siglo XII con la pared del monasterio. Las partes más bajas del ábside, las capillas de ambos lados y el transepto fueron construidos entre 1165 y 1180 en estilo Románico. El techo del ábside y el transepto en estilo Gótico, las dos torres orientales, los primeros cuatro tramos de la nave y la bóveda fueron completados entre el siglo XII y el primer tercio del siglo XIII.
A mediados del siglo XIII, las ventanas del coro y los dos rosetones del transepto fueron completados. Entre finales del siglo XII y el primer tercio del siglo XIV, los últimos cuatro tramos y la parte más baja de la fachada fueron completadas. El final del siglo XIV presenció la terminación de los últimos tramos de la bóveda y los rosetones de la fachada en 1392.
En el siglo XV, la parte superior de la fachada y las torres fueron completadas. La estatua de Dios Padre fue ubicada en la parte más alta del frontón en 1481. La capilla de los Borbones (nombrada así por los arzobispos que ordenaron su construcción), de un estilo Gótico tardío, fue construida entre finales del siglo XV y comienzos del siglo XVI.
En 1562, la catedral fue destruida por las tropas calvinistas del barón de Adrets. Las ventanas de la gran nave medieval y del tímpano del largo portal fueron destruidas en el siglo XVIII por orden de los Canónigos. Durante la revolución, la catedral sufrió algunos daños.
Entre 1791 y 1793, el arzobispo Lamourette ordenó la modificación de los coros. Esto incluyó la destrucción del atril.
El coro fue restaurado a su disposición medieval entre 1935 y 1936. Durante la liberación de Lyon en septiembre de 1944, algunas de las vidrieras de colores fueron destruidas.
La fachada fue restaurada en 1982.
Astronomical clock
Originally from the 16th century.
It indicates: the date, the position of the moon, the sun and the Earth, as well as the position of the stars over Lyon. It is built under the knowledge of the time, in which it was stated that the sun revolves around the Earth.
Above the clock, a series of automatons begin to move several times a day: animals and a scene representing the Annunciation.
The Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Lyon, often called simply Lyon Cathedral or Primatiale Saint-Jean-Baptiste-et-Saint-Étienne is the cathedral and primate of Lyon (France). The term primacy comes from Primat des Gaules, the historical title of the Bishop of Lyon.
Built between 1180 and 1480, it mixes the Romanesque style with the Gothic. It has an astronomical clock from the 14th century.
Construction began in the 12th century with the wall of the monastery. The lower parts of the apse, the chapels on both sides and the transept were built between 1165 and 1180 in the Romanesque style. The roof of the apse and the transept in Gothic style, the two eastern towers, the first four sections of the nave and the vault were completed between the 12th century and the first third of the 13th century.
In the middle of the 13th century, the windows of the choir and the two rose windows of the transept were completed. Between the end of the 12th century and the first third of the 14th century, the last four sections and the lowest part of the facade were completed. The end of the 14th century witnessed the completion of the last sections of the vault and the rose windows of the facade in 1392.
In the 15th century, the upper part of the facade and the towers were completed. The statue of God the Father was located in the highest part of the pediment in 1481. The Bourbon Chapel (named after the archbishops who ordered its construction), of a late Gothic style, was built between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the century XVI.
In 1562, the cathedral was destroyed by the Calvinist troops of Baron Adrets. The windows of the great medieval nave and the tympanum of the long portal were destroyed in the 18th century by order of the Canons. During the revolution, the cathedral suffered some damage.
Between 1791 and 1793, Archbishop Lamourette ordered the modification of the choirs. This included the destruction of the lectern.
The choir was restored to its medieval disposition between 1935 and 1936. During the liberation of Lyon in September 1944, some of the stained glass windows were destroyed.
The facade was restored in 1982.
The ruins of the Old Sheldon Church near Yemassee, South Carolina. Since the church was originally built, it was burned twice, once by the British and once by the Federal Army during the Civil War. In 1970, the ruins were added to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP: 70000562).
From the church's web page:
Old Sheldon Church is located near Gardens Corner. Its ruins lie on a tree-shrouded byway near U.S. 21. Its history is rich. Established in 1745, Sheldon Church was built between 1751 and 1756 on land donated primarily by the Bull family and named after their ancestral home in Warwickshire, England. Described as a monument to Anglican wealth and spiritual primacy, the church was designed as compact auditory; built along a row of seven classic columns with colonnaded
walls three-and-a-half feet thick. It was the earliest example of classical Greek architecture in America.
The original structure was burned in May 1779 during the American Revolution. It lay in ruins until 1825 when a vestry was formed to restore the church to the center of spiritual life in Prince William’s Parish. It prospered during the remainder of the antebellum era as a parish of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, but it would not survive the American Civil War. During the Civil War (1861-1865), the church was stripped of its timbers and furnishings and would never be restored again.
In 1925, the Parish Church of St. Helena reclaimed these ruins from the encroaching wilderness and has scheduled an annual service at this site as a continuing legacy of Old Sheldon’s spiritual heritage.
« Les murs ont des oreilles, dit-on ; ici, ils ont un nez et une bouche. Prisonniers de la pierre, ces visages semblent exprimer la recherche désespérée d’une échappatoire pour pousser un ultime cri. Ont-ils quelque terrible secret à divulguer avant leur disparition dans la gangue qui les enveloppera bientôt ? Dans leur fragilité, leur gratuité, leur susceptibilité au temps, à la dégradation ou au vol, ces pièces sont les témoins éphémères d’un “ici et maintenant” citadin. Elles constituent aussi une tentative d’interrogation sur le statut de l’œuvre d’art ainsi que sur les fondements de sa valeur et de son utilité. Etranger à toute notion de “marché”, mon geste artistique s’approche d’une affirmation de la primauté du rapport direct et intime entre l’œuvre et le regardeur ; je souhaite que ce dernier, mu par la curiosité et sa disposition émotionnelle, se sente invité à un engagement physique. Des transformations résulteront des rencontres avec le public. Presse n’en n’illustre que mieux le fait qu’elle n’existe, qu’elle ne “vaut” que dans et par cette interaction. »
“The walls have ears, they say; here they have a nose and a mouth. Trapped in stone, these faces seem to express the desperate search for an escape route to utter a final cry. Do they have some terrible secret to divulge before their disappearance in the matrix that will soon envelop them? In their fragility, their gratuitousness, their susceptibility to time, degradation or theft, these pieces are fleeting witnesses of a “here and now” city dweller. They also constitute an attempt to question the status of the work of art as well as the foundations of its value and usefulness. Foreign to any notion of "market", my artistic gesture approaches an affirmation of the primacy of the direct and intimate relationship between the work and the viewer; I want the latter, driven by curiosity and his emotional disposition, to feel invited to a physical commitment. Transformations will result from meetings with the public. Press only better illustrates the fact that it exists, that it is only "valid" in and through this interaction. "
A reredos of Corsham Stone, representing the Last Supper, was erected behind the altar of St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, Armagh, in 1903.
St St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, Armagh (Irish: Ardeaglais Phádraig, Ard Mhacha) is the seat of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Diocese of Armagh. Although the origins of the site are as a 5th century Irish stone monastery, said to have been founded by St. Patrick, and there has been a significant church on the site since, its present appearance largely dates from Lewis Nockalls Cottingham’s restoration in the years after 1834, although the fabric of Primate O’Scanlan’s 1268 building remains. Over the centuries, the church on the site has been at least partially destroyed and rebuilt 17 times.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the cathedral was the seat of the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and one of the most important churches in Gaelic Ireland. With the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, the cathedral was taken over by the Church of Ireland.
Following Catholic emancipation in the 19th century, a new Catholic cathedral was built in Armagh, also called St Patrick’s Cathedral, on another hilltop half a kilometre away.
Evidence suggests that the hilltop was originally a pagan sanctuary.
By the 7th century, it had become the most important monastery and monastic school in the north of Ireland, and monastic settlement grew up around it. Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, visited Armagh in 1004, acknowledging it as the head cathedral of Ireland and bestowing it a large sum of gold. Brian was buried at Armagh cathedral after his death at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Armagh’s claim to the primacy of Ireland was formally acknowledged at the Synod of Ráth Breasail in 1111.
The cathedral was renovated and restored under Dean Eoghan McCawell (1505–1549), having suffered from a devastating fire in 1511 and being in poor shape. Soon after his death the cathedral was described by Lord Chancellor Cusack as “one of the fairest and best churches in Ireland”. However, by the end of the Nine Years’ War which devastated Ulster between 1593 and 1603, Armagh lay in ruins.
Following the Nine Years’ War, Armagh came under English control and the town began to be settled by Protestants from Britain, as part of the Plantation of Ulster. During the Irish Rebellion of 1641, many Protestant settlers fled to Armagh cathedral for safety. After negotiations with the besieged settlers, Catholic rebels occupied the town until May 1642.
As mentioned above, the cathedral largely owes its current appearance to a rebuilding between 1834 and 1840 by Archbishop Lord John George Beresford and the architect Lewis Nockalls Cottingham. The fabric remains that of the mediaeval building but much restored. While Cottingham was heavy-handed in his restoration, the researches of T. G. F. Patterson and Janet Myles in the late twentieth century have shown the restoration to have been notably antiquarian for its time. The tracery of the nave windows in particular are careful restorations as is the copy of the font. The capital decoration of the two westernmost pillars of the nave (either side of the West Door internal porch) are mediaeval as are the bulk of the external gargoyle carvings (some resited) of the parapet of the Eastern Arm. Cottingham’s intention of retaining the richly cusped West Door with flanking canopied niches was over-ruled. Subsequent restorations have more radically altered the internal proportions of the mediaeval building, proportions which Cottingham had retained.
Many other Celtic and mediaeval carvings are to be seen within the cathedral which is also rich in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sculpture. There are works by Francis Leggatt Chantrey, Louis-François Roubiliac, John Michael Rysbrack, Carlo Marochetti and others.
John De Andrea American 1941 –
Self-Portrait with Sculpture, 1980
Polyvinyl, polychromed in oil
While recognizable as a modern iteration of the Pygmalion myth, this female sculpture is animated less by the sculptor’s apparent desire than by the illusionistic application of layers of paint, gradually suffusing her with life color. The internalized gaze of the artist/sculptor is undistracted beyond the nude presence of the female figure. In place of an erotic charge between the two figures, the Galatea-like model sits expectantly for the artist to complete the task, while De Andrea acknowledges the primacy of skin pigment in enlivening the figure through the presence of loaded brushes in his hand.
Collection of Foster Goldstrom
From the placard: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art , The Breuer
Like Life Sculpture, Color, And The Body
Upper Street, Islington, is an agreeable corner of "outer inner" London, where a tiny something of the capital's villages endures. Perhaps "corner" is an unsuitable word as Upper Street is actually part of the A1, known, in a more heroic age, as the Great North Road. I'm not sure where in central London the A1 starts: in my Philip's Street Atlas it is last marked as such at St Martin's le Grand, north of St Paul's, but perhaps it continues to the Bank, or the north end of London Bridge. The bridge itself, I note, is part of the A3. Of course, in the motorway age the "A" routes have forfeited their primacy and I can think of many that have become mere back roads. The snap was taken in July 2011 with my Rheinmetall Welta Weltax, probably manufactured in the 1950s. I have newer, better cameras, but it has a Zeiss Tessar lens and, unusually, retains its 6X4½cm mask. Equally unusually, for an old camera, all the shutter speeds are spot-on. I don't use it often, but it is always a pleasure and I have a half-used film in it at the moment.
castelvecchio museum, verona, italy. 1956-1973
area di cangrande della scala, 1961-1964
architect: carlo scarpa, 1906-1978
I am going to run through a few photos from three study trips where I was able to join my students in discovering some of our finest modern architecture. trying to make sense of the masters with a group of your future colleagues is just about the most fun a grown man can have while still being paid - even if the wages offered by the academy border on the symbolic.
the first photo is a crazy vertical composite made from some six or eight individual shots. the problem of how to portray the complex spaces of carlo scarpa seems to call for the unreasonable. this is particularly true of the area di cangrande della scala, the space around the gothic equestrian statue that scarpa made the centre piece of his museum.
if scarpa's work is characterised by his surgical interventions in the historical fabric of the veneto, we are here looking at a complete amputation. within its defensive walls, the castelvecchio - literally the old castle - held a modern wing. modern by italian standards, that is, since this early nineteenth-century structure would be considered historic anywhere else. yet, carlo scarpa managed to convince the authorities to let him tear down a full bay of the building and, not least, its monumental exterior staircase.
we are looking at the scar tissue of the amputation here: the bridges and enigmatic modernist structures inserted into the void, scarpa had created for himself. it is one of the most celebrated spaces of 20th-century museum building, but should perhaps be one of the most controversial for the sheer violence imparted by its architect.
we all know the solid reasons scarpa gave for the demolition: how the old moat was found under the grand staircase, how an ancient gate turned up, how important historical layers were revealed. but tellingly, scarpa had already decided to tear down parts of the 19th-century building before these discoveries were made. in fact, he had originally suggested removing a similar length of it at the other end, where no moat or gate would have been uncovered.
ascribing reasonable causes to the unreasonable, ie. rationalising, is central to creative work. it is how we form layers of meaning around solutions that were at first only intuited. as architects, spending large sums of other people's money, we are forced to be quite blunt and literal in the reasons we give for our proposals. yet the process by which meaning is arrived at, leaves our work as open to interpretation as if it had been poetry.
leaving aside all reasonable causes, all rationalising, I see scarpa establishing a hierarchy in which the medieval parts of the castle and scarpa's own modern additions gain primacy over the nineteenth-century buildings. it is a power game of sorts, and scarpa turns out to share the prejudices of the early modern architects he so admired.
I see him sharing their distaste for nineteenth-century architecture, and I think of the strange and disjunctive space he created through demolition as a distant relative of le corbusier's plan voisin of 1922 in which the swiss master famously proposed to replace central paris with glass skyscrapers.
yet, where le corbusier offered us the utopian promise of technological perfection, scarpa made a ruin of the building he had been asked to restore. there were no utopian promises left to be made for carlo scarpa, who had lived through fascism and the world war, only the poetry of our european heritage laid bare.
it is a poetry which recognises loss and decay, and which reminds us of john ruskin's profound and profoundly disturbing discovery that buildings must be allowed to die their own slow deaths if they are to stay authentic.
Rudolf Steiner
Steiner um 1905.jpg
BornRudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner
27 (25?) February 1861
Murakirály, Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (now Donji Kraljevec, Croatia)
Died30 March 1925 (aged 64)
Dornach, Switzerland
Alma materVienna Institute of Technology
University of Rostock (PhD, 1891)
Spouse(s)
Anna Eunicke (1899–1911)
Marie Steiner-von Sivers (1914–1925)
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolMonism
Holism in science
Goethean science
Anthroposophy
Main interests
Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, esotericism, Christianity
Notable ideas
Anthroposophy, anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, spiritual science, Waldorf education, holism in science
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Steiner Seven Apocalyptical Seals Transparent.png
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Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner (27 (or 25) February 1861[5] – 30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist.[6][7] Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism.[8]
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality.[9] His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,[10]:291 differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts (developing a new artistic form, eurythmy) and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts.[11] In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked to establish various practical endeavors, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture,[12] and anthroposophical medicine.[13]
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe's world view, in which "Thinking… is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas."[14] A consistent thread that runs from his earliest philosophical phase through his later spiritual orientation is the goal of demonstrating that there are no essential limits to human knowledge.[15]
Contents
1Biography
1.1Childhood and education
1.2Early spiritual experiences
1.3Writer and philosopher
1.4Theosophical Society
1.5Anthroposophical Society and its cultural activities
1.6Political engagement and social agenda
1.7Attacks, illness, and death
1.8Spiritual research
1.9Esoteric schools
2Breadth of activity
2.1Education
2.2Biodynamic agriculture
2.3Anthroposophical medicine
2.4Social reform
2.5Architecture and visual arts
2.6Performing arts
3Philosophical ideas
3.1Goethean science
3.2Knowledge and freedom
3.3Spiritual science
3.4Steiner and Christianity
3.4.1Christ and human evolution
3.4.2Divergence from conventional Christian thought
3.4.3The Christian Community
4Reception
4.1Scientism
4.2Race and ethnicity
4.2.1Judaism
5Writings (selection)
6See also
7References
8Further reading
9External links
Biography[edit]
Childhood and education[edit]
The house where Rudolf Steiner was born, in present-day Croatia
Steiner's father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829–1910), left a position as a gamekeeper[16] in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, northeast Lower Austria to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Franziska Blie (1834 Horn – 1918, Horn), a marriage for which the Count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf's birth was stationed in Murakirály (Kraljevec) in the Muraköz region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (present-day Donji Kraljevec in the Međimurje region of northernmost Croatia). In the first two years of Rudolf's life, the family moved twice, first to Mödling, near Vienna, and then, through the promotion of his father to stationmaster, to Pottschach, located in the foothills of the eastern Austrian Alps in Lower Austria.[13]
Steiner entered the village school, but following a disagreement between his father and the schoolmaster, he was briefly educated at home. In 1869, when Steiner was eight years old, the family moved to the village of Neudörfl and in October 1872 Steiner proceeded from the village school there to the realschule in Wiener Neustadt.[17]:Chap. 2
Rudolf Steiner, graduation photo from secondary school
In 1879, the family moved to Inzersdorf to enable Steiner to attend the Vienna Institute of Technology,[18] where he enrolled in courses in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy and audited courses in literature and philosophy, on an academic scholarship from 1879 to 1883, at the end of which time he withdrew from the Institute without graduating.[2]:122,443,446,456,503[19]:29 In 1882, one of Steiner's teachers, Karl Julius Schröer,[17]:Chap. 3 suggested Steiner's name to Joseph Kürschner, chief editor of a new edition of Goethe's works,[20] who asked Steiner to become the edition's natural science editor,[21] a truly astonishing opportunity for a young student without any form of academic credentials or previous publications.[19]:43
Before attending the Vienna Institute of Technology, Steiner had studied Kant, Fichte and Schelling.[22]
Early spiritual experiences[edit]
Rudolf Steiner as 21-year-old student (1882)
When he was nine years old, Steiner believed that he saw the spirit of an aunt who had died in a far-off town asking him to help her at a time when neither he nor his family knew of the woman's death.[23] Steiner later related that as a child he felt "that one must carry the knowledge of the spiritual world within oneself after the fashion of geometry ... [for here] one is permitted to know something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences. In this feeling I found the justification for the spiritual world that I experienced ... I confirmed for myself by means of geometry the feeling that I must speak of a world 'which is not seen'."[17]
Steiner believed that at the age of 15 he had gained a complete understanding of the concept of time, which he considered to be the precondition of spiritual clairvoyance.[22] At 21, on the train between his home village and Vienna, Steiner met an herb gatherer, Felix Kogutzki, who spoke about the spiritual world "as one who had his own experience therein".[17]:39–40[24] Kogutzki conveyed to Steiner a knowledge of nature that was non-academic and spiritual.
Writer and philosopher[edit]
In 1888, as a result of his work for the Kürschner edition of Goethe's works, Steiner was invited to work as an editor at the Goethe archives in Weimar. Steiner remained with the archive until 1896. As well as the introductions for and commentaries to four volumes of Goethe's scientific writings, Steiner wrote two books about Goethe's philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886),[25] which Steiner regarded as the epistemological foundation and justification for his later work,[26] and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897).[27] During this time he also collaborated in complete editions of the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and the writer Jean Paul and wrote numerous articles for various journals.
Rudolf Steiner around 1891/92, etching by Otto Fröhlich
In 1891, Steiner received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock, for his dissertation discussing Fichte's concept of the ego,[10][28] submitted to Heinrich von Stein, whose Seven Books of Platonism Steiner esteemed.[17]:Chap. 14 Steiner's dissertation was later published in expanded form as Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom, with a dedication to Eduard von Hartmann.[29] Two years later, he published Die Philosophie der Freiheit (The Philosophy of Freedom or The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—Steiner's preferred English title) (1894), an exploration of epistemology and ethics that suggested a way for humans to become spiritually free beings. Steiner later spoke of this book as containing implicitly, in philosophical form, the entire content of what he later developed explicitly as anthroposophy.[30]
Marie Steiner 1903
In 1896, Steiner declined an offer from Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche to help organize the Nietzsche archive in Naumburg. Her brother by that time was non compos mentis. Förster-Nietzsche introduced Steiner into the presence of the catatonic philosopher; Steiner, deeply moved, subsequently wrote the book Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom.[31] Steiner later related that:
My first acquaintance with Nietzsche's writings belongs to the year 1889. Previous to that I had never read a line of his. Upon the substance of my ideas as these find expression in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Nietzsche's thought had not the least influence....Nietzsche's ideas of the 'eternal recurrence' and of 'Übermensch' remained long in my mind. For in these was reflected that which a personality must feel concerning the evolution and essential being of humanity when this personality is kept back from grasping the spiritual world by the restricted thought in the philosophy of nature characterizing the end of the 19th century....What attracted me particularly was that one could read Nietzsche without coming upon anything which strove to make the reader a 'dependent' of Nietzsche's.[17]:Chap. 18
In 1897, Steiner left the Weimar archives and moved to Berlin. He became part owner of, chief editor of, and an active contributor to the literary journal Magazin für Literatur, where he hoped to find a readership sympathetic to his philosophy. Many subscribers were alienated by Steiner's unpopular support of Émile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair[32] and the journal lost more subscribers when Steiner published extracts from his correspondence with anarchist John Henry Mackay.[32] Dissatisfaction with his editorial style eventually led to his departure from the magazine.
In 1899, Steiner married Anna Eunicke; the couple separated several years later. Anna died in 1911.
Theosophical Society[edit]
Main article: Rudolf Steiner and the Theosophical Society
Rudolf Steiner in Munich with Annie Besant, leader of the Theosophical Society. Photo from 1907
In 1899, Steiner published an article, "Goethe's Secret Revelation", discussing the esoteric nature of Goethe's fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This article led to an invitation by the Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak to a gathering of Theosophists on the subject of Nietzsche. Steiner continued speaking regularly to the members of the Theosophical Society, becoming the head of its newly constituted German section in 1902 without ever formally joining the society.[10][33] It was also in connection with this society that Steiner met and worked with Marie von Sivers, who became his second wife in 1914. By 1904, Steiner was appointed by Annie Besant to be leader of the Theosophical Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. In 1904, Eliza, the wife of Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, became one of his favourite scholars[34]. Through Eliza, Steiner met Helmuth, who served as the Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914[35].
In contrast to mainstream Theosophy, Steiner sought to build a Western approach to spirituality based on the philosophical and mystical traditions of European culture. The German Section of the Theosophical Society grew rapidly under Steiner's leadership as he lectured throughout much of Europe on his spiritual science. During this period, Steiner maintained an original approach, replacing Madame Blavatsky's terminology with his own, and basing his spiritual research and teachings upon the Western esoteric and philosophical tradition. This and other differences, in particular Steiner's vocal rejection of Leadbeater and Besant's claim that Jiddu Krishnamurti was the vehicle of a new Maitreya, or world teacher,[36] led to a formal split in 1912/13,[10] when Steiner and the majority of members of the German section of the Theosophical Society broke off to form a new group, the Anthroposophical Society. Steiner took the name "Anthroposophy" from the title of a work of the Austrian philosopher Robert von Zimmermann, published in Vienna in 1856.[37] Despite his departure from the Theosophical Society, Steiner maintained his interest in Theosophy throughout his life.[8]
Anthroposophical Society and its cultural activities[edit]
RudolfSteiner.jpeg
The Anthroposophical Society grew rapidly. Fueled by a need to find an artistic home for their yearly conferences, which included performances of plays written by Edouard Schuré and Steiner, the decision was made to build a theater and organizational center. In 1913, construction began on the first Goetheanum building, in Dornach, Switzerland. The building, designed by Steiner, was built to a significant part by volunteers who offered craftsmanship or simply a will to learn new skills. Once World War I started in 1914, the Goetheanum volunteers could hear the sound of cannon fire beyond the Swiss border, but despite the war, people from all over Europe worked peaceably side by side on the building's construction. Steiner moved from Berlin to Dornach in 1913 and lived there to the end of his life.[38]
Steiner's lecture activity expanded enormously with the end of the war. Most importantly, from 1919 on Steiner began to work with other members of the society to found numerous practical institutions and activities, including the first Waldorf school, founded that year in Stuttgart, Germany. At the same time, the Goetheanum developed as a wide-ranging cultural centre. On New Year's Eve, 1922/1923, the building burned to the ground; contemporary police reports indicate arson as the probable cause.[13]:752[39]:796 Steiner immediately began work designing a second Goetheanum building - this time made of concrete instead of wood - which was completed in 1928, three years after his death.
At a "Foundation Meeting" for members held at the Dornach center during Christmas, 1923, Steiner spoke of laying a new Foundation Stone for the society in the hearts of his listeners. At the meeting, a new "General Anthroposophical Society" was established with a new executive board. At this meeting, Steiner also founded a School of Spiritual Science, intended as an "organ of initiative" for research and study and as "the 'soul' of the Anthroposophical Society".[40] This School, which was led by Steiner, initially had sections for general anthroposophy, education, medicine, performing arts (eurythmy, speech, drama and music), the literary arts and humanities, mathematics, astronomy, science, and visual arts. Later sections were added for the social sciences, youth and agriculture.[41][42][43] The School of Spiritual Science included meditative exercises given by Steiner.
Political engagement and social agenda[edit]
Steiner became a well-known and controversial public figure during and after World War I. In response to the catastrophic situation in post-war Germany, he proposed extensive social reforms through the establishment of a Threefold Social Order in which the cultural, political and economic realms would be largely independent. Steiner argued that a fusion of the three realms had created the inflexibility that had led to catastrophes such as World War I. In connection with this, he promoted a radical solution in the disputed area of Upper Silesia, claimed by both Poland and Germany. His suggestion that this area be granted at least provisional independence led to his being publicly accused of being a traitor to Germany.[44]
Steiner opposed Wilson's proposal to create new European nations based around ethnic groups, which he saw as opening the door to rampant nationalism. Steiner proposed as an alternative "'social territories' with democratic institutions that were accessible to all inhabitants of a territory whatever their origin while the needs of the various ethnicities would be met by independent cultural institutions."[45]
Attacks, illness, and death[edit]
The National Socialist German Workers Party gained strength in Germany after the First World War. In 1919, a political theorist of this movement, Dietrich Eckart, attacked Steiner and suggested that he was a Jew.[46] In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including accusations that he was a tool of the Jews,[47] while other nationalist extremists in Germany called for a "war against Steiner". That same year, Steiner warned against the disastrous effects it would have for Central Europe if the National Socialists came to power.[46]:8 In 1922 a lecture Steiner was giving in Munich was disrupted when stink bombs were let off and the lights switched out, while people rushed the stage apparently attempting to attack Steiner, who exited safely through a back door.[48][49] Unable to guarantee his safety, Steiner's agents cancelled his next lecture tour.[32]:193[50] The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin, saying that if those responsible for the attempted coup [Hitler and others] came to power in Germany, it would no longer be possible for him to enter the country.[51]
From 1923 on, Steiner showed signs of increasing frailness and illness. He nonetheless continued to lecture widely, and even to travel; especially towards the end of this time, he was often giving two, three or even four lectures daily for courses taking place concurrently. Many of these lectures focused on practical areas of life such as education.[52]
Steiner's gravestone at the Goetheanum
Increasingly ill, he held his last lecture in late September, 1924. He continued work on his autobiography during the last months of his life; he died on 30 March 1925.
Spiritual research[edit]
Steiner first began speaking publicly about spiritual experiences and phenomena in his 1899 lectures to the Theosophical Society. By 1901 he had begun to write about spiritual topics, initially in the form of discussions of historical figures such as the mystics of the Middle Ages. By 1904 he was expressing his own understanding of these themes in his essays and books, while continuing to refer to a wide variety of historical sources.
"A world of spiritual perception is discussed in a number of writings which I have published since this book appeared. The Philosophy of Freedom forms the philosophical basis for these later writings. For it tries to show that the experience of thinking, rightly understood, is in fact an experience of spirit." (Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Consequences of Monism)
Steiner aimed to apply his training in mathematics, science, and philosophy to produce rigorous, verifiable presentations of those experiences.[53] He believed that through freely chosen ethical disciplines and meditative training, anyone could develop the ability to experience the spiritual world, including the higher nature of oneself and others.[32] Steiner believed that such discipline and training would help a person to become a more moral, creative and free individual – free in the sense of being capable of actions motivated solely by love.[54] His philosophical ideas were affected by Franz Brentano,[32] with whom he had studied,[55] as well as by Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Goethe's phenomenological approach to science.[32][56][57]
Steiner followed Wilhelm Dilthey in using the term Geisteswissenschaft, usually translated as "spiritual science".[58] Steiner used the term to describe a discipline treating the spirit as something actual and real, starting from the premise that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind what is sense-perceptible.[59] He proposed that psychology, history, and the humanities generally were based on the direct grasp of an ideal reality,[60] and required close attention to the particular period and culture which provided the distinctive character of religious qualities in the course of the evolution of consciousness. In contrast to William James' pragmatic approach to religious and psychic experience, which emphasized its idiosyncratic character, Steiner focused on ways such experience can be rendered more intelligible and integrated into human life.[61]
Steiner proposed that an understanding of reincarnation and karma was necessary to understand psychology[62] and that the form of external nature would be more comprehensible as a result of insight into the course of karma in the evolution of humanity.[63] Beginning in 1910, he described aspects of karma relating to health, natural phenomena and free will, taking the position that a person is not bound by his or her karma, but can transcend this through actively taking hold of one's own nature and destiny.[64] In an extensive series of lectures from February to September 1924, Steiner presented further research on successive reincarnations of various individuals and described the techniques he used for karma research.[52][65]
Esoteric schools[edit]
See also: Rudolf Steiner's exercises for spiritual development
Steiner was founder and leader of the following:
His independent Esoteric School of the Theosophical Society, founded in 1904. This school continued after the break with Theosophy but was disbanded at the start of World War I.
A lodge called Mystica Aeterna within the Masonic Order of Memphis and Mizraim, which Steiner led from 1906 until around 1914. Steiner added to the Masonic rite a number of Rosicrucian references.[66]
The School of Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society, founded in 1923 as a further development of his earlier Esoteric School. This was originally constituted with a general section and seven specialized sections for education, literature, performing arts, natural sciences, medicine, visual arts, and astronomy.[41][43][67] Steiner gave members of the School the first Lesson for guidance into the esoteric work in February 1924.[68] Though Steiner intended to develop three "classes" of this school, only the first of these was developed in his lifetime (and continues today). An authentic text of the written records on which the teaching of the First Class was based was published in 1992.[69]
Breadth of activity[edit]
After the First World War, Steiner became active in a wide variety of cultural contexts. He founded a number of schools, the first of which was known as the Waldorf school,[70] which later evolved into a worldwide school network. He also founded a system of organic agriculture, now known as biodynamic agriculture, which was one of the very first forms of, and has contributed significantly to the development of, modern organic farming.[71] His work in medicine led to the development of a broad range of complementary medications and supportive artistic and biographic therapies.[72] Numerous homes for children and adults with developmental disabilities based on his work (including those of the Camphill movement) are found in Africa, Europe, and North America.[73] His paintings and drawings influenced Joseph Beuys and other modern artists. His two Goetheanum buildings have been widely cited as masterpieces of modern architecture,[74][75][76][77][78] and other anthroposophical architects have contributed thousands of buildings to the modern scene.[79] One of the first institutions to practice ethical banking was an anthroposophical bank working out of Steiner's ideas; other anthroposophical social finance institutions have since been founded.
Steiner's literary estate is correspondingly broad. Steiner's writings, published in about forty volumes, include books, essays, four plays ('mystery dramas'), mantric verse, and an autobiography. His collected lectures, making up another approximately 300 volumes, discuss an extremely wide range of themes. Steiner's drawings, chiefly illustrations done on blackboards during his lectures, are collected in a separate series of 28 volumes. Many publications have covered his architectural legacy and sculptural work.
Education[edit]
The Waldorf school in Verrières-le-Buisson (France)
Main article: Waldorf education
As a young man, Steiner was a private tutor and a lecturer on history for the Berlin Arbeiterbildungsschule,[80] an educational initiative for working class adults.[81] Soon thereafter, he began to articulate his ideas on education in public lectures,[82] culminating in a 1907 essay on The Education of the Child in which he described the major phases of child development which formed the foundation of his approach to education.[83] His conception of education was influenced by the Herbartian pedagogy prominent in Europe during the late nineteenth century,[80]:1362, 1390ff[82] though Steiner criticized Herbart for not sufficiently recognizing the importance of educating the will and feelings as well as the intellect.[84]
In 1919, Emil Molt invited him to lecture to his workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart. Out of these lectures came a new school, the Waldorf school. In 1922, Steiner presented these ideas at a conference called for this purpose in Oxford by Professor Millicent Mackenzie. He subsequently presented a teacher training course at Torquay in 1924 at an Anthroposophy Summer School organised by Eleanor Merry.[85] The Oxford Conference and the Torquay teacher training led to the founding of the first Waldorf schools in Britain.[86] During Steiner's lifetime, schools based on his educational principles were also founded in Hamburg, Essen, The Hague and London; there are now more than 1000 Waldorf schools worldwide.
Biodynamic agriculture[edit]
Main article: Biodynamic agriculture
In 1924, a group of farmers concerned about the future of agriculture requested Steiner's help. Steiner responded with a lecture series on an ecological and sustainable approach to agriculture that increased soil fertility without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.[12] Steiner's agricultural ideas promptly spread and were put into practice internationally[87] and biodynamic agriculture is now practiced in Europe,[88] North America, South America[89], Africa[90], Asia[88] and Australasia.[91][92][93]
A central aspect of biodynamics is that the farm as a whole is seen as an organism, and therefore should be a largely self-sustaining system, producing its own manure and animal feed. Plant or animal disease is seen as a symptom of problems in the whole organism. Steiner also suggested timing such agricultural activities as sowing, weeding, and harvesting to utilize the influences on plant growth of the moon and planets; and the application of natural materials prepared in specific ways to the soil, compost, and crops, with the intention of engaging non-physical beings and elemental forces. He encouraged his listeners to verify his suggestions empirically, as he had not yet done.[91]
Anthroposophical medicine[edit]
Main article: Anthroposophical medicine
From the late 1910s, Steiner was working with doctors to create a new approach to medicine. In 1921, pharmacists and physicians gathered under Steiner's guidance to create a pharmaceutical company called Weleda which now distributes natural medical products worldwide. At around the same time, Dr. Ita Wegman founded a first anthroposophic medical clinic (now the Ita Wegman Clinic) in Arlesheim.
Social reform[edit]
Main article: Threefold Social Order
For a period after World War I, Steiner was active as a lecturer on social reform. A petition expressing his basic social ideas was widely circulated and signed by many cultural figures of the day, including Hermann Hesse.
In Steiner's chief book on social reform, Toward Social Renewal, he suggested that the cultural, political and economic spheres of society need to work together as consciously cooperating yet independent entities, each with a particular task: political institutions should establish political equality and protect human rights; cultural institutions should nurture the free and unhindered development of science, art, education and religion; and economic institutions should enable producers, distributors and consumers to cooperate to provide efficiently for society's needs.[94] He saw such a division of responsibility, which he called the Threefold Social Order, as a vital task which would take up consciously the historical trend toward the mutual independence of these three realms. Steiner also gave suggestions for many specific social reforms.
Steiner proposed what he termed a "fundamental law" of social life:
The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others.
— Steiner, The Fundamental Social Law[95]
He expressed this in the motto:[95]
The healthy social life is found
When in the mirror of each human soul
The whole community finds its reflection,
And when in the community
The virtue of each one is living.
Architecture and visual arts[edit]
First Goetheanum
Second Goetheanum
Detail of The Representative of Humanity
English sculptor Edith Maryon belonged to the innermost circle of founders of anthroposophy and was appointed to head the Section of Sculptural Arts at the Goetheanum.
Steiner designed 17 buildings, including the First and Second Goetheanums.[96] These two buildings, built in Dornach, Switzerland, were intended to house significant theater spaces as well as a "school for spiritual science".[97] Three of Steiner's buildings have been listed amongst the most significant works of modern architecture.[98]
His primary sculptural work is The Representative of Humanity (1922), a nine-meter high wood sculpture executed as a joint project with the sculptor Edith Maryon. This was intended to be placed in the first Goetheanum. It shows a central, free-standing Christ holding a balance between the beings of Lucifer and Ahriman, representing opposing tendencies of expansion and contraction.[99][100][101] It was intended to show, in conscious contrast to Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Christ as mute and impersonal such that the beings that approach him must judge themselves.[102] The sculpture is now on permanent display at the Goetheanum.
Steiner's blackboard drawings were unique at the time and almost certainly not originally intended as art works.[103] Josef Beuys' work, itself heavily influenced by Steiner, has led to the modern understanding of Steiner's drawings as artistic objects.[104]
Performing arts[edit]
See also: Eurythmy
Steiner wrote four mystery plays between 1909 and 1913: The Portal of Initiation, The Souls' Probation, The Guardian of the Threshold and The Soul's Awakening, modeled on the esoteric dramas of Edouard Schuré, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.[105] Steiner's plays continue to be performed by anthroposophical groups in various countries, most notably (in the original German) in Dornach, Switzerland and (in English translation) in Spring Valley, New York and in Stroud and Stourbridge in the U.K.
In collaboration with Marie von Sivers, Steiner also founded a new approach to acting, storytelling, and the recitation of poetry. His last public lecture course, given in 1924, was on speech and drama. The Russian actor, director, and acting coach Michael Chekhov based significant aspects of his method of acting on Steiner's work.[106][107]
Together with Marie von Sivers, Rudolf Steiner also developed the art of eurythmy, sometimes referred to as "visible speech and song". According to the principles of eurythmy, there are archetypal movements or gestures that correspond to every aspect of speech – the sounds (or phonemes), the rhythms, and the grammatical function – to every "soul quality" – joy, despair, tenderness, etc. – and to every aspect of music – tones, intervals, rhythms, and harmonies.
Philosophical ideas[edit]
Live through deeds of love, and let others live understanding their unique intentions: this is the fundamental principle of free human beings.
Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom. Chapter 9
Goethean science[edit]
See also: Goethean science
In his commentaries on Goethe's scientific works, written between 1884 and 1897, Steiner presented Goethe's approach to science as essentially phenomenological in nature, rather than theory- or model-based. He developed this conception further in several books, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (1886) and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897), particularly emphasizing the transformation in Goethe's approach from the physical sciences, where experiment played the primary role, to plant biology, where both accurate perception and imagination were required to find the biological archetypes (Urpflanze), and postulated that Goethe had sought but been unable to fully find the further transformation in scientific thinking necessary to properly interpret and understand the animal kingdom.[108] Steiner emphasized the role of evolutionary thinking in Goethe's discovery of the intermaxillary bone in human beings; Goethe expected human anatomy to be an evolutionary transformation of animal anatomy.[108] Steiner defended Goethe's qualitative description of color as arising synthetically from the polarity of light and darkness, in contrast to Newton's particle-based and analytic conception.
Particular organic forms can be evolved only from universal types, and every organic entity we experience must coincide with some one of these derivative forms of the type. Here the evolutionary method must replace the method of proof. We aim not to show that external conditions act upon one another in a certain way and thereby bring about a definite result, but that a particular form has developed under definite external conditions out of the type. This is the radical difference between inorganic and organic science.
— Rudolf Steiner, The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, Chapter XVI, "Organic Nature"
Knowledge and freedom[edit]
See also: Philosophy of Freedom
Steiner approached the philosophical questions of knowledge and freedom in two stages. In his dissertation, published in expanded form in 1892 as Truth and Knowledge, Steiner suggests that there is an inconsistency between Kant's philosophy, which posits that all knowledge is a representation of an essential verity inaccessible to human consciousness, and modern science, which assumes that all influences can be found in the sensory and mental world to which we have access. Steiner considered Kant's philosophy of an inaccessible beyond ("Jenseits-Philosophy") a stumbling block in achieving a satisfying philosophical viewpoint.[109]
Steiner postulates that the world is essentially an indivisible unity, but that our consciousness divides it into the sense-perceptible appearance, on the one hand, and the formal nature accessible to our thinking, on the other. He sees in thinking itself an element that can be strengthened and deepened sufficiently to penetrate all that our senses do not reveal to us. Steiner thus considered what appears to human experience as a division between the spiritual and natural worlds to be a conditioned result of the structure of our consciousness, which separates perception and thinking. These two faculties give us not two worlds, but two complementary views of the same world; neither has primacy and the two together are necessary and sufficient to arrive at a complete understanding of the world. In thinking about perception (the path of natural science) and perceiving the process of thinking (the path of spiritual training), it is possible to discover a hidden inner unity between the two poles of our experience.[54]:Chapter 4 Truth, for Steiner, is paradoxically both an objective discovery and yet "a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality."[110]
In the Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner further explores potentials within thinking: freedom, he suggests, can only be approached gradually with the aid of the creative activity of thinking. Thinking can be a free deed; in addition, it can liberate our will from its subservience to our instincts and drives. Free deeds, he suggests, are those for which we are fully conscious of the motive for our action; freedom is the spiritual activity of penetrating with consciousness our own nature and that of the world,[111] and the real activity of acting in full consciousness.[54]:133–4 This includes overcoming influences of both heredity and environment: "To be free is to be capable of thinking one's own thoughts – not the thoughts merely of the body, or of society, but thoughts generated by one's deepest, most original, most essential and spiritual self, one's individuality."[10]
Steiner affirms Darwin's and Haeckel's evolutionary perspectives but extended this beyond its materialistic consequences; he sees human consciousness, indeed, all human culture, as a product of natural evolution that transcends itself. For Steiner, nature becomes self-conscious in the human being. Steiner's description of the nature of human consciousness thus closely parallels that of Solovyov:[112]
Spiritual science[edit]
See also: Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner's exercises for spiritual development
Rudolf Steiner 1900
In his earliest works, Steiner already spoke of the "natural and spiritual worlds" as a unity.[32] From 1900 on, he began lecturing about concrete details of the spiritual world(s), culminating in the publication in 1904 of the first of several systematic presentations, his Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos. As a starting point for the book Steiner took a quotation from Goethe, describing the method of natural scientific observation,[113] while in the Preface he made clear that the line of thought taken in this book led to the same goal as that in his earlier work, The Philosophy of Freedom.[114]
In the years 1903–1908 Steiner maintained the magazine "Lucifer-Gnosis" and published in it essays on topics such as initiation, reincarnation and karma, and knowledge of the supernatural world.[115] Some of these were later collected and published as books, such as How to Know Higher Worlds (1904/5) and Cosmic Memory. The book An Outline of Esoteric Science was published in 1910. Important themes include:
the human being as body, soul and spirit;
the path of spiritual development;
spiritual influences on world-evolution and history; and
reincarnation and karma.
Steiner emphasized that there is an objective natural and spiritual world that can be known, and that perceptions of the spiritual world and incorporeal beings are, under conditions of training comparable to that required for the natural sciences, including self-discipline, replicable by multiple observers. It is on this basis that spiritual science is possible, with radically different epistemological foundations than those of natural science. He believed that natural science was correct in its methods but one-sided for exclusively focusing on sensory phenomena, while mysticism was vague in its methods, though seeking to explore the inner and spiritual life. Anthroposophy was meant to apply the systematic methods of the former to the content of the latter[116][117]
For Steiner, the cosmos is permeated and continually transformed by the creative activity of non-physical processes and spiritual beings. For the human being to become conscious of the objective reality of these processes and beings, it is necessary to creatively enact and reenact, within, their creative activity. Thus objective spiritual knowledge always entails creative inner activity.[32] Steiner articulated three stages of any creative deed:[54]:Pt II, Chapter 1
Moral intuition: the ability to discover or, preferably, develop valid ethical principles;
Moral imagination: the imaginative transformation of such principles into a concrete intention applicable to the particular situation (situational ethics); and
Moral technique: the realization of the intended transformation, depending on a mastery of practical skills.
Steiner termed his work from this period onwards Anthroposophy. He emphasized that the spiritual path he articulated builds upon and supports individual freedom and independent judgment; for the results of spiritual research to be appropriately presented in a modern context they must be in a form accessible to logical understanding, so that those who do not have access to the spiritual experiences underlying anthroposophical research can make independent evaluations of the latter's results.[54] Spiritual training is to support what Steiner considered the overall purpose of human evolution, the development of the mutually interdependent qualities of love and freedom.[10]
Steiner and Christianity[edit]
In 1899 Steiner experienced what he described as a life-transforming inner encounter with the being of Christ; previously he had little or no relation to Christianity in any form. Then and thereafter, his relationship to Christianity remained entirely founded upon personal experience, and thus both non-denominational and strikingly different from conventional religious forms.[10] Steiner was then 38, and the experience of meeting the Christ occurred after a tremendous inner struggle. To use Steiner's own words, the "experience culminated in my standing in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge."[118]
Christ and human evolution[edit]
Steiner describes Christ as the unique pivot and meaning of earth's evolutionary processes and human history, redeeming the Fall from Paradise.[119] He understood the Christ as a being that unifies and inspires all religions, not belonging to a particular religious faith. To be "Christian" is, for Steiner, a search for balance between polarizing extremes[119]:102–3 and the ability to manifest love in freedom.[10]
Central principles of his understanding include:
The being of Christ is central to all religions, though called by different names by each.
Every religion is valid and true for the time and cultural context in which it was born.
Historical forms of Christianity need to be transformed in our times in order to meet the ongoing evolution of humanity.
In Steiner's esoteric cosmology, the spiritual development of humanity is interwoven in and inseparable from the cosmological development of the universe. Continuing the evolution that led to humanity being born out of the natural world, the Christ being brings an impulse enabling human consciousness of the forces that act creatively, but unconsciously, in nature.[120]
Divergence from conventional Christian thought[edit]
Steiner's views of Christianity diverge from conventional Christian thought in key places, and include gnostic elements.[108] However, unlike many gnostics, Steiner affirms the unique and actual physical Incarnation of Christ in Jesus at the beginning of the Christian era.
One of the central points of divergence with conventional Christian thought is found in Steiner's views on reincarnation and karma.
Steiner also posited two different Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ: one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew; the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke.[94] He references in this regard the fact that the genealogies in these two gospels list twenty-six (Luke) to forty-one (Matthew) completely different ancestors for the generations from David to Jesus. See Genealogy of Jesus for alternative explanations of this radical divergence.
Steiner's view of the second coming of Christ is also unusual. He suggested that this would not be a physical reappearance, but rather, meant that the Christ being would become manifest in non-physical form, in the "etheric realm" – i.e. visible to spiritual vision and apparent in community life – for increasing numbers of people, beginning around the year 1933. He emphasized that the future would require humanity to recognize this Spirit of Love in all its genuine forms, regardless of how this is named. He also warned that the traditional name, "Christ", might be used, yet the true essence of this Being of Love ignored.[108]
The Christian Community[edit]
In the 1920s, Steiner was approached by Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a Lutheran pastor with a congregation in Berlin, who asked if it was possible to create a more modern form of Christianity. Soon others joined Rittelmeyer – mostly Protestant pastors and theology students, but including several Roman Catholic priests. Steiner offered counsel on renewing the spiritual potency of the sacraments while emphasizing freedom of thought and a personal relationship to religious life. He envisioned a new synthesis of Catholic and Protestant approaches to religious life, terming this "modern, Johannine Christianity".[94]
The resulting movement for religious renewal became known as "The Christian Community". Its work is based on a free relationship to the Christ, without dogma or policies. Its priesthood, which is open to both men and women, is free to preach out of their own spiritual insights and creativity.
Steiner emphasized that the resulting movement for the renewal of Christianity was a personal gesture of help to a movement founded by Rittelmeyer and others independently of his anthroposophical work.[94] The distinction was important to Steiner because he sought with Anthroposophy to create a scientific, not faith-based, spirituality.[119] He recognized that for those who wished to find more traditional forms, however, a renewal of the traditional religions was also a vital need of the times.
Reception[edit]
See also: Anthroposophy § Reception
Steiner's work has influenced a broad range of notable personalities. These include philosophers Albert Schweitzer, Owen Barfield and Richard Tarnas;[32] writers Saul Bellow,[121] Andrej Belyj,[122][123][124] Michael Ende,[125] Selma Lagerlöf,[126] Edouard Schuré, David Spangler,[citation needed] and William Irwin Thompson;[32] child psychiatrist Eva Frommer;[127] economist Leonard Read;[128] artists Josef Beuys,[129] Wassily Kandinsky,[130][131] and Murray Griffin;[132] esotericist and educationalist George Trevelyan;[133] actor and acting teacher Michael Chekhov;[134] cinema director Andrei Tarkovsky;[135] composers Jonathan Harvey[136] and Viktor Ullmann;[137] and conductor Bruno Walter.[138] Olav Hammer, though sharply critical of esoteric movements generally, terms Steiner "arguably the most historically and philosophically sophisticated spokesperson of the Esoteric Tradition."[139]
Albert Schweitzer wrote that he and Steiner had in common that they had "taken on the life mission of working for the emergence of a true culture enlivened by the ideal of humanity and to encourage people to become truly thinking beings".[140]
Anthony Storr stated about Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy: "His belief system is so eccentric, so unsupported by evidence, so manifestly bizarre, that rational skeptics are bound to consider it delusional."[141]
Robert Todd Carroll has said of Steiner that "Some of his ideas on education – such as educating the handicapped in the mainstream – are worth considering, although his overall plan for developing the spirit and the soul rather than the intellect cannot be admired".[142] Steiner's translators have pointed out that his use of Geist includes both mind and spirit, however,[143] as the German term Geist can be translated equally properly in either way.[144]
The 150th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner's birth was marked by the first major retrospective exhibition of his art and work, 'Kosmos - Alchemy of the everyday'. Organized by Vitra Design Museum, the traveling exhibition presented many facets of Steiner's life and achievements, including his influence on architecture, furniture design, dance (Eurythmy), education, and agriculture (Biodynamic agriculture).[145] The exhibition opened in 2011 at the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany,[146]
Scientism[edit]
See also: Anthroposophy: Scientific basis
Olav Hammer has criticized as scientism Steiner's claim to use scientific methodology to investigate spiritual phenomena that were based upon his claims of clairvoyant experience.[139] Steiner regarded the observations of spiritual research as more dependable (and above all, consistent) than observations of physical reality. However, he did consider spiritual research to be fallible[2]:p. 618 and held the view that anyone capable of thinking logically was in a position to correct errors by spiritual researchers.[147]
Race and ethnicity[edit]
Steiner's work includes both universalist, humanist elements and historically influenced racial assumptions.[148] Due to the contrast and even contradictions between these elements, "whether a given reader interprets Anthroposophy as racist or not depends upon that reader's concerns".[149] Steiner considered that by dint of its shared language and culture, each people has a unique essence, which he called its soul or spirit.[139] He saw race as a physical manifestation of humanity's spiritual evolution, and at times discussed race in terms of complex hierarchies that were largely derived from 19th century biology, anthropology, philosophy and theosophy. However, he consistently and explicitly subordinated race, ethnicity, gender, and indeed all hereditary factors, to individual factors in development.[149] For Steiner, human individuality is centered in a person's unique biography, and he believed that an individual's experiences and development are not bound by a single lifetime or the qualities of the physical body.[33] More specifically:
Steiner occasionally characterized specific races, nations and ethnicities in ways that have been termed racist by critics.[150] This includes descriptions by him of certain races and ethnic groups as flowering, others as backward, or destined to degenerate or disappear.[149] He presented explicitly hierarchical views of the spiritual evolution of different races,[151] including—at times, and inconsistently—portraying the white race, European culture or Germanic culture as representing the high point of human evolution as of the early 20th century, although he did describe them as destined to be superseded by future cultures.[149]
Throughout his life Steiner consistently emphasized the core spiritual unity of all the world's peoples and sharply criticized racial prejudice. He articulated beliefs that the individual nature of any person stands higher than any racial, ethnic, national or religious affiliation.[13][94] His belief that race and ethnicity are transient and superficial, and not essential aspects of the individual,[149] was partly rooted in his conviction that each individual reincarnates in a variety of different peoples and races over successive lives, and that each of us thus bears within him or herself the heritage of many races and peoples.[149][152] Toward the end of his life, Steiner predicted that race will rapidly lose any remaining significance for future generations.[149] In Steiner's view, culture is universal, and explicitly not ethnically based; he saw Goethe and idealist philosophy in particular as the source of ideas that could be drawn upon by any culture, and he vehemently criticized imperialism.[153]
In the context of his ethical individualism, Steiner considered "race, folk, ethnicity and gender" to be general, describable categories into which individuals may choose to fit, but from which free human beings can and will liberate themselves.[33]
Judaism[edit]
During the years when Steiner was best known as a literary critic, he published a series of articles attacking various manifestations of antisemitism[154] and criticizing some of the most prominent anti-Semites of the time as "barbaric" and "enemies of culture".[155] On a number of occasions, however, Steiner suggested that Jewish cultural and social life had lost all contemporary relevance[156] and promoted full assimilation of the Jewish people into the nations in which they lived. This stance has come under severe criticism in recent years.[149]
Steiner was a critic of his contemporary Theodor Herzl's goal of a Zionist state, and indeed of any ethnically determined state, as he considered ethnicity to be an outmoded basis for social life and civic identity.[157]
Towards the end of Steiner's life and after his death, there were massive defamatory press attacks mounted on him by early National Socialist leaders (including Adolf Hitler) and other right-wing nationalists. These criticized Steiner's thought and anthroposophy as being incompatible with National Socialist racial ideology, and charged him of being influenced by his close connections with Jews and even that he himself was Jewish.[46][155]
In 192 BC, the Romans conquered the area and founded the outpost Toletum. Due to its iron ore deposits, Toledo developed into an important settlement. Since the first barbarian invasions, the ancient walls were reinforced. In 411 the Alans and later the Visigoths conquered the city. Toledo was the capital of the Visigoths' empire from about 531 to 711.
The Moors conquered the place in 712. Toledo experienced its heyday during the period of Moorish rule as Ṭulayṭula during the Caliphate of Córdoba until its conquest by Alfonso VI in 1085, after a four-year siege. In 1088, only a few years after the conquest, Archbishop Bernard of Toledo obtained confirmation from Pope Urban II that Toledo should hold the "primatus in totis Hispaniarum regnis" (primacy in all the kingdoms of the Iberian dominions). The Archbishop of Toledo is still today the Primate of the Catholic Church of Spain.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Toledo school of translators translated ancient philosophical writings (Plato, Aristotle) that had been translated from Greek into Arabic, but also genuinely Arabic writings from the fields of astronomy, mathematics, Islamic religion and theology into Latin.
After the conquest by Alfonso VI, Toledo became the residence of the Kingdom of Castile in 1087 and remained the capital of Spain until 1561.
In the 12th century, more than 12,000 Jews lived in Toledo.
According to an inscription, this synagogue was built in 1180, but it probably only acquired its current appearance in the 13th century. It is considered the oldest synagogue building in Europe still standing. After the attacks on the Jewish quarter in 1355 and 1391 and the emigration of many Jews, it was converted into a Catholic church in 1405.
The synagogue is a Mudéjar construction, created by Moorish architects. But it can also be considered one of the finest examples of Almohad architecture. The plain white interior walls as well as the use of brick and of pillars instead of columns are characteristics of Almohad architecture.