Bison, symbolic animals of the Great Plains, are often mistakenly called buffaloes. By any name, they are formidable beasts and the heaviest land animals in North America.

 

Bison stand some 5 to 6.5 feet (1.5 to 2 meters) tall at the shoulder, and can tip the scales at over a ton (907 kilograms). Despite their massive size, bison are quick on their feet. When the need arises they can run at speeds up to 40 miles (65 kilometers) an hour. They sport curved, sharp horns that may grow to be two feet (61 centimeters) long.

 

These large grazers feed on plains grasses, herbs, shrubs, and twigs. They regurgitate their food and chew it as cud before final digestion.

 

Females (cows) and adult males (bulls) generally live in small, separate bands and come together in very large herds during the summer mating season. Males battle for mating primacy, but such contests rarely turn dangerous. Females give birth to one calf after a nine-month pregnancy.

 

Bison once covered the Great Plains and much of North America, and were critically important to Plains Indian societies. During the 19th century, settlers killed some 50 million bison for food, sport, and to deprive Native Americans of their most important natural asset. The once enormous herds were reduced to only a few hundred animals. Today, bison numbers have rebounded somewhat, and about 200,000 bison live on preserves and ranches where they are raised for their meat.

 

Source: National Geographic

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...

 

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.

Apollon Tapınağı / Temple of Apollo

 

Mevcut Tapınak, eski ve dini mağara olarak bilinen Plutonion üzerinde kurulmuştur. Yerli halkın en eski dini merkezi olan bu yerde, Apollon bölgenin ana Tanrıçası Kybele ile buluşmuştur. Eski kaynaklar, Ana Tanrıça Kybele rahibinin bu mağaraya indiğini ve zehirli gazdan etkilenmediğini bildirirler. Apollon Tapınağı’nda üst yapıya ait kalıntılar MS III. yüzyıldan geriye gitmemekle birlikte, temeller Geç Helenistik Döneme kadar uzanmaktadır.

Mermer giriş basamaklarından tanınan 70 metre uzunluğundaki Tapınak, temenos duvarı ile çevrili kutsal alan içinde bulunmaktadır. Temenos duvarı güney, batı ve kuzeyde bir kısmı kazılmış olan portiğe yaslanmıştır. Mermer portiğe ait dor düzenindeki yivli yarım sütunlar, astragal ve inci dizisi, ekhinusu da yumurta dizisi ile bezeli sütun başlıkları taşımaktadır.

Tapınak, daha geç bir döneme tarihlenmekte, fakat müzede bulunan iki ion bir korint düzenindeki nefis başlık ile bazı mimari parçalar MS I. yüzyıla tarihlenmekte ve daha eski çağlara dayanan bir tapınağın varlığına işaret etmektedir. Apollon Tapınağı’ndan günümüze kalan mermer merdivenden başka, mermer levhalar ile kaplı ve silmeli kornişleri olan bir podyum görülmektedir. Cephesi iki ante ve arasında yer alan iki sütun ile bezelidir. Tarihlenmesi ante ve başlıklarında, cella duvarında ve tabanında kullanılan yazıtlı bloklar sayesinde yapılabilmektedir. Bir tanesinin üzerinde Apollon kehanetine ait bir yazı okunmaktadır. Tapınak mimari bezemelere göre MS III. yüzyıla tarihlenmektedir.

Tapınağın arkasındaki merdivende, Apollon Tapınağı’ndan alınan parçalar, sütun gövdeleri, arşitrav parçaları, başlıklar, kaideler ile doldurulan bir alan görülmektedir. Bu yapıda, MÖ IV. yüzyıl heykel şemalarını yenileyen, kıvrımlı giysili olan, nitelikli bir kadın heykeli bulunmuştur. Yazıtından da anlaşıldığına göre; Zeuxis’in kızı Apphia imparatorluk tanrılarına ve Demos’a (Hierapolis halkının kişileştirilmesi) adamıştır.

Bir ucu, kuzeyindeki adını imparator Domitiandan alan Domitian kapısı ve diğer bir ucu güneyinde Güney Roma kapısına uzanan, 1 km uzunluğundaki Cadde görülmeye deger en önemli tarihi eserler arasındadır. Her iki tarafında sütunlu revarklar ve kamu yapıları bulunan cadde şehri bir uçtan diğer bir ucuna kadar ikiye ayırır. Ayrıca cadde giriş ve çıkışlarında bulunan kapılar ise tarihi hâlen omzunda taşıyan koca bir medeniyetin en güzel örnekleridir.

 

A temple was raised to Apollo Lairbenos, the town's principal god during the late Hellenistic period. This Apollo was linked to the ancient Anatolian sun god Lairbenos and the god of oracles Kareios. The site also included temples or shrines to Cybele, Artemis, Pluto, and Poseidon. Now only the foundations of the Hellenistic temple remain. The temple stood within a peribolos (15 by 20 metres (49 by 66 ft)) in Doric style.

The structures of the temple are later, though the presence of two Ionic capitals in the Museum, as well as of a Corinthian capital of the 1st century AD and other architectural fragments lead archeologists to suppose the existence of an earlier temple on the site.

The temple, which has a marble staircase, lies within a sacred area, about 70 metres (230 ft) long. It was surrounded by an enclosure wall (temenos). The back of the temple was built against the hill, the peribolos was surrounded on the remaining southern, western and northern sides, by a marble portico which has been partially excavated. This portico has pilasters bearing fluted Doric semi-columns supporting capitals that are decorated below with a row of astragali and beads and which, on the decorated below with a row of astragali and beads and which, on the echinus, bear a series of ovolos.

The new temple was reconstructed in the 3rd century in Roman fashion, recycling the stone blocks from the older temple. The reconstruction had a smaller area and now only its marble floor remains.

The temple of Apollo was deliberately built over an active fault. This fault was called the Plutonion. It was the oldest religious centre of the native community, the place where Apollo met with Cibele. It was said that only the priest of the Great Mother could enter the cave without being overpowered by the noxious underground fumes. Temples dedicated to Apollo were often built over geologically active sites, including his most famous, the temple at Delphi.

When the Christian faith was granted official primacy in the 4th century, this temple underwent a number of desecrations. Part of the peribolos was also dismantled to make room for a large Nympheum.

 

A print from the Phillip Medhurst Collection (published by Revd. Philip De Vere at St.George's Court, Kidderminster, England)

I know the feeling. It often stops me in my tracks as well. But it brings a special smile to my face when I see it happening to someone else.

 

There's a primacy to staring the morning directly in the face. Seeing others doing it gives me faith in the human spirit and draws a sharp line linking me to others.

 

DSCF5394_72

A print from the Phillip Medhurst Collection (published by Revd. Philip De Vere at St.George's Court, Kidderminster, England)

Composite image, consisting of several shots taken in portrait orientation, stitched together using the excellent freeware utility, Hugin.

My wife reckons she hasn't got quite enough decorations yet. I should make her read the following article that caught my eye in The Telegraph by Richard Godwin

 

Every year, as Winter tightens its grip, about eight million British householders venture into the cold, procure a tree, drag it home – and worship it.

 

We adorn the idol in silver and gold. We animate it with electricity, dress it with meaningful items – baubles, bells, angels, glass brussel sprouts in tiny santa hats – and attach huge moral weight to questions of tinsel. We say: “Welcome to the family” and give the tree the plum view of the TV, establishing a bond that crosses not only the species divide but the realms of the living and the dead – for the thing that brings us such cheer is already in the process of decay. In fact it was killed for our pleasure, literally cut off at the roots.

 

The Christmas tree ritual is perhaps the closest we come in 21st-century Britain to ritualised pagan sacrifice. It also happens to be my favourite part of Christmas – the only part that modern capitalism can’t quite poison, though Lord knows it tries. Even in an age of Pre-Lit Ultra Mountain Pine artificial trees and “Novelty Jingle Balls Adult Baubles” (£8.99 on Etsy), tree day retains its innocence. I love it all. The elemental tussle of wrestling a six-foot thing that clearly wants to be outside, inside; the resurrection of the Christmas playlist; the making of punch; the larking of children; the disinterring of the ornaments. (“Those guys from the Christmas decorations box. They’re fun, right?” as Woody reminds his fellow toys in Toy Story 3.) It all happens before Christmas has had any chance to become tedious or stressful.

 

So you can imagine how my heart leapt as I drove into Marldon Christmas tree farm near Torquay in Devon on a blue winter morning last week to be greeted by thousands of trees, in their own element, or close to it. The trees here are underplanted in a forest-like arrangement, most of them human-sized – three to six foot or so – but with the occasional 15-foot giant in their midst, destined for a hotel lobby or department store or town square.

 

Some of the trees are pre-decorated by families who have picked them out in advance; a crowd management technique because this place becomes extremely popular at weekends. Marldon’s clients have included the National Trust, the Crown Estates, the Royal Horticultural Society and 10 Downing Street, and the trees here are not the cheapest: £50 plus for a Nordmann fir. But what is on sale is rather grander than a mere tree – it is enchantment itself, complete with Alpine ski lodge, huskies, reindeer, a snow machine, and, it is rumoured, the big man himself, FC

 

“Christmas basically starts with a tree purchase, doesn’t it?” says Sadie Lynes, the founder of Christmas tree wholesalers Jadecliff, which grows around 200,000 trees across these sites in Devon, in addition to importing trees from Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Denmark for wholesale. “We see so many families come into sites like Marldon and for them it’s when Christmas begins. We all need a bit of feel-good with the climate as it is in the world. That’s what the Christmas tree symbolises. It’s the catalyst. Here we go. It’s Christmas.”

 

The practice of dragging evergreens into the home in midwinter actually predates Christmas. Some have interpreted this as a pagan tree worship. It seems equally feasible that our ancestors found a bit of holly, ivy and/or mistletoe cheered them up a bit during the darkest months of winter.

 

The modern Christmas tree ritual is, like so many Christmas rituals, a German innovation, imported to Britain by way of Prince Albert in the 1840s. As is tat. Baubles were invented in the 16th century by a German glassblower from Lauscha. Tinsel comes from 17th-century Nuremberg where it was originally made from shredded silver, though the word comes from the French étinceller, to sparkle. Apparently it was common practice in 16th-century Germany to hang Christmas trees upside down and, according to certain lifestyle influencers, this might make a quirky centrepiece to a 21st-century home – but this seems like a terrible hassle. Witch trials were also common in Germany in the 1500s too and there’s no reason to resurrect those.

 

In any case, Albert’s trees were the right way up. So is the Trafalgar Square tree that the citizens of Oslo donate to the citizens of London to say thanks for the war. Trees are of course a staple of Hollywood imagery too, White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life… though my favourite Christmas tree scene in a movie is the bit in Joe Dante’s Gremlins where one of the eponymous critters stages a surprise attack from between the branches of a tree. For all their cosy domestication, trees should remain a little bit menacing – a little bit other.

 

As for the British Christmas tree industry, that only took root comparatively recently. Sadie Lynes entered the business thanks to her father, Keith Fletcher, who began importing trees from the Ardennes forest to sell in his greengrocers in the early 1980s. “There wasn’t a supply in the UK back in the early 1980s,” she says. “A lot of them came from Belgium and Denmark. The farmers in the UK would perhaps plant a few in a corner of a field that they couldn’t use for anything else and would then wander back ten years later to see how it was getting on.”

 

The industry has seen rapid development in the 40 or years since then, many of which Lynes has spent as the head of the British Christmas Tree Growers Association, which has over 300 members. “It has gone from a product that is field-grown but without much care to a product that has been standardised. We prune, we net, we label, we palletise.”

 

Christmas trees tend to thrive on marginal land which makes them a tempting crop for farmers looking to maximise their land use. But they are not to be taken lightly. According to Marldon’s chief operating officer, Steve Gribbon, it costs around £1.50 to plant one Nordmann sapling and ten years for it to grow to a profitable size. “A lot of people say: ‘What do you do after Christmas?’ If only you knew!” A Nordmann requires at least two prunings a year to retain the desired rocket-like shape, both the top and bottom whirls (a “whirl” is the term for a layer of branches; the tip is called the “leader”; the soft green growth that arrives in Spring is the “flush”).

 

Let’s say you plant 2,000 trees in a field over ten years. You’ll have 20,000 trees to prune before the time you’ve seen a return. The costs of fertiliser and fuel have vastly increased in recent years too. “You really need to be set up well. A lot of farmers start growing trees and only later do they realise how much work is going to be involved.”

 

Compared to many other appalling rituals of Christmas – the mechanised slaughter of turkeys, for example, or the panic-buying of plastic nonsense on Amazon – the cultivation of millions of trees may seem comparatively benign. And yet it seems to attract undue angst. Witness the recent fracas in Italy, where various environmental associations from Trentino wrote a furious letter to the Pope urging him not to accept a 29-metre fir tree from their region for a “purely consumerist” Christmas display at the Vatican. “It is inconsistent to talk about fighting climate change and then perpetuate traditions like this, which require the elimination of such an ancient and symbolic tree.” The local mayor, Renato Girardi, pronounced himself bewildered at the fury, noting that the tree would otherwise be destined for the sawmill – as is fairly standard practise when it comes to forestry management.

 

The inherent absurdity of the business is not lost on Lynes. “It’s one of the most stupid business models out there, if you think about it,” she says. “You grow this thing for ten years. It has a four-week life span. And then it’s worth nothing.” Still, she’s being a little disingenuous about that. If cultivated with care, Christmas trees can be an exemplary circular business. For the ten years or so that it takes for a Nordmann fir to grow to six feet, it recycles CO2 into oxygen and provides a rich habitat for wildlife. Indeed it is precisely the sustainability of the business that attracted Gribbon to the industry.

 

He spent most of his career working in advertising before taking a “substantial” pay cut to come and grow Christmas trees. But as we stroll among the trees he seems almost unreasonably content. “It’s a lovely industry. When you get to the retail part, it’s nothing but smiles. And everything we do is about sustainable forestry. A lot of companies like to talk around the subject of sustainability. It’s very easy to greenwash things. But we’ve tried to look at the whole cycle.”

 

The trees grown here are processed in the neighbouring farm just visible over the hill, whereupon they end up as 3,000 tons of compost, used to help grow other crops: corn, wheat, more Christmas trees. Where underplanting is not possible, fields are rotated in such a way as to not strip whole areas bare in one go.

 

“We try and do it in such a way as to not disrupt the animals,” says Gribbon. “If it wasn’t like that, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

 

There is another element that is not usually factored in when the benefits of real trees are compared with artificial trees – which is how useful they are for fundraising. I should confess that I have some skin in this game. In fact, I am a seasoned Christmas tree salesman. For the last six years, I have somehow landed myself in a WhatsApp group of dads who sell trees on the first weekend of December. As someone who mostly pushes words around a computer for a living, this is a thrilling insight into what it might be like to do a proper job. We rise at 5.30am or so, head out nobly into the dark with our Stanley knives and torches to manhandle 150 or so Christmas trees from their pallets on the back of a lorry and line them up around the dark playground. Then, as the sun rises, the Christmas tunes come on, bacon sandwiches are prepared and everyone parades in to buy their tree.

 

The camaraderie is unmatched. No one is sad to be buying a Christmas tree. The last event raised over £2,000 for the school, a margin it is hard to reproduce in, say, bake sales. “It’s an all-round win-win and a joyous occasion to boot!” says Zoe, the head of the PTA. If anyone raises a query regarding waste, I will tell them that the trees are all grown just a couple of miles away, at Frenchay Forestry just off the M32 and the Bristol Waste Company will collect them for free after Christmas whereupon they will be shredded, blended, mixed and seasoned into organic compost; there is also a local hospice that will collect trees for modest donations.

 

Christmas tree fashions have changed. A couple of generations ago, the Norway spruce predominated. “Considered purely as a tree, a piece of living greenery, the Norway spruce hasn’t much to commend it,” notes Richard Mabey in Flora Britannica, who quotes a vintage poem produced by a cleaning company lamenting the tendency for its needles to get everywhere: “It’s mid-July, you cry out, ‘Waiter / What’s this in my soup?’ / He replies ‘Norwegian Tarragon / According to the cook’”.

 

Today, over 80 per cent of all Christmas trees sold in the UK are Nordmanns. This is a hardier variety that was apparently “discovered” by the Finnish botanist Alexander von Nordmann on a trip to the Caucasus in the 1830s (presumably the locals had been wondering what those green pointy things were.) The Nordmann has much to recommend it: its shapely whirls, its pert leader, its excellent needle retention. But much like a supermarket apple, its hardiness comes at the cost of character. It has almost no aroma, unlike the Norway spruce, which in turn has nothing to the “incredible scent” of the Noble fir, Lynes assures me. She imports these from Ireland. “If we can’t produce a tree ourselves, we try to buy them from where they thrive.” The chic thing these days would be to source a rare breed: a Fraser fir, a koreana, a lasiocarpa fir, a lodgepole pine.

 

There are of course commercial pressures on the Christmas tree. One is that everyone wants their trees up much sooner: “In my father’s day, we never sold a tree wholesale until the sixth of December. Now our wholesale season is already finished,” says Lynes. The thing is, the earlier you put up your tree, the sooner it will die. Lynes’s advice is to put it in water and replenish regularly; keep it away from any heat sources – underfloor heating is deadly – and ideally slice a layer off the bottom of the tree midway through the season to allow it to take in more water. “We try to say to our customers, ‘come on, you’ve got to look after your tree.’”

 

The primacy of the Nordmann has been challenged in recent years by the rise of artificial trees, which like artificial lawns and AI friends are increasingly hard to distinguish from the real thing. My parents were delighted that it took my sisters and me three years to notice that their tree spent most of the year disassembled in the attic. According to a YouGov survey, 60 per cent of British people planned to use an existing fake tree over Christmas 2022 and seven per cent intended to buy a new one, compared to 15 per cent who intended to buy a real tree. Interestingly, 54 per cent considered the artificial tree to be more environmentally friendly. In fact, it is estimated that it would need to be reused at least seven times for it to have a smaller carbon footprint – and this doesn’t take in such benefits as local employment, composting, charity fundraisings, nor the forever plastics in fake trees.

 

Still, Lynes is less concerned about fake trees than she is about supermarkets devaluing real trees and exploiting farmers. Lidl is currently advertising £11.99 pot grown trees. Tesco is offering half-price trees to Clubcard customers. “They’re kind of ruining the industry,” Lynes says. “At a farm or a garden centre, you can see the trees and you’ll know they’re fresh. You’ve got some degree of expertise too. Whereas the supermarkets are not really engaged with the products. It’s just there to help footfall. You don’t know how long it’s been sitting there. The margins are small and if they don’t sell them they’ll push it back to the farmers and farmers can’t live like that.” Many Christmas tree farmers have been left exposed by the collapse of Homebase, which has gone into administration.

 

But this is another reason why farms like Marldon are leaning so heavily on the experience of buying the tree. “Christmas basically starts with a tree purchase. I had a friend who bought her house based on where the tree would go at Christmas. For her that was really special.” Gribbon says that many local families come for the day and don’t actually buy a tree at all and he’s fine with that. “You can see, for them, it’s just an amazing day out. It might be their Christmas. You can see it’s a tradition for them and it’s harking back to the traditions of their childhood.”

 

It’s the ritual enchantment that’s the thing. T.S. Eliot wrote a late masterpiece called The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, in which he recalled the “the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree.” For the 66-year-old Eliot those memories, unboxed each year, were “not be forgotten in later experience, / In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium / The awareness of death, [or] the consciousness of failure.”

 

The trees are themselves enormous metaphors. They sit there flashing in our homes, half-raves, half-shrines, reminders that none of us have long before our needles drop.

The primary outbuildings on the farm in Columbia County were two large barns, a silo, and a corn crib. The rectangle gable-end barn was probably the first barn built on the farm. The lower-level fieldstone wall is suggestive of its primacy. The gambrel roof, or Wisconsin barn, and the adjacent silo is indicative of a dairy operation. The corn crib could be filled from opening on the roof.

A wonderful street to spend a few sun-sets, Harar, Ethiopia.

 

Harar (Ethiopia) is a magical place! See my Harar photo series.

If you have only 12 days to finally visit Africa, you should perhaps focus on one place: let it be Harar, Ethiopia (July 2006).

For centuries, until about 1860, it was an independent city at the borders of two different worlds: the Abbysinian mountains and the deserts stretching to the Red Sea coast. Trade and religious affairs (Muslim) must have alternated primacy during its history. As a holy city to Islam it feels as a surprisingly relaxed place. Tom Waits can not imagine the kind of dark yet exalted bars you find here at night. The size of the walled old city is at least half that of Jerusalem's old city. Most important the people are really open and the city is one of the world's few cities that within a few days demonstrate their very own distinct living atmosphere you'll never forget.

(See also my friend Elmer's photos from this trip, where by change you can also see me on a photo.)

 

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...

 

Pope Leo IX (21 June 1002 – 19 April 1054), born Bruno of Egisheim-Dagsburg, was Pope from 12 February 1049 to his death in 1054. He was a German aristocrat and a powerful secular ruler of central Italy while holding the papacy. He is regarded as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, his feast day celebrated on 19 April. Leo IX is widely considered the most historically significant German Pope of the Middle Ages. His citing of the Donation of Constantine in a letter to the Patriarch of Constantinople brought about the Great Schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.He was born to Count Hugh and Heilwig and was a native of Eguisheim, Upper Alsace (present day France). His family was of noble rank, and his father, Count Hugh, was a cousin of Emperor Conrad II (1024–1039).[4] He was educated at Toul, where he successively became canon and, in 1026, bishop. In the latter capacity he rendered important political services to his relative Conrad II, and afterwards to Emperor Henry III. He became widely known as an earnest and reforming ecclesiastic by the zeal he showed in spreading the rule of the order of Cluny. On the death of Pope Damasus II in 1048, Bruno was selected as his successor by an assembly at Worms in December. Both the Emperor and the Roman delegates concurred. However, Bruno apparently favored a canonical election and stipulated as a condition of his acceptance that he should first proceed to Rome and be freely elected by the voice of the clergy and people of Rome. Setting out shortly after Christmas, he met with abbot Hugh of Cluny at Besançon, where he was joined by the young monk Hildebrand, who afterwards became Pope Gregory VII; arriving in pilgrim garb at Rome in the following February, he was received with much cordiality, and at his consecration assumed the name Leo IX.

Leo IX favored traditional morality in his reformation of the Catholic Church. One of his first public acts was to hold the well-known Easter synod of 1049, at which celibacy of the clergy (down to the rank of subdeacon) was required anew. Also, the Easter synod was where the Pope at least succeeded in making clear his own convictions against every kind of simony. The greater part of the year that followed was occupied in one of those progresses through Italy, Germany and France which form a marked feature in Leo IX's pontificate. After presiding over a synod at Pavia, he joined Henry III in Saxony and accompanied him to Cologne and Aachen. He also summoned a meeting of the higher clergy in Reims in which several important reforming decrees were passed. At Mainz he held a council at which the Italian and French as well as the German clergy were represented, and ambassadors of the Greek emperor were present. Here too, simony and the marriage of the clergy were the principal matters dealt with. After his return to Rome he held another Easter synod on 29 April 1050. It was occupied largely with the controversy about the teachings of Berengar of Tours. In the same year he presided over provincial synods at Salerno, Siponto and Vercelli, and in September revisited his native Germany, returning to Rome in time for a third Easter synod, at which the question of the reordination of those who had been ordained by simonists was considered. In 1052 he joined the Emperor at Pressburg and vainly sought to secure the submission of the Hungarians. At Regensburg, Bamberg and Worms, the papal presence was celebrated with various ecclesiastical solemnities. Commemorative shield on the wall of the Castle of Eguisheim, Alsace, birthplace of Pope Leo IX. In constant fear of attack from the Normans in the south of Italy, the Byzantines turned in desperation to the Normans own spiritual chief, Pope Leo IX and, according to William of Apulia, begged him "to liberate Italy that now lacks its freedom and to force that wicked people, who are pressing Apulia under their yoke, to leave." After a fourth Easter synod in 1053, Leo IX set out against the Normans in the south with an army of Italians and Swabian mercenaries. "As fervent Christians the Normans were reluctant to fight their spiritual leader and tried to sue for peace but the Swabians mocked them – battle was inevitable." Leo IX led the army himself but his forces suffered total defeat at the Battle of Civitate on 15 June 1053. Nonetheless, on going out from the city to meet the victorious enemy he was received with every token of submission, pleas for forgiveness and oaths of fidelity and homage. From June 1053 to March 1054 the Pope was nevertheless held hostage at Benevento, in honourable captivity, until he acknowledged the Normans conquests in Calabria and Apulia. He did not long survive his return to Rome, where he died on 19 April 1054. Leo IX sent a letter to Michael Cærularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, in 1054, that cited a large portion of the Donation of Constantine, believing it genuine. The official status of this letter is acknowledged in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 5, entry on Donation of Constantine, "The first pope who used it in an official act and relied upon it, was Leo IX; in a letter of 1054 to Michael Cærularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, he cites the "Donatio" to show that the Holy See possessed both an earthly and a heavenly imperium, the royal priesthood." Leo IX assured the Patriarch that the donation was completely genuine, not a fable, so only the apostolic successor to Peter possessed that primacy and was the rightful head of all the Church. The Patriarch rejected the claims of papal primacy, and subsequently the One Church was split in two in the Great East–West Schism of 1054.Before his death, Leo IX had sent a legatine mission under Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida to Constantinople to negotiate with Patriarch Michael I Cerularius in response to his actions concerning the church in Southern Italy. Humbert quickly disposed of negotiations by delivering a bull excommunicating the Patriarch. This act, though legally invalid due to the Pope's death at the time, was answered by the Patriarch's own bull of excommunication against Humbert and his associates and is popularly considered the official split between the Eastern and Western Churches.

A makeshift curtain at Scranton Lace's factory floor. Scranton Lace, once the employer of Hillary Clinton's father and grandfather, was one of the world's largest producers of fine, Nottingham lace. The looms were precision calibrated to read punch cards that contained encoded instructions for weaving the fine, intricate lacework. Revolutionary for its time, Scranton's looms represented the primacy of mechanization and automation in an age that benefitted greatly from mass production.

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...

Ingólfur's Settlement

 

In the spring Ingólfur travelled west across the moor. He made his home at the spot where the highseat pillars had been washed ashore, and lived at Reykjavík; the highseat pillars are still there in the hall. Ingólfur claimed possession of the whole region between the Ölfus river and Hvalfjörður, south of the Brynjudalur and Öxará rivers, including all the Nesses.

 

The Book of Settlements, written down in the 13th century

 

*Chieftains

 

According to written historical sources, Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir, the first settlers, controlled a huge expanse of territory. The first arrivals could acquire extensive lands, of which they might give or sell part to later settlers. The number of settlers rose rapidly, and by 930 AD Iceland was deemed fully settled.

 

In recent years theories have been put forward about the settlement of Iceland; doubt has been cast, for instance, on the assumption that Ingólfur and Hallveig were the first settlers. But there are many indications that Reykjavík (or Vík) was one of the first settlements, and that the descendants of the founders were chieftains. But over the centuries the clan lost its influential position, and Reykjavík declined from its important status as a chieftains' manor.

 

***

Was Reykjavík a chieftain's manor?

 

Written sources of the 12th century say that the first four generations of Reykjavík residents played an important role in the development of the Icelandic constitution. Ingólfur Arnarson, reputed to be the first settler of Reykjavík, had a son named Þorsteinn, who is said to have founded an assembly in the Kjalarnes district. His son, Þorkell, was Law Speaker at the Alþingi (national assembly) in the late 10th century. Þorkell's son, Þormóður, was "allsherjargoði" when Iceland adopted Christianity around 1000 AD. The position of allsherjargoði is believed to have been primarily an honorary position but it implies primacy among the chieftains of Iceland.

 

The farm of Reykjavík is known to have been a large estate until the mid-18th century.

*Assemblies and society

 

Most of the settlers originated in Norway or the British Isles, and no doubt many of them had attended assemblies (ping, thing) in their home countries. At such assemblies decisions were made collectively, laws were enacted, and disputes were settled.

 

In 930 AD the Alþingi (national assembly or parliament) was founded at Þingvellir, introducing the era of the Old Commonwealth, under the authority of chieftains or goðar. A woman could hold a chieftaincy but had no right to vote at the Alþingi.

 

In the 1220s Ice and descended into civil conflict, as the most powerful clans of chieftains competed for control of the country. This period is known as the Sturlung Age, taking its name from one of the clans. The civil strife led to the end of the Old Common-wealth, when the King of Norway gained control of Iceland. The country remained a territory of the Norwegian king until 1397, when Denmark, Sweden and Norway were united into the Kalmar Union under Queen Margrethe I. In due course Iceland came to be part of the Danish realm, until it won independence in the 20th century.

 

*Slaves

 

The early settlers brought enslaved people with them, among them women captured or purchased in the British Isles. Recent research on the Icelandic genome shows that most of the male settlers came from Norway, while more than half the women were from the British Isles.

 

Slavery is believed to have died out in Iceland in the late 11th century. The population had expanded greatly by that time, and labour was cheap. Many former slaves became tenant farmers on land they leased from wealthy landowners.

John Heer, an eminent witness to Catholic truth and pastoral charity, was born in Cologne, Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and entered the Order of Preachers in his native city.

 

He was sent to Holland, to serve as parish priest at Hoornaer, where Catholics were being subjected to severe persecution by the Calvinists. In 1572, Calvinist forces took the city of Gorcum and imprisoned its Catholic clergy; when Saint John went to minister to them, he was himself captured. They were all taken to Briel, where they were offered their freedom if they would deny the primacy of the Pope and abandon the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist; they refused and Saint John and was hanged, along with eighteen other priests and religious, on the night of 8/9 July 1572; their bodies were dismembered.

 

They were beatified by Pope Clement X on 24 November 1675 and canonised by Pius IX on 29 June 1867.

 

This statue of the saint, with the emblems of the papacy and the Eucharist is in the reredos of the former Dominican priory church in Hawkesyard, Staffordshire.

 

Gouda cheese (pronounced How-dah) is a sweet, creamy, yellow cow's milk cheese that originated from Holland. It is one of the most popular and perhaps the oldest recorded cheeses in the world still made today.

 

The cheese is named after the master of Gouda (Gouda is a city and municipality in the west of the Netherlands, between Rotterdam and Utrecht, in the province of South Holland), not because it was first produced in that city but because it was traded there. In the Middle Ages, Dutch cities could obtain certain rights which gave them primacy or a total monopoly on certain goods.

 

Today, within the town of Gouda, farmers continue to sell their cheese. The cheese is taken to the market square where two-man teams ("cheese-porters"), identified by different colored straw hats, carry the cheese in wooden cheese barrows that are tied to ropes slung across their shoulders. The weight of eight cheese wheels on the barrow is about 295 pounds. Cheese buyers sample the cheese and negotiate a price using a ritual bargaining system called 'handjeklap'. Once a price is agreed upon, the porters carry the cheese to the weighing house and complete the sale.

 

The Gouda Cheese Market is held on Thursday mornings from April through August.

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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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...

 

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...

Huge painting at the famous Enrico's restaurant, North Beach, San Francisco.

 

The Beat Museum www.thebeatmuseum.org/ is a few doors (go West) from Enrico's.

 

The Beat Generation was a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) are often considered their most important works.

 

The members of the Beat Generation were new bohemian ecstatic epicureans, who often engaged in spontaneous creativity. The style of their work may seem chaotic, but the chaos was purposeful; it highlighted the primacy of such Beat Generation essentials as spontaneity, open emotion, visceral engagement in often gritty worldly experiences. The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style. (Please note: The above data was obtained from Wikipedia).

 

Both the painting and the iron artwork were at Enrico's on bawdy Broadway Street, San Francisco.

 

Enrico Banducci - born Harry Banducci - (February 17, 1922 – October 9, 2007) was an American impresario. Banducci operated the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. There he launched the careers of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters, Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand, as well as many folk singers.[1] The hungry i featured the original brick wall in the stage background, a staple for stand up comedy presentations ever since. Banducci bought the hungry i from its founder, Eric "Big Daddy" Nord, in 1950. Banducci later also started the Clown Alley hamburger stand as well as Enrico's Sidewalk Cafe on Broadway, a restaurant and jazz club that has been in and out of business (as of 2007 it remains in operation under new ownership).

 

The cyclotron was the first circular particle accelerator design, developed by Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley in the early 30s. Particles started out in the center of the big magnet and were accelerated by an oscillating electric field. The magnetic field from the big magnet causes the accelerated particles to bend in a circle, going in wider circles as they get accelerated. When they reach maximum energy they are extracted to hit a target in the next room.

 

After Lawrence invented the idea, lots of universities built them. This one dates to about 1940. All that remained of the cyclotron was the big magnet. I think this magnet was capable of a field of about 1 T, maybe 1.5 T. That’s from memory. Unfortunately I can’t find any detailed information about it on the web.

 

This building was torn down just a couple years ago, in 2020 or so.

 

At the time this photo was taken, Prof Becker had a small drift chamber that he had built installed in the center of the magnet. (A drift chamber is a type of particle detector in which the passage of a charged particle ionizes a gas in the chamber. The ionization drifts in an electric field to one end of the chamber where it is detected by wires held at a high voltage.) Over the years he used this setup to do experiments on the ionization and electron drift properties of various gas mixtures, with applications to full-sized detectors.

 

In the green paint on the top part of the magnet yoke you’ll notice the ghost letters “SS”. I think this is the remnants of “SSC” for Superconducting Supercollider, the effort that would have put an energy-frontier proton collider in Texas and beat the LHC to the Higgs boson discovery by 10 years, but was canceled by Congress early in the Clinton administration.

 

You will notice the glass vessel filled with water in the foreground. Prof Becker had asked me to do a side project that involved measuring a volume of gas, which I was doing by measuring the displacement of the water in the graduated cylinder. My memory is fuzzy but I believe that this was a small R&D test for a component of the AMS02 experiment that was being designed for the International Space Station. You can see that the gas is connected to a small object in the magnet that is then connected to my water setup. I think that small object was a little electromechanical valve, and I was testing its performance in a strong magnetic field. AMS02 was going to have a strong magnet and a gas-based detector (I can't remember for sure but maybe the TRD: ams02.space/detector/transition-radiation-detector-trd ), so this makes some sense. AMS02 finally got off the ground to the International Space Station in 2011 (and probably never would have gotten that far without Sam Ting’s political clout).

 

Speaking of Sam Ting, this building was his fiefdom. He won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the J/Psi particle (and thus the charm quark) in 1974. Ting’s group (including Prof Becker) were collecting data at Brookhaven National Lab in New York. Legend has it that they saw a peak in their data but delayed publishing to be absolutely sure of their results. In the meantime a group at SLAC led by Burt Richter saw a peak in electron-positron collisions. In the end, the 2 groups published on the same day in 1974, meaning that credit had to be shared. Ting named the new particle “J”, which looked similar to a Chinese character in his name. The SLAC team gave the name psi. The community settled on using “J/Psi” going forward. Ting had a giant sign with the letter J installed over the entrance to this building ( www.flickr.com/photos/bmeeee/17011649352/ ). Prof Becker kept his punch cards from the original data analysis in a locked cabinet in the building.

 

Back in the day I heard a story where the spin was that Becker was confident in the discovery but Ting was conservative, and this conservatism led to the publishing delay that cost the MIT team primacy in the discovery over the SLAC team. The legend speculated that a sole discovery by the MIT team would have led to Ting and Becker winning the Nobel Prize together, while in reality the shared discovery with SLAC meant that the prize had to be shared by the groups. Since Ting and Richter were the group leaders, the prize was shared by them, leaving Becker in the lurch. This story is confirmed somewhat in this article published after Prof Becker's death in 2020: news.mit.edu/2020/ulrich-becker-mit-professor-emeritus-ph... (This article also contains a wonderful anecdote that Prof Becker told me personally once, about an encounter with the aging Werner Heisenberg after the discovery of the J/Psi.)

 

There were accompanying legends that there was a leak of information from the MIT team to SLAC, facilitating them to search at the right energy. This history by Richter certainly doesn’t say that: www.slac.stanford.edu/history/pubs/richterdis.pdf (it's quite amazing that they made the discovery one day and submitted the results for publication the next day) but the MIT News article above does paint a timeline where the Brookhaven results were being discussed privately for quite a while before the SLAC discovery.

 

By coincidence I went from being an undergrad in Building 44, learning from Prof Becker, to being a graduate student at SLAC working in Group C, which had previously been led by Richter and was then led by Vera Luth who was a junior member on Richter’s team at the time of the J/Psi discovery.

Accusations against the Popes PLEASE READ AND SHARE:

 

THE SEAT OF ST. PETER IS NOT VACANT

 

Our Lord first pointed Peter as the rock upon which the Church is built. To declare that the seat of Peter is vacant means the Church ceases to exist because She exists on this firm rock. No matter how or what human weakness may be with Him, just like Peter who even denied the Lord, let us not question the decision of the Lord for choosing them. Long live the Pope!

  

ST. JEROME

"I follow no leader but Christ and join in communion with none but your blessedness [Pope Damasus I], that is, with the chair of Peter. I know that this is the rock on which the Church has been built. Whoever eats the Lamb outside this house is profane. Anyone who is not in the ark of Noah will perish when the flood prevails" (Letters 15:2 [A.D. 396]).

 

Council of Ephesus

"Philip, the presbyter and legate of the Apostolic See [Rome], said: ‘There is no doubt, and in fact it has been known in all ages, that the holy and most blessed Peter, prince and head of the apostles, pillar of the faith, and foundation of the Catholic Church, received the keys of the kingdom from our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior and Redeemer of the human race, and that to him was given the power of loosing and binding sins: who down even to today and forever both lives and judges in his successors’" (Acts of the Council, session 3 [A.D. 431]).

ST. AMBROSE

"It is to Peter that he says: ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church’ [Matt. 16:18]. Where Peter is, there is the Church. And where the Church is, no death is there, but life eternal" (Commentary on Twelve Psalms of David 40:30 [A.D. 389]).

 

St. Cyprian of Carthage

"The Lord says to Peter: ‘I say to you,’ he says, ‘that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not overcome it. And to you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven . . . ’ [Matt. 16:18–19]. On him [Peter] he builds the Church, and to him he gives the command to feed the sheep [John 21:17], and although he assigns a like power to all the apostles, yet he founded a single chair [cathedra], and he established by his own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were that also which Peter was [i.e., apostles], but a primacy is given to Peter, whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. . . . If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he [should] desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?" (The Unity of the Catholic Church 4; 1st edition [A.D. 251]).

"There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one chair founded on Peter by the word of the Lord. It is not possible to set up another altar or for there to be another priesthood besides that one altar and that one priesthood. Whoever has gathered elsewhere is scattering" (Letters 43[40]:5 [A.D. 253]).

"There [John 6:68–69] speaks Peter, upon whom the Church would be built, teaching in the name of the Church and showing that even if a stubborn and proud multitude withdraws because it does not wish to obey, yet the Church does not withdraw from Christ. The people joined to the priest and the flock clinging to their shepherd are the Church. You ought to know, then, that the bishop is in the Church and the Church in the bishop, and if someone is not with the bishop, he is not in the Church. They vainly flatter themselves who creep up, not having peace with the priests of God, believing that they are

secretly [i.e., invisibly] in communion with certain individuals. For the Church, which is one and Catholic, is not split nor divided, but it is indeed united and joined by the cement of priests who adhere one to another" (ibid., 66[69]:8).

  

St. Padre Pio

 

"Your Holiness, I unite myself with my brothers and present at your feet my affectionate respect, all my devotion to your august person in an act of faith, love and obedience to the dignity of him whom you are representing on this earth. "

-Personal letter of Padre Pio to Pope Paul VI

 

Alleged Quote from Padre Pio

 

"Courage, courage, courage! For the Church is already invaded by Freemasonry." He added that "Freemasonry has already reached the Pope's slippers"

 

In case this is true, it does not really pertain to the pope being a mason. It is an accepted fact that there are many enemies of the Church nowadays and this quote may actually pertain that they are within the premises of the Holy Father.

 

Let us remember Fatima

 

"The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world."

 

Let us pray for our brothers and sisters who are in darkness due to this disturbing and deceitful trap of the devil

   

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.

   

Deep in the night

  

Tombstone of historian Goldwin Smith and his wife. St. James Cemetery, Toronto, Canada. Spring afternoon, 2021. Pentax K1 II.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwin_Smith

 

Goldwin Smith (13 August 1823 – 7 June 1910) was a British historian and journalist, active in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the 1860s he also taught at Cornell University in the United States.

 

Life and career

Early life and education

 

Smith was born at Reading, Berkshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after a brilliant undergraduate career he was elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford. He threw his energy into the cause of university reform with another fellow of University College, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. On the Royal Commission of 1850 to inquire into the reform of the university, of which Stanley was secretary, Smith served as assistant-secretary; and he was then secretary to the commissioners appointed by the act of 1854. His position as an authority on educational reform was further recognised by a seat on the Popular Education Commission of 1858. In 1868, when the question of reform at Oxford was again growing acute, he published a pamphlet, entitled The Reorganization of the University of Oxford.

 

In 1865, he led the University of Oxford opposition to a proposal to develop Cripley Meadow north of Oxford railway station for use as a major site of Great Western Railway (GWR) workshops. His father had been a director of GWR. Instead the workshops were located in Swindon. He was public with his pro-Northern sympathies during the American Civil War, notably in a speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester in April 1863 and his Letter to a Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association the following year.

 

Besides the Universities Tests Act 1871, which abolished religious tests, many of the reforms suggested, such as the revival of the faculties, the reorganisation of the professoriate, the abolition of celibacy as a condition of the tenure of fellowships, and the combination of the colleges for lecturing purposes, were incorporated in the act of 1877, or subsequently adopted by the university. Smith gave the counsel of perfection that "pass" examinations ought to cease; but he recognised that this change "must wait on the reorganization of the educational institutions immediately below the university, at which a passman ought to finish his career." His aspiration that colonists and Americans should be attracted to Oxford was later realised by the will of Cecil Rhodes. On what is perhaps the vital problem of modern education, the question of ancient versus modern languages, he pronounced that the latter "are indispensable accomplishments, but they do not form a high mental training" – an opinion entitled to peculiar respect as coming from a president of the Modern Language Association.

 

Oxford years

 

He held the regius professorship of Modern History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866, that "ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the 'best instrument for cultivating the historical sense." As a historian, indeed, he left no abiding work; the multiplicity of his interests prevented him from concentrating on any one subject. His chief historical writings – The United Kingdom: a Political History (1899), and The United States: an Outline of Political History (1893) — though based on thorough familiarity with their subject, make no claim to original research, but are remarkable examples of terse and brilliant narrative.

 

He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1865.

 

The outbreak of the American Civil War proved a turning point in his life. Unlike most of the ruling classes in England, he championed the cause of the North, and his pamphlets, especially one entitled Does the Bible Sanction American Slavery? (1863), played a prominent part in converting English opinion. Visiting America on a lecture tour in 1864, he received an enthusiastic welcome, and was entertained at a public banquet in New York. Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., invited him to take up a teaching post at the newly founded institution. But it was not until a dramatic change in Smith's personal circumstances that led to his departure from England in 1868, that he took up the post. He had resigned his chair at Oxford in 1866 in order to attend to his father, who had suffered permanent injury in a railway accident. In the autumn of 1867, when Smith was briefly absent, his father took his own life. Possibly blaming himself for the tragedy, and now without an Oxford appointment, he decided to move to North America.

 

Cornell years

 

Smith's time at Cornell was brief, but his impact there was significant. He held the professorship of English and Constitutional History in the Department of History at Cornell University from 1868 to 1872. The addition of Smith to Cornell's faculty gave the newly opened university "instant credibility." Smith was something of an academic celebrity, and his lectures were sometimes printed in New York newspapers.

 

During Smith's time at Cornell he accepted no salary and provided much financial support to the institution. In 1869 he had his personal library shipped from England and donated to the university. He lived at Cascadilla Hall among the students, and was much beloved by them.

 

In 1871 Smith moved to Toronto to live with relatives, but retained an honorary professorship at Cornell and returned to campus frequently to lecture. When he did, he insisted on staying with the students at Cascadilla Hall rather than in a hotel. Smith bequeathed the bulk of his estate to the University in his will.

 

Smith's abrupt departure from Cornell was credited to several factors, including the Ithaca weather, Cornell's geographic isolation, Smith's health, and political tensions between Britain and America.[13] But the decisive factor in Smith's departure was the university's decision to admit women. Goldwin Smith told White that admitting women would cause Cornell to "sink at once from the rank of a University to that of an Oberlin or a high school" and that all "hopes of future greatness" would be lost by admitting women.

 

Goldwin Smith Hall

 

On June 19, 1906 Goldwin Smith Hall was dedicated, at the time Cornell's largest building and its first building dedicated to the humanities, as well as the first home to the College of Arts and Sciences. Smith personally laid the cornerstone for the building in October 1904 and attended the 1906 dedication. The Cornell Alumni News observed on the occasion, "To attempt to express even in a measure the reverence and affection which all Cornellians feel for Goldwin Smith would be attempting a hopeless task. His presence here is appreciated as the presence of no other person could be."

 

Toronto

 

In Toronto, Smith he edited the Canadian Monthly, and subsequently founded the Week and the Bystander, and where he spent the rest of his life living in The Grange manor.

 

In 1893, Smith was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. In his later years he expressed his views in a weekly journal, The Farmer's Sun, and published in 1904 My Memory of Gladstone, while occasional letters to the Spectator showed that he had lost neither his interest in English politics and social questions nor his remarkable gifts of style. He died at his residence in Toronto, The Grange.

 

Political views

 

He continued to take an active interest in English politics. As a Liberal, he opposed Benjamin Disraeli, and was a strong supporter of Irish Disestablishment, but refused to follow Gladstone in accepting Home Rule. He expressly stated that "if he ever had a political leader, his leader was John Bright, not Mr Gladstone." Causes that he powerfully attacked were Prohibition, female suffrage and state socialism, as he discussed in his Essays on Questions of the Day (revised edition, 1894). He also published sympathetic monographs on William Cowper and Jane Austen, and attempted verse in Bay Leaves and Specimens of Greek Tragedy. In his Guesses at the Riddle of Existence (1897), he abandoned the faith in Christianity that he had expressed in his lecture of 1861, Historical Progress, in which he forecast the speedy reunion of Christendom on the "basis of free conviction," and wrote in a spirit "not of Agnosticism, if Agnosticism imports despair of spiritual truth, but of free and hopeful inquiry, the way for which it is necessary to clear by removing the wreck of that upon which we can found our faith no more."

 

Anglo-Saxonism

 

Smith was considered a devout Anglo-Saxonist, deeply involved with political and racial aspects of English nationhood and British colonialism. He believed the Anglo-Saxon "race" excluded Irish people but could extend to Welsh and Lowland Scots within the context of the United Kingdom's greater empire. Speaking in 1886, he referred to his "standing by the side of John Bright against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the West, as I now stand against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the East." These words form the key to his views of the future of the British Empire and he was a leading light of the anti-imperialist "Little Englander" movement.

 

Smith thought that Canada was destined by geography to enter the United States. In his view, separated as it is by north–south barriers, into zones communicating naturally with adjoining portions of the United States, it was an artificial and badly-governed nation. It would break away from the British Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons of the North American continent would become one nation. These views are most fully stated in his Canada and the Canadian Question (1891). Donald Creighton writes that Smith was most ably rebutted by George Monro Grant in the Canadian Magazine.

 

British imperialism

 

Smith identified as an anti-imperialist, describing himself as "anti-Imperialistic to the core," yet he was deeply penetrated with a sense of the greatness of the British race. Of the British empire in India he said that "it is the noblest the world has seen... Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there." His fear was that England would become a nation of factory-workers, thinking more of their trade-union than of their country. He was also opposed to Britain granting more representative government to India, expressing fear that this would lead to a "murderous anarchy."

 

His opinion of British activity in the Transvaal was well voiced in the Canadian press and in his book In The Court of History: An Apology of Canadians Opposed to the Boer War (1902). This work is a fascinating articulation of pacifist opposition to the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. It is important because it is amongst the few expressions of opposition toward from the perspective of an Anglo-colonial settler. His anti-imperialism was intensified and made manifest in his Commonwealth or Empire? (1902), a warning to the United States against the assumption of imperial responsibilities.

 

Antisemitism

 

Smith had virulently anti-Jewish views. Labelled as "the most vicious anti-Semite in the English-speaking world", he referred to Jews as "parasites" who absorb "the wealth of the community without adding to it". Research by Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick has studied Smith's writings, which claimed that Jews were responsible for a form of "repulsion" they provoked in others, due to his assertion of their "peculiar character and habits", including a "preoccupation with money-making", which made them "enemies of civilization". He also denigrated brit milah, or circumcision, as a "barborous rite", and proposed assimilating Jews or deporting them to Palestine as a solution to the "Jewish problem".

 

Smith wrote, "The Jewish objective has always been the same, since Roman times. We regard our race as superior to all humanity, and we do not seek our ultimate union with other races, but our final triumph over them." He had a strong influence on William Lyon Mackenzie King and Henri Bourassa.

 

He proposed elsewhere that Jews and Arabs were of the same race. He also believed that Islamic oppression of non-Muslims was for economic factors.

 

In December 2020, the Cornell University Board of Trust voted to remove Smith's name from the honorific titles of twelve professors at Cornell. The Board took this action in recognition of Smith's published misogynistic, racist, and anti-Semitic views. The Board declined to rename Goldwin Smith Hall.

 

Legacy

 

Goldwin Smith is credited with the quote "Above all nations is humanity," an inscription that was engraved in a stone bench he offered to Cornell in May 1871. The bench sits in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, named in his honour. This quote is the motto of the University of Hawaii and other institutions around the world (for example, the Cosmopolitan Club at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign).

 

Another stone bench inscribed with the motto, sits on the campus of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. It sits with a clear view down onto the city.

 

After his death, a plaque in his memory was erected outside his birthplace in the town centre of Reading. This still exists, outside the entrance to the Harris Arcade.

 

www.biographi.ca/en/bio/smith_goldwin_13E.html

 

SMITH, GOLDWIN, writer, journalist, and controversialist; b. 13 Aug. 1823 in Reading, England, son of Richard Pritchard Smith, an Oxford-educated physician and railway promoter and director, and Elizabeth Breton, and the only one of their seven children to survive to adulthood; d. 7 June 1910 in Toronto.

 

After attending a private school and Eton College, Goldwin Smith in 1841 went to Christ Church and then in 1842 to Magdalen College, both at Oxford. He was awarded a first class in literae humaniores and obtained a ba in 1845 and an ma in 1848. He also carried off a series of prizes in classical studies, including one for a Latin essay on the position of women in ancient Greece. He both translated and wrote Latin verse, interests he would retain throughout his life. His education was intended as a preparation for the law and in 1842 his name had been entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar in 1850 but he never pursued a legal career.

 

When Smith was at Oxford the university was racked with religious controversy which focused on John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement. Smith apparently admired Newman’s style but he was repelled by the movement’s ritualistic tendencies and its affinities with Roman Catholicism. Although he was a member of the Church of England, as was required of all Oxford students at the time, his mother’s Huguenot background may have contributed to his developing religious liberalism and dislike of clericalism. He would remain interested in religious issues until the end of his life, but his knowledge of theology was superficial. In addition, his understanding of the scientific controversies that were beginning to arise in pre-Darwinian Oxford was modest and was probably gained at the geological lectures of William Buckland, who upheld William Paley’s view that God’s existence was demonstrated by design in nature. Although Smith would come to accept a version of evolution and to realize, as he wrote in 1883, that it had “wrought a great revolution,” he never fully understood Charles Darwin’s hypothesis.

 

Smith spent the late 1840s in London and in travels on the Continent with Oxford friends. His growing interest in liberal reforms, especially in reducing the privileged status of the Church of England, was stimulated by events and personalities at home and abroad, though he quickly joined the side of authority during the Chartist disturbances in 1848. His first reformist thrusts were directed at Oxford. A fellow in civil law at University College from 1846, he joined in a demand for a reduction in clerical control over the university. Partly as a result of the agitation, which included letters from Smith to the Times of London in 1850, a royal commission, with Smith as assistant secretary, was struck in that year to investigate the university. The commission reported in 1852 and the Oxford University Act two years later relaxed but did not abolish religious tests.

 

During his years with the royal commission Smith widened his contacts in the political and intellectual world and turned to journalism, which was to be his permanent vocation. In 1850 he began contributing to the Morning Chronicle and in 1855 to the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, both published in London, reviewing poetry and advocating university reform. In 1858 he was made a member of a new royal commission, chaired by the Duke of Newcastle, to examine Britain’s educational system, and he wrote part of the report which appeared in 1862. Meanwhile, also in 1858, the Conservative government of Lord Derby appointed Smith regius professor of modern history at Oxford. This post carried such prestige that Smith, who was only 35, might have been expected to settle into it for the rest of his life. In 1861 he indicated his intention to withdraw from active journalism and devote himself to his new profession as an historian. He apparently planned to write some serious scholarly works, but this goal proved incompatible with his intense interest in contemporary affairs. Lack of detachment was the most prominent characteristic of Smith’s historical writing. He always knew which side was right. For him history was not an arid, scientific search for objective accuracy. “History,” he argued, “without moral philosophy, is a mere string of facts; and moral philosophy, without history, is apt to become a dream.”

 

Smith used his chair largely to engage in controversies over political and religious questions. Although he was undoubtedly a stimulating and devoted lecturer and tutor, he showed no interest in original research and published nothing of scholarly merit. His later historical publications and literary biographies, including histories of the United States and the United Kingdom and studies on William Cowper and Jane Austen, were little more than a reworking of secondary sources usually spiced up with a dose of his principles and prejudices. He was a man of letters, not a research scholar, and he also published travel books and Latin and Greek authors in translation. His first book was typical. Of his five Lectures on modern history (1861), three dealt with religious controversies related to rationalism and agnosticism, another with the idea of progress, and only one with a historical topic, the founding of the American colonies. Though denying that history was a science, Smith was quite prepared to draw moral laws from his reading of the past. In the first place, he considered “the laws of the production and distribution of wealth . . . the most beautiful and wonderful of the natural laws of God. . . . To buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, the supposed concentration of economical selfishness, is simply to fulfil the commands of the Creator.” These laws, discovered by Adam Smith, whom he viewed as a prophet, expressed a tenet of political economy from which he would never deviate: a market economy guided by the “hidden hand” was divinely sanctioned and if faithfully observed would lead to a just social order. Secondly, Smith’s reading of history convinced him that religion provided the cement holding the social order in place. “Religion,” he warned those who contended that progress had made Christianity obsolete, “is the very core, centre, and vital support of our social and political organization; so that without a religion the civil tie would be loosened, personal would completely prevail over public motives, selfish ambition and cupidity would break loose in all directions, and society and the body politic would be in danger of dissolution.”

 

To these lessons of history Smith added a third which would serve as a permanent guide to his judgements on the way of the world, a conviction that “colonial emancipation” should take place as rapidly as possible because it was – except for India and Ireland – inevitable. This conclusion appeared in a series of articles published in the London Daily News in 1862–63 and then in pamphlet form as The empire in 1863. There he presented a distillation of the opinions of his friends John Bright, Richard Cobden, and others of the so-called Manchester school who believed that Britain’s economic power, under free trade, was so great that the formal, political empire could be disbanded without economic loss. The lesson of the American revolution, for Smith a disaster which had divided the Anglo-Saxon people, was simply that colonies should be allowed to grow naturally into nations. Once they were freed of the yoke of dependency, “something in the nature of a great Anglo-Saxon federation may, in substance if not form, spontaneously arise out of affinity and mutual affection.” Though condemned by the Times and attacked by Benjamin Disraeli as one of the “prigs and pedants” who should make way for statesmen, Smith clung tenaciously to his anti-imperial faith.

 

A drastic alteration in Smith’s personal circumstances led to his departure from England in 1868. He had resigned his chair at Oxford in 1866 in order to attend to his father, who had suffered permanent injury in a railway accident. In the autumn of 1867, when Smith was briefly absent, his father took his own life. Doubtless blaming himself for the tragedy – and now without an Oxford appointment – he decided to travel to North America, which he had previously visited in 1864, when Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., invited him to take up a teaching post at the newly founded institution. Smith was attracted by the determination of its founder, Ezra Cornell, to organize a university that was non-sectarian and open to all classes of society, though he had no sympathy for its commitment to coeducation. He remained at Cornell on a full-time basis for only two years but his connection with the university, which in 1906 named a building after him, continued for life. Whether it was the climate or the presence of women, admitted in 1869, that caused Smith to leave, he decided in 1871 to move to Toronto and to be near some relatives. Four years later that move became permanent as a consequence of his marriage in Toronto on 3 Sept. 1875 to William Henry Boulton*’s widow, Harriet Elizabeth Mann, née Dixon, who was two years his junior, an American by birth, and possessor of a significant fortune which included the estate named the Grange. Smith settled into a late-blooming marital bliss and the Grange’s affluent surroundings with ease: “a union for the afternoon and evening of life,” he told his American friend Charles Eliot Norton. He was, as he remarked after Harriet died in 1909, “finally bound to Canada by the happiest event of my life.”

 

The marriage, a personal healing of the unfortunate breach of 1776, was an extremely successful one. After years of transiency and a life seemingly limited to male friendships, Smith had found a perfect mate. His new wife was socially sophisticated and apparently utterly devoted to her austere husband who, in contrast to her first, spent his waking hours in reading, writing, and good talk. His circle of friends and visitors, the intellectual élite of the English-speaking world, joined local celebrities and politicians in the drawing-room of the Grange. “Here one is suddenly set down in an old English house,” Albert Venn Dicey wrote, “surrounded by grounds, with old four-post beds, old servants, all English, and English hosts . . . an English mansion in some English county.” For the remaining 35 years of his life, Smith lived in Canada, but he was never quite of it. From his “English mansion,” this talented and acerbic political and literary critic would hurl his jeremiads at a world that irritatingly deviated from the Manchester liberal faith in which he was steeped.

 

The move to Canada and marriage and domestic tranquillity did nothing to diminish Smith’s intellectual energy or his eagerness to improve public morality. Indeed, what he viewed as the underdeveloped, overly partisan state of Canadian public discussion spurred him on to greater effort. No sooner had he arrived in Toronto than he began reviewing for the Globe, but he quickly fell out with George Brown*, the paper’s proprietor, whose dogmatic righteousness brooked no competition. Smith soon turned to a series of attempts to establish independent organs, though independence usually meant agreement with Smith. First, he assisted Graeme Mercer Adam* in the founding of the Canadian Monthly and National Review (Toronto), where in February 1872 he adopted the nom de plume that would become his most characteristic signature, A Bystander. It was intended to imply that he was an outsider and therefore detached and analytical. In fact, it was soon obvious enough to readers that the author was a committed, often fierce, partisan, even if somewhat of an outsider. When the supporters of the Canada First movement launched the Nation in Toronto in 1874, Smith signed on as one of the principal contributors, both financially and as a writer. Then, in April 1876, he participated in a more ambitious project, the establishment, with John Ross Robertson* as publisher, of the Evening Telegram, a daily to compete with Brown’s Globe. It soon developed Conservative sympathies and Smith departed.

 

In June 1878 Smith returned to Toronto following an 18-month sojourn with Harriet in England more convinced than ever that the country needed the benefit of his intellectual guidance. Within a year he opened his own one-man show, the Bystander, subtitled “A monthly review of current events, Canadian and general.” The performance was a breathtaking one. For three years Smith’s outpourings filled its pages with brilliant, opinionated comment on virtually every political, cultural, and intellectual development in Europe and North America. He was determined to broaden the mental horizons of Canadians and by 1880 was pleased to admit that “the great questions of religious philosophy are beginning to engage a good many Canadian minds.” He expounded Adam Smith’s political economy, denounced women’s suffrage as a threat to the family, warned of the dangers of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, castigated Bismarck, expatiated on the Eastern Question, and sniped at Disraeli. He even found space, when Sarah Bernhardt visited Canada in 1881, to agree with Bishop Édouard-Charles Fabre* and the Presbyterian (Montreal) in condemning her for her unsanctified liaisons. The Bystander’s suspicious eye frequently detected clerical power in Quebec and Ireland, and Jewish control over the European press. When Smith decided to give his active pen a rest in June 1881, he had established himself as a vigorous intellectual voice in Canada. A second series of the Bystander, this time published quarterly from January to October 1883, began after his return from another lengthy stay in England. The third and final series appeared between October 1889 and September 1890. In the interim he lent his support to another new journal, the Week, edited by Charles George Douglas Roberts*, which began publication in December 1883. Smith’s final venture in Canadian journalism came in 1896 when he acquired a controlling interest in the faltering Canada Farmers’ Sun (Toronto), a paper which, under George Weston Wrigley, had actively supported such radical causes as the political insurgency of the Patrons of Industry. The Bystander promptly put the paper back on orthodox rails by calling for free trade, retrenchment, and opposition to Canadian participation in the South African War. All of this activity still left time for a flood of articles in the international press: the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, and the Nineteenth Century, a Monthly Review in London, the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, and the Sun, the Nation, and the Forum in New York. Indeed, he published in any daily or monthly that would print his articles, reviews, and letters. His output was prodigious, the writing crisp and often epigrammatic.

 

Smith’s activities were not confined to intellectual labour. A public-spirited person, he devoted both money and energy to a variety of causes. Civic affairs especially concerned him for he believed that local governments should take greater responsibility for the welfare of citizens than was the case in Toronto. He chaired a citizens’ reform committee, advocated the commission system for city government, fought for the preservation and extension of parks for public recreation, campaigned for Sunday streetcars, and opposed free public lending libraries. (“A novel library,” he told Andrew Carnegie, “is to women mentally pretty much what the saloon is physically to men.”) He was distressed by problems of urban unemployment and poverty, and contributed generously to such charities and benevolent societies as the Associated City Charities of Toronto, which he founded, and the St Vincent de Paul Society. He also supported the building of a synagogue. For two decades he urged the appointment of a city welfare officer to supervise grants to social agencies, a cause that succeeded in 1893 only after Smith agreed to pay the officer’s salary for the first two years. Underlying these and other humanitarian endeavours was a philosophy of noblesse oblige, the Christian duty of the fortunate towards their weaker brethren. He feared that the failure of Christian voluntary charity would increase the popularity of those who advocated radical social programs. “Care for their own safety, then, as well as higher considerations, counsels the natural leaders of society to be at the post of duty,” Smith told a conference of the combined charities of Toronto in May 1889.

 

Education was another concern which Smith brought with him to Canada. In 1874 he was elected by Ontario teachers to represent them on the Council of Public Instruction and he was subsequently chosen president of the Ontario Teachers’ Association. But once again, university reform captured his deepest interest, and as in so many things, he advocated reforms that revealed his Oxford connections. Almost from the time of his arrival he proposed the federation of Ontario’s scattered universities on an Oxford model. He followed progress towards that federation in the 1880s and 1890s, regularly participating in University of Toronto functions and advocating university autonomy. In 1905 he accepted membership on, but not the chair of, a royal commission on the University of Toronto. One outcome was a new act in 1906 establishing a board of governors for the university, to which Smith was appointed. Among the many honorary degrees which Smith received from the great universities of the English-speaking world he must have particularly savoured the one conferred on him in 1902 by the University of Toronto; six years earlier he had withdrawn his name from nomination for a degree in the face of the furious opposition of George Taylor Denison* and other imperial federationists who protested against the granting of the degree to a “traitor.”

 

For all of his breadth of knowledge and interest, Smith’s overriding concern was the contemporary world. His reputation rests on that collection of ideas which he regularly, and with remarkable consistency, applied to the issues of his time. Though he has most often been categorized as a “Victorian liberal,” it is not his liberal principles but rather his faith in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization that is his most striking trait. That faith not only frequently contradicted his liberalism, but also, in its application to Canada, limited his ability to understand and sympathize with the aspirations of the people among whom he had chosen to take up residence.

 

Smith’s liberalism expressed itself most fulsomely in his commitment to free market economics, the secularization of public life, and opposition to empire. Though a firm believer in individualism and parliamentary government, Smith showed no special interest in civil liberties, except in his criticism of clericalism, and he favoured neither universal manhood nor women’s suffrage. He distrusted democracy and pronounced the French revolution (an event admired by most liberals) “of all the events in history, the most calamitous.” Inequality, he believed, was mankind’s permanent condition. While he repeatedly professed sympathy for labour and supported trade unions, he abhorred strikes and denounced as “chimeras” those reforms – single tax, currency inflation, public ownership, the regulation of hours of work – which labour radicals began to advocate in the late 19th century; progress he thought possible, but “there is no leaping into the millennium.” Although limited government intervention in the economy might sometimes be justified (he reluctantly supported Sir John A. Macdonald*’s arguments for a National Policy), collectivism and socialism were anathema. He opposed income tax, old-age pensions, and even publicly financed education. In his introduction to Essays on questions of the day (1893), he summed up his social philosophy by confessing that “the opinions of the present writer are those of a Liberal of the old school as yet unconverted to State Socialism, who looks for further improvement not to an increase of the authority of government, but to the same agencies, moral, intellectual, and economical, which have brought us thus far, and one of which, science, is now operating with immensely increased power.” Clearly, it was not just “state socialism” that had failed to convert the master of the Grange; the new social liberalism of Thomas Hill Green and Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse was equally heretical to him. Indeed, by the late Victorian era one of Smith’s own adages could reasonably be applied to its author: “There is no reactionary,” the Bystander informed the readers of the Week in 1884, “like the exhausted Reformer.”

 

Had Smith’s social philosophy become threadbare merely as a result of the passage of time, then he might none the less rank as a significant liberal, if only of the “old school.” But the limits of his liberalism are even more evident when placed in the context of his nationalism – his belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority. In common with most 19th-century political thinkers, especially liberals, Smith believed that “nations” were “an ordinance of nature, and a natural bond.” Like John Stuart Mill, and in contrast to Lord Acton, he defined a nation in terms of the concept of cultural homogeneity. And although he opposed imperialism, he was nevertheless utterly at one with those imperialists who believed that the Anglo-Saxon cultural community, centred in Great Britain with branches around the world, was a superior civilization. Its political institutions, economic system, morality, and culture were all signs of its primacy in a world of diverse nations. In his first, and most famous, critique of the empire, he gave voice to his own form of nationalism, one which verged on cultural imperialism. “I am no more against Colonies than I am against the solar system,” he wrote in The empire. “I am against dependencies, when nations are fit to be independent. If Canada were made an independent nation she would still be a Colony of England, and England would still be her Mother Country in the full sense in which those names have been given to the most famous examples of Colonization in history. Our race and language, our laws and liberties, will be hers.”

 

For Smith the great failure, even tragedy, of Anglo-Saxon history was the American revolution. “Before their unhappy schism they were one people,” and the healing of that schism through the “moral, diplomatic and commercial union of the whole English-speaking race throughout the world” became the goal to which all else was secondary. He shared that goal with those Canadians who advocated imperial federation – Denison, George Monro Grant, George Robert Parkin* – but because his chosen route began with the annexation of Canada to the United States he found himself in permanent head-to-head combat with those same men.

 

Smith’s convictions about the superiority of Anglo-Saxon values are most strikingly illustrated in his attitude towards “lesser breeds without the Law.” His advocacy of colonial freedom was limited to those colonies which had English majorities. India, a conquered territory, was exempt; for Britain to relinquish what he called this “splendid curse” would be to abdicate its responsibility and leave the subcontinent to certain anarchy. If India troubled Smith, Ireland infuriated him. He mistrusted Roman Catholicism everywhere; in Ireland he despised it. As an ethnic group the Irish were an “amiable but thriftless, uncommercial, saint-worshipping, priest-ridden race.” He fought Home Rule as though his very life depended upon its defeat. “Statesmen might as well provide the Irish people with Canadian snowshoes,” he declaimed sarcastically, “as extend to them the Canadian Constitution.” His one-time associate William Ewart Gladstone was denounced as “an unspeakable old man” when he took up the Irish cause.

 

Other non-Anglo-Saxon groups fared little better. Though Smith occasionally expressed sympathy for “the wild-stocks of humanity” – the people of Africa, for example – he saw no reason to lament the oppressed state of the native North American. The doomed state of the native people was not the fault of the British who “had always treated [them] with humanity and justice”; with their disappearance, “little will be lost by humanity,” he concluded callously.

 

For the Jewish people, Smith reserved a special place in his catalogue of “undesirables.” The critical problem with the Jews was what Smith saw as their stubborn unwillingness to assimilate, to give up their religious beliefs and cultural practices, to become “civilized.” He regularly stereotyped them as “tribal,” “usurious,” “plutopolitans,” incapable of loyalty to their country of residence. The Talmud, the Bystander affirmed, “is a code of casuistical legalism . . . of all reactionary productions the most debased, arid, and wretched.” If the Jews would not assimilate they should be returned to their homeland. In a sentence that reeked with racist arrogance he declared that “two greater calamities perhaps have never befallen mankind than the transportation of the negro and the dispersion of the Jews.” Smith’s extreme ethnocentricity in the case of the Jewish people, as Gerald Tulchinsky has shown, can only be described as anti-Semitism.

 

Smith’s belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority and the importance that he attached to the reunification of the “race” provided him with both his questions and his answers when he analysed “Canada and the Canadian question.” On his arrival in Toronto Smith had discovered a nascent nationalist movement. He threw his support behind this amorphous group of young men whose platform was set out in William Alexander Foster*’s pamphlet Canada First; or, our new nationality: an address (Toronto, 1871), which called for the promotion of a national sentiment and the clarification of Canada’s status in the empire as well as for a number of political reforms. While Smith believed that the movement would promote Canadian independence, others favoured some form of equal partnership with the other members of the empire. For a time the movement attracted the sympathy of the prominent Liberal party intellectual Edward Blake*, but by the mid 1870s it had disintegrated, and its organ, the Nation, disappeared in 1876. This brief experience apparently convinced Smith that Canada could never become a genuine nation and that its destiny lay in union with the United States. In 1877 he set out these conclusions in an article for the Fortnightly Review and then in the Canadian Monthly, conclusions which he would repeat over the remainder of his life and which found their most famous expression in his Canada and the Canadian question in 1891. At the heart of his case was the claim that Canada could not be a nation because it lacked cultural homogeneity. The principal obstacle to nationhood was Quebec, composed as it was of an “unprogressive, religious, submissive, courteous, and, though poor, not unhappy people. . . . They are governed by the priest, with the occasional assistance of the notary. . . . The French-Canadians . . . retain their exclusive national character.” Confederation had failed to meld the competing “races” and regions into a single community and only political corruption, bribes to the regions, and the vested interests which benefited from the protective tariff kept this artificial country from collapsing. “Sectionalism,” he had written in 1878, “still reigns in everything, from the composition of a Cabinet down to that of a Wimbledon Rifle team.” In Smith’s mind the natural geographical and economic forces of North America worked against the unnatural political and sentimental opinions of Canadians. Like the United States, Canada was a North American nation and once this fact was recognized the two communities would achieve their destiny in unity. “The more one sees of society in the New World, the more convinced one is that its structure essentially differs from that of society in the Old World, and that the feudal element has been eliminated completely and forever.” Everything pointed towards “an equal and honorable alliance like that of Scotland and England” between Canada and her southern neighbour, “Canadian nationality being a lost cause.”

 

Over the years Smith’s conviction about Canada’s destiny intensified, his observation of French Canada hardening his hostility to that community. By 1891 he was willing to state emphatically that one of the principal benefits of union with the United States would be the final solution of the French Canadian problem. “Either the conquest of Quebec was utterly fatuous or it is to be desired that the American Continent should belong to the English tongue and to Anglo-Saxon civilisation.” Though the opposition of French Canadians to the South African War moderated these sentiments somewhat – Smith even considered joining forces with Henri Bourassa* in an anti-imperialist movement – he continued to fear, as he told Bourassa in 1905, “the connexion of your national aspirations with those of an ambitious and aggressive priesthood.” His ideal of cultural homogeneity left no room for a political nationality based on cultural diversity, the cornerstone of confederation. For him the call of race was irresistible: “In blood and character, language, religion, institutions, laws and interests, the two portions of the Anglo-Saxon race on this continent are one people.”

 

In all of his pronouncements on politics, economics, and Canada’s destiny, Smith seemed a self-confident, even dogmatic, pundit. But underneath that confidence was a profoundly uneasy man. The unease arose not only from Smith’s personal religious uncertainty but even more from his anxiety about the future of society in an age of religious scepticism. Though Smith does not seem to have experienced that typical Victorian “crisis of faith,” Darwinism and the higher criticism of the Bible certainly left him with little more than a thin deism and a vague humanism founded on Christian ethics. Throughout his life he struggled with religious questions, and his inconclusive answers were recorded in his Guesses at the riddle of existence (1897). But it was always to the social implications of the decline of faith that he returned. In an essay entitled “The prospect of a moral interregnum,” published in 1879, he observed: “That which prevails as Agnosticism among philosophers and the highly educated prevails as secularism among mechanics, and in that form is likely soon to breed mutinous questionings about the present social order among those who get the poorer share, and who can no longer be appeased by promises of compensation in another world.” For 30 years he repeated this gloomy theme, revealing his forebodings about the decline and fall of practically everything he accepted as eternal verities. Everywhere “prophets of unrest” loomed – Karl Marx, Henry George, Edward Bellamy, assorted socialists and anarchists, and the leaders of “the revolt of women” – questioning the established order, no longer satisfied by the opiate of religion. His increasingly shrill polemics signified his alienation from a world that had passed him by. He was simply too set in his ways to admit, as he was urged to do by Alphonse Desjardins*, the leader of the Quebec cooperative movement, “that improvements can be got by recognizing that the old liberal school of Political Economy has not discovered everything.”

 

Harriet Smith died at the Grange on 9 Sept. 1909. The following March the old man slipped and broke his thigh. He died on 7 June 1910 and was buried in St James cemetery. The Grange, which remained his wife’s property, was willed by her to the city of Toronto to serve as a public art gallery. The £20,000 Smith had inherited from his father had grown to more than $830,000 by the time of his death. He left his excellent library to the University of Toronto. Most of his fortune and his private papers went to Cornell University as a mark, Smith’s will revealingly declared, of his “attachment as an Englishman to the union of the two branches of our race on this continent with each other, and with their common mother.”

 

Ramsay Cook

A print from the Phillip Medhurst Collection (published by Revd. Philip De Vere at St.George's Court, Kidderminster, England)

"Jesus said to them, "Come and have breakfast." Now none of the disciples dared ask him, "Who are you?" They knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and so with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was raised from the dead." (John 21:12-14)

 

The church of the Primacy in Tabhga by the Sea of Galilee contains a limestone rock which is venerated as a "Mensa Christi", Latin for 'table of Christ'. According to tradition this is the spot where Jesus is said to have laid out a breakfast of bread and fish for the Apostles, and then told Peter to "feed my sheep" after the miraculous catch.

sometimes being political "friends" can be lethal .

in the words of Henry Kisenger :

"The word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

 

m.youtube.com/watch?v=NduM-85k_a0&pp=ygUXU3RldmUga3Vz...

  

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!

 

Some background:

The Vickers Type 287 was a British 1930s light bomber built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Brooklands near Weybridge, Surrey, for the Royal Air Force. The Type 287 was originally built as a private venture and designed as a single-engine monoplane with a very high aspect ratio wing, and a manually operated, retractable undercarriage. It used the same geodetic design principles for both the fuselage and wings that had been derived from that used by Barnes Wallis in the airship R100. As it was not known how the geodetic structure could cope with being disrupted by a bomb bay, the Wellesley's bomb load was carried in two streamlined panniers under the wings.

 

The RAF ultimately ordered a total of 176 of the two-seater aircraft, with a 14-month production run starting in March 1937, and it was introduced into service the same year.

While it was obsolete by the start of the Second World War, and unsuited to the European air war. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the Wellesley had been phased out from home based squadrons, with only four examples remaining in Britain, but remained in service with three squadrons based in the Middle East. The Wellesley Mk. I bomber was successfully used in the desert theatres of East Africa, Egypt and the Middle East, where it was used until 1942.

While the Wellesley was not a significant combat aircraft, the design principles that were tested in its construction were put to good use with the Wellington medium bomber that became one of the main types of RAF Bomber Command in the early years of the European war.

 

The GR Mk. IV (Type 301) was a late special development for the RAF Coastal Command. It was actually a stopgap solution - during the first three years of the Second World War, Coastal Command and the Admiralty fought a continuous battle with the RAF and Air Ministry over the primacy of trade defense in relation to the bomber effort against mainland Germany, a strategic tussle which conceivably could have cost the Western Alliance the Battle of the Atlantic. The Air Staff and Bomber Command enjoyed the backing of Churchill and the maritime air effort struggled to receive the recognition it needed. On the outbreak of war, the Coastal Command’s order of battle listed just 298 aircraft, of which only 171 were operational.

 

Owing to the starvation of resources, even as late as March 1943 the Atlantic supply lines were being threatened. This situation arose as a direct result of the lack of very long-range aircraft. The Wellesley, even though basically outdated, offered a quick and proven basis for a radar-equipped maritime reconnaissance aircraft, especially for the Mediterranean, Middle East and African theatres, as these were regarded as less risky than the battle of the Atlantic or over the North Sea.

 

The Wellesley GR Mk. IV was a heavily modified version of the Mark I, built from existing airframes that were returned to Great Britain for conversion at Weybridge and Chester. A total of 28 aircraft were modified in early 1942.

 

The GR Mk. IV featured an ASV Mark III radar with a radome under the fuselage and additional mast antennae on fuselage and wings. The crew rose to three, as an operator for the ASV radar joined pilot and navigator/gunner, was placed behind the pilot.

In order to improve survivability the aircraft's defensive armament was considerably improved: instead of a single .303 in (7.7 mm) Vickers K machine gun in the Mk. I's rear cockpit, a powered dorsal turret, equipped with four 0.303 in (7.7 mm) Browning machine guns, was installed. The Brownings were electrically fired and insulated cut-off points in the turret ring prevented the guns firing when they were pointing at the propeller disc or tailplane.

The wing-mounted .303 in (7.7 mm) Vickers machine gun was retained, as well as the capability to carry up to 2,000 lb (907 kg) of bomb ordnance in underwing panniers. These were modified to carry up to four 450 lb (200 kg) Mark VII depth charges and an array of flash bombs for night missions, as the GR Mk. IV could not carry a Leigh Light.

 

In order to keep overall performance up despite the additional equipment on board and the extra drag created through radome and gun turret, the original Bristol Pegasus XX 9 cylinder radial piston engine with 925 hp (690 kW) was replaced by a 14 cylinder 1.525 hp (1.121 kW) Hercules VI powerplant.

The complete front of the engine had to be modified in order to take the heavier and much more powerful engine, similar to the Type 289 and 292 long range conversions of the basic Wellesley. As a further means of keeping the performance up, parts of the original steel fuselage structure were replaced by light alloy elements.

 

All GR Mk. IV's were sent to the Mediterranean theatre in summer 1942, primarily for defensive tasks, e. g. defending supply lines. The aircraft also took part in Operation Torch (initially called Operation Gymnast), the British-American invasion of French North Africa in World War II during the North African Campaign, which started on 8 November 1942.

 

By 1943 Coastal Command finally received the recognition it needed and its operations proved decisive in the victory over the U-Boats, and when more powerful Vickers Wellington aircraft became available, the Wellesleys of Coastal Command were withdrawn or deployed to Greece, and performed various support duties during the RAF interference in the Greek Civil War. By 1944, the last aircraft had been retired.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 3

Length: 39 ft 3 in (11.96 m)

Wingspan: 74 ft 7 in (22.73 m)

Height: 15 ft 3½ in (4.67 m)

Wing area: 630 ft² [11] (58.5 m²)

Empty weight: 6,760 lb (3,066 kg)

Loaded weight: 11,048 lb (5,011 kg)

Max. takeoff weight: 12,500 lb (5,670 kg)

 

Powerplant:

1× Bristol Hercules VI, rated at 1,675 hp (1,250 kW)

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 228 mph (198 kn, 369 km/h) at 19,700 ft (6,000 m)

Cruise speed: 180 mph (157 kn, 290 km/h) at 15,000 ft (4,600 m) (57% power)

Range: 1,220 mi (1,963 km)

Service ceiling: 25,500 ft (7,772 m)

Wing loading: 18 lb/ft² (86 kg/m²)

Power/mass: 0.08 hp/lb (0.14 kW/kg)

Climb to 15,000 ft (4,600 m): 17.8 min

 

Armament:

5× .303 in (7.7 mm) Vickers machine guns, one fixed forward in the right wing, four in a dorsal powered turret

Up to 2.000 lb (907 kg) of bombs in underwing panniers

  

The kit and its assembly:

Honestly, this kit conversion was inspired by an idea from fellow users (NARSES2 and pyro-manic) at whatifmodelers.com, who suggested a Wellesley in Coastal Command service. I have always liked these aircraft's elegant livery with a dark top side, white undersides and a very high waterline - and using THIS on a Wellesley, which traditionally carried Dark Green/Dark Earth uppers and Night (Black) undersides, would certainly look cool.

 

But it would certainly not remain a standard Mk. I bomber for sure, and as I cooked up a story I found the idea of a re-engined, radar-equipped reconnaissance aircraft pretty convincing - the Wellesley's long range and payload (the thing could carry more than it weighed itself!) made it an excellent choice.

 

The basis is the vintage Matchbox kit, which actually has some nice features. The geodetic surface is fine and not over-emphasized, just the landing gear is rather poor - I decided to drill open the landing gear wells and add some interior, as the kit offers OOB offer neither a well nor any detail. Inside, I glued parts from a plastic cookie box - not intended to be realistic, I just wanted to have some depth and structure.

As further means to enhance the overall look I also lowered the flaps, which was easy to realize.

 

Engine conversion to a Hercules (from a Matchbox Wellington bomber) was straightforward, as the Wellesley kit not only offers the original Jupiter engine of the Mk. I. bomber, but also an alternative, streamlined engine cowling for the Type 292 Long Range Development Aircraft. This offers a nice adapter for the Hercules – and with the bigger propeller and a spinner, this changes the look of the Wellesley a lot.

 

In order to beef up rearward defense I decided to implant a powered gun turret - a quadruple .303 turret from a Boulton Paul Defiant. The turret was taken from a Pavla kit and consists of styrene and resin parts, plus a vacu canopy. The gunner is a personal addition, I think it comes from a Matchbox Privateer, from one of the optional dorsal turrets.

Mounting the Defiant turret in the fuselage was tricky, as the turret is relatively wide, almost the same diameter as the Wellesley’s. I placed it where the original navigator cockpit with the rearwards-facing Vicker K is located. I carefully opened up the fuselage around that opening until the turret would fit, and then added covers made from styrene strips so that the whole thing would look a bit organic and streamlined. Inside, the turret sits on a styrene axis, so that it can be inserted/taken out at will. Very handy during painting, and the construction makes the turret 360° turnable.

 

Otherwise, the interior was taken OOB, as there’s hardly anything to identify once the canopy is fitted. The latter would remain closed, anyway.

 

The radome under the fuselage was a late addition: originally I had planned to add antenna masts for an ASV Mk. II radar, but then found the ASV Mk. III radome from the aforementioned Matchbox Wellington kit. As the Wellesley did not have a bomb bay, that space between the landing gear was just perfect. And while it would not be necessary I still added some antenna masts (scratched from heated sprues) under the wings and on the fuselage flanks - it just looks cool... ;)

  

Painting and markings:

The interior (cockpit, turret, landing gear) was painted in classic Interior Green (Humbrol 78).

 

On the outside, rather simple, classic Coastal Command colors were used: Dark Sea Grey and Dark Slate Grey on the upper side, with the pattern taken from the RAF Wellesley, and white undersides with a very high waterline and white leading edges on the wings.

 

Painting started with the lower sides – I used spray paint from the rattle can, since the large areas are hard to paint, esp. with white. Consequently I rather used a very light grey (RAL 7047, Telegrau 4), since pure white would be too bright/ by tendency. The color pictures I consulted for reference suggest that these machines would easily tend to become dirty, much room for weathering! After basic spray painting, the “white” areas received a counter-shading and dry-brushing with Humbrol 196 (RAL 7035, Lichtgrau), which is slightly more yellow-ish and lighter than RAL 7047.

 

After that had dried up, waterlines and leading edges were masked with Tamiya Tape, for the upper colors. Humbrol 27 and 224 were used as basic enamel colors, as they are the darkest tones for the job. Later, these were treated with Modelmasters’ 2056 and 2059, in order to weather the upper surfaces and work out the geodetic structure – similar procedure as for the lower surfaces.

 

The kit received a wash with black ink and serious dry-brushing in order to work out the wonderful surface structure - basically with some Humbrol 64 (Light Sea Grey) all around - no pure white has been used on the kit at all. Dirt, soot and stains were added with grinded graphite and thinned Humbrol 224.

 

Decals were puzzled together from the scrap box, from various RAF aircraft. Even though I took 179th Squadron Wellingtons as benchmark, I decided to add a full three-digit code with dull red letters – it adds an eye-catcher to the aircraft’s flanks, and the letters come from a MIcroscale aftermarket sheet.

The respective Wellingtons only had scarce markings and just single-letter codes (the full squadron code, "OZ", had obviously been omitted?).

  

In the end, not a major conversion, but the different paint scheme and the more massive nose change the overall look of the Wellesley considerably. I am quite happy with the result.

In the 1240s, the clerics and lay council members who heard cases before the south façade of Strasbourg Cathedral could reflect on Frederick II's Privilege and Judgement, and might have seen on that sculpted façade the expression of an ideal system in which justice prevailed and Jews were defended as members of the brotherhood. The figure of the emperor could remain almost exactly as he had conceived it, and that the figure in his long peaceful robes would probably be more suitable for the state Friedrich II than for the completely warrior Barbarossa, so that the Saracen doctor could be a sign of the influence of Arab alchemy in the Middle Ages.

Frederick II, a fusion of not only east and west, but of past and future, was, in many respects, an embodiment of the alchemical union of opposites. By symbolizing the sun in the title song, Frederick serves as an allegory for the highest alchemical state, the Rubedo, the sun at its zenith. Like Frederick, the album is also a fusion of past and future. In Peter Sinfield's verses, Frederick II is commenting on his own life and times, the present age (his future), and, in the case of Twenty First Century Schizoid Man, our future. As the Middle Ages are characterized by the Hermetic Principle of Correspondence: As Above, so Below, and the album, In the Court of the Crimson King , is told from a decidedly medieval perspective, it follows that there is both a metaphysical (an above) and an earthly (below) Crimson King. (See chapter two) It also follows that Peter Sinfield's lyrics are not the words (observations) of just any medieval person, but specifically those of Frederick II. His observations of the modern world are filtered through what he has learned in his personal 13th century milieu. The album, sub-titled An Observation by King Crimson is, more specifically..."He was himself at home in the mysterious twilight of the prophets and stargazers and could not value their sphere too highly as, in a certain sense, a training ground. His own aims, however, were far too simple and straightforward to be understood by any of these over-learned folk. He depended only on first hand ocular observation. "No certainty comes by hearsay" was one of his maxims. An Arab scholar Shahabu 'd Din has preserved in an essay on Optics : Attentive Observation of What the Eye Perceives, some questions asked by the Emperor. He asked why Canopus looked larger at his rising than at his zenith ; why eyes afflicted with cataracts could see black streaks and spots ; why a lance plunged in water should appear broken. Deceptions of the eye had a disturbing importance for the man who relied preponderantly on visual observation.

Frederick's great work is the product of years of observation : de Arte venandi cum avibus. 'Thanks to his amazingly penetrative glance, directed especially to the observation of nature, the Imperator himself wrote a book about the nature and care of birds, in which he showed how deeply imbued he was with a love of knowledge,' wrote a chronicler. Down to the minutest detail it is based on his own observations or those which friends and experts had made at his instigation. For twenty or thirty years the Emperor had meditated the writing of this Ornithology--for it is no less--and all the time he had been amassing first-hand material till at last, urged by his son Manfred, he set about the actual tasks of writing the six books in this branch of Zoology. 'He must be reckoned the greatest expert who ever lived,' so judged Ranke. And the statement is not unjustified. In the most vital points the book has not even yet been superseded. The most astonishing thing about it is its absolute accuracy and matter-of-factness, which contains more knowledge of the mysteries of nature than do the cosmic astral encylcopaedias of the court philosophers at which the Emperor was wont to smile, even though on occasion he participated in the current superstitions. In that age of intellectual starvation which speculated on how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, Frederick summed up his programme in the introduction in the clear-cut phrase : 'Our intention is to set forth the things which are, as they are (manifestare ea quae sunt sicet sunt).' This stern sobriety, that seeks nothing before things or behind things, but the things themselves, when exercised by a wise man contains the vision of all visions. Everything is, first and foremost, itself. Neither the philosophers of the East nor the philosophers of the West had taught this to Frederick."Epitaph is meant to link the two sides, side one (the below, earthly/present side) and side two (the above, metaphysical/past side). Acting as a sort of linchpin holding together the two sides, Epitaph is a microcosm of the album. Like the album, Epitaph travels through time, though the album travels in one direction (future to past), while the song travels in the other direction (past to future). This is one way in which Epitaph is a reflection of the album as a whole. Beginning in the past tense, by referring to the walls on which the prophets wrote, Epitaph continues in the present tense, and concludes in the future tense with "I fear tomorrow I'll be crying". All of the album's themes are touched on in the song: the apocalyptic technology of Schizoid Man (knowledge is a deadly friend), the futility of I Talk to the Wind ( March for No Reason ), the other worldly imagery of Moonchild (between the iron gates of fate), and, in addition to the angst and foreboding of The Court of the Crimson King , allusions to the politico-military intrigue of the title song (upon the instruments of death). Epitaph can also be described as a mirror by which the two sides (past and present, above and below) are reflected, or as the veil between the material and spiritual worlds, life and death. On either side of Epitaph are the two quiet songs, I Talk to the Wind and Moonchild , reflecting one another. On the opposite ends of the album, Schizoid Man and the title song are apocalyptic messages about , respectively, the future and the past. Epitaph can also be readily interpreted as personally relating to Frederick II.

The medieval axiom "As above, so below" dictates that for every metaphysical phenomenon there is an earthly correlate. If the emperor's crimson color indicates, in metaphysical terms, that he has achieved the highest alchemical state, then, in earthly terms, the Crimson King, Frederick II, is crimson with blood. "In the thirteenth century, all sorts of cruelties were common. The popes themselves committed ten of nineteen descendants of Frederick II to prison, one of his daughters for forty-eight years, and saw to the deaths of others in battle or capture. When Frederick II's chief advisor, Taddeo da Suessy, was taken prisoner at Parma, his hands were immediately cut off by those loyal to the pope and he was thrown into a dungeon. For suspicion of stealing from him, Frederick seized his other chief advisor, the poet della Vigna (later celebrated by Dante), had his eyes burned out, and threw him into a dungeon. There the poet killed himself by pounding his head against the damp stone walls. In southern France, men and women alike were accused of being heretics, given no way to defend themselves except by enduring torture, and if found guilty covered with pitch and set aflame. Swords aloft, soldiers were set free upon entire settlements of heretics, which they torched. During the lifetime of Aquinas, all of Provence was swept by violence against heretics-some of whom were living, according to their own lights, admirable evangelical lives. Frederick II was excommunicated by the Council of Lyons, purportedly for the reign of massacre and terror that he had inflicted upon cities throughout Italy. Frederick was capable at a whim of ordering an entire city razed, its men butchered or sold into slavery, its women sent eastward to become slaves of his Saracen friends…" "Frederick II retaliated for his second excommunication by wrecking a Genoese fleet and capturing over 100 Cardinals and Bishops on board who were in passage to a Synod at Rome." "They took two cardinals, four Archbisops, six Bishops and four Abbots and, in so far as they were not dead, the Lombard's ambassadors. Many rode about on planks in the crimsoned waves and lamented : " O Vierge Marie, Madonna ". Two thousand corpses floated about, face upwards." - The Infidel Emperor "Three ships were sunk and twenty-two captured with something like four thousand Genoese. The emperor prepared to march on Rome."

"Matthew Paris in relating the capture of the prelates quotes the Sibylinne prophecy taken from the so-called Dicta Merlin :

"The sea will be crimsoned with the blood of the saints."

"This event made an enormous impression on the world. Nothing that any previous Emperor had ever dared or done was comparable to this capture of cardinals and a hundred priests. Frederick's power seemed boundless, but a certain horror was blended with the admiration. Enemies recognised therein the ruthlessness of Satan. Nothing had so strongly ministered to the conviction that Frederick was the herald of Antichrist as the capture and continued captivity of the princes of the Church in the prisons of the Emperor. Many of them died in his dungeons, and their blood cried out against this enemy of the faith." "…He was held by many to be the Great Heretic of the epoch, who for nearly thirty years waged constant warfare throughout Italy, leaving a train of ruin, slaughter, humiliation, and misery. …Frederick II remains an ambiguous figure who has haunted the German imagination even into our own century." For this stranger, this Roman of Swabian race, embodied that European-German personage whom men had dreamt of, who combined the triple culture of Europe : the cultures of the Church, the East, the Ancients. The Church was to Frederick II something complete and finished, which he had in himself outgrown, which lay behind him. Nietzsche called Frederick "to my mind the First European," and wrote of "that magic, intangible, unfathomable Riddle of a man predestined to victory and betrayal." This explains the abiding interest that German visitors have displayed towards this Sicilian city over the centuries. ... survival but also respect for various peoples and religions (Christian, Muslim, Jewish), acquiring a good knowledge of Arabic, Greek, Latin, Italian, Sicilian, German and Norman French."The color red symbolizes the Emperor's fiery nature. Likewise the Emperor's red eagle represents the alchemical tinctura rubea (red tincture) which has the solar nature of gold, as the white eagle of the Empress represents the tinctura alba (white tincture), which has the lunar nature of silver (Crowley 78). Viewing himself as a direct successor to the Roman emperors of antiquity,[2] he was Emperor of the Romans from his papal coronation in 1220 until his death; he was also a claimant to the title of King of the Romans from 1212 and unopposed holder of that monarchy from 1215. As such, he was King of Germany, of Italy, and of Burgundy. At the age of three, he was crowned King of Sicily as a co-ruler with his mother, Constance of Hauteville, the daughter of Roger II of Sicily. His other royal title was King of Jerusalem by virtue of marriage and his connection with the Sixth Crusade. He was frequently at war with the papacy, hemmed in between Frederick's lands in northern Italy and his Kingdom of Sicily (the Regno) to the south, and thus he was excommunicated four times and often vilified in pro-papal chronicles of the time and since. Pope Gregory IX went so far as to call him an Antichrist. Speaking six languages (Latin, Sicilian, German, French, Greek and Arabic), Frederick was an avid patron of science and the arts. He played a major role in promoting literature through the Sicilian School of poetry. His Sicilian royal court in Palermo, from around 1220 to his death, saw the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school had a significant influence on literature and on what was to become the modern Italian language. He was also the first king who explicitly outlawed trials by ordeal as they were considered irrational. After his death, his line quickly died out and the House of Hohenstaufen came to an end.Born in Iesi, near Ancona, Italy, Frederick was the son of the emperor Henry VI. He was known as the puer Apuliae (son of Apulia).[6] Some chronicles say that his mother, the forty-year-old Constance, gave birth to him in a public square in order to forestall any doubt about his origin. Frederick was baptised in Assisi. In 1196 at Frankfurt am Main the infant Frederick was elected King of the Germans. His rights in Germany were disputed by Henry's brother Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick. At the death of his father in 1197, Frederick was in Italy traveling towards Germany when the bad news reached his guardian, Conrad of Spoleto. Frederick was hastily brought back to his mother Constance in Palermo, Sicily, where he was crowned as King on 17 May 1198, now Frederick I of Sicily, at only three years of age. Constance of Sicily was in her own right queen of Sicily, and she established herself as regent. In Frederick's name she dissolved Sicily's ties to Germany and the Empire that had been created by her marriage, sending home his German counsellors and renouncing his claims to the German throne and empire. Upon Constance's death in 1198, Pope Innocent III succeeded as Frederick's guardian. Frederick's tutor during this period was Cencio, who would become Pope Honorius III.[9] However, Markward of Annweiler, with the support of Henry's brother, Philip of Swabia, reclaimed the regency for himself and soon after invaded the Kingdom of Sicily. In 1200, with the help of Genoese ships, he landed in Sicily and one year later seized the young Frederick. He thus ruled Sicily until 1202, when he was succeeded by another German captain, William of Capparone, who kept Frederick under his control in the royal palace of Palermo until 1206. Frederick was subsequently under tutor Walter of Palearia, until, in 1208, he was declared of age. His first task was to reassert his power over Sicily and southern Italy, where local barons and adventurers had usurped most of the authority.

Otto of Brunswick had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Innocent III in 1209. In southern Italy, Otto became the champion of those noblemen and barons who feared Frederick's increasingly strong moves against them, exemplified by the firing of the pro-noble Walter of Palearia. The new emperor invaded Italy, where he reached Calabria without meeting much resistance. In response, Innocent sided against Otto, and in September 1211 at the Diet of Nuremberg Frederick was elected in absentia as German King by a rebellious faction backed by the pope. Innocent also excommunicated Otto, who was forced to return to Germany.[8] Frederick sailed to Gaeta with a small following. He agreed with the pope on a future separation between the Sicilian and Imperial titles, and named his wife Constance as regent. Passing through Lombardy and Engadin, he reached Konstanz in September 1212, preceding Otto by a few hours. Frederick was crowned as king on 9 December 1212 in Mainz. Frederick's authority in Germany remained tenuous, however, and he was recognized only in southern Germany; in the region of northern Germany, the center of Guelph power, Otto continued to hold the reins of royal and imperial power despite his excommunication. But Otto's decisive military defeat at the Bouvines forced him to withdraw to the Guelph hereditary lands where, virtually without supporters, he died in 1218. The German princes, supported by Innocent III, again elected Frederick king of Germany in 1215, and he was crowned king in Aachen on 23 July 1215 by one of the three German archbishops. It was not until another five years had passed, and only after further negotiations between Frederick, Innocent III, and Honorius III – who succeeded to the papacy after Innocent's death in 1216 – that Frederick was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome by Honorius III, on 22 November 1220.[10] At the same time, Frederick's oldest son Henry took the title of King of the Romans. Gold augustale of Emperor Frederik II, as King of Sicily 1198–1250. Unlike most Holy Roman emperors, Frederick spent few years in Germany. In 1218, he helped King Philip II of France and Odo III, Duke of Burgundy, to bring an end to the War of Succession in Champagne (France) by invading Lorraine, capturing and burning Nancy, capturing Theobald I, Duke of Lorraine and forcing him to withdraw his support from Erard of Brienne-Ramerupt. After his coronation in 1220, Frederick remained either in the Kingdom of Sicily or on Crusade until 1236, when he made his last journey to Germany. He returned to Italy in 1237 and stayed there for the remaining thirteen years of his life, represented in Germany by his son Conrad.

In the Kingdom of Sicily, he built on the reform of the laws begun at the Assizes of Ariano in 1140 by his grandfather Roger II. His initiative in this direction was visible as early as the Assizes of Capua (1220, issued soon after his coronation in Rome) but came to fruition in his promulgation of the Constitutions of Melfi (1231, also known as Liber Augustalis), a collection of laws for his realm that was remarkable for its time and was a source of inspiration for a long time after. It made the Kingdom of Sicily an absolutist monarchy; it also set a precedent for the primacy of written law. With relatively small modifications, the Liber Augustalis remained the basis of Sicilian law until 1819.During Frederick's stay in the Holy Land, his regent, Rainald of Spoleto, had attacked the Marche and the Duchy of Spoleto. Gregory IX recruited an army under John of Brienne and, in 1229, invaded southern Italy. His troops overcame an initial resistance at Montecassino and reached Apulia. Frederick arrived at Brindisi in June 1229. He quickly recovered the lost territories and trialled the rebel barons, but avoided crossing the boundaries with the Papal States.[8] The war came to an end with the Treaty of Ceprano in the summer of 1230; the emperor personally met Gregory IX at Anagni, making some concessions to the church in Sicily.[8] He also issued the Constitutions of Melfi (August 1231), as an attempt to solve the political and administrative problems of the country, which had dramatically been shown by the recent war. While he may have temporarily made his peace with the pope, Frederick found the German princes another matter. Frederick's son Henry VII (who was born 1211 in Sicily, son of Frederick's first wife Constance of Aragon) had caused their discontent with an aggressive policy against their privileges. This forced Henry to a complete capitulation, and the Statutum in favorem principum ("Statutes in favor of the princes"), issued at Worms, deprived the emperor of much of his sovereignty in Germany.[8] Frederick summoned Henry to a meeting, which was held at Aquileia in 1232. Henry confirmed his submission, but Frederick was nevertheless compelled to confirm the Statutum at Cividale soon afterwards. The situation for Frederick was also problematic in Lombardy, after all the emperor's attempts to restore the imperial authority in Lombardy with the help of Gregory IX (at the time, ousted from Rome by a revolt) turned to nothing in 1233. In the meantime Henry in Germany had returned to an anti-princes policy, against his father's will: Frederick thus obtained his excommunication from Gregory IX (July 1234). Henry tried to muster an opposition in Germany and asked the Lombard cities to block the Alpine passes. In May 1235, Frederick went to Germany, taking no army with him: as soon as July, however, he was able to force his son to renounce to the crown all his lands, at Worms, and then imprisoned him.In Germany the Hohenstaufen and the Guelphs reconciled in 1235. Otto the Child, the grandson of Henry the Lion, had been deposed as Duke of Bavaria and Saxony in 1180, conveying the allodial Guelphic possessions to Frederick, who in return enfeoffed Otto with the same lands and additional former imperial possessions as the newly established Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, ending the unclear status of the German Guelphs, who had been left without title and rank after 1180.Besides his great tolerance (which, however, did not apply to Christian heretics), Frederick had a great thirst for knowledge and learning. Frederick employed Jews from Sicily, who had immigrated there from the holy land, at his court to translate Greek and Arabic works. He played a major role in promoting literature through the Sicilian School of poetry. His Sicilian royal court in Palermo, saw the first use of a literary form of an Italo-Romance language, Sicilian. The poetry that emanated from the school had a significant influence on literature and on what was to become the modern Italian language.[citation needed] The school and its poetry were saluted by Dante and his peers and predate by at least a century the use of the Tuscan idiom as the elite literary language of Italy. Frederick II is the author of the first treatise on the subject of falconry, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus ("The Art of Hunting with Birds"). In the words of the historian Charles Homer Haskins: It is a scientific book, approaching the subject from Aristotle but based closely on observation and experiment throughout, Divisivus et Inquisitivus, in the words of the preface; it is at the same time a scholastic book, minute and almost mechanical in its divisions and subdivisions. It is also a rigidly practical book, written by a falconer for falconers and condensing a long experience into systematic form for the use of others. Frederick's pride in his mastery of the art is illustrated by the story that, when he was ordered to become a subject of the Great Khan (Batu) and receive an office at the Khan's court, he remarked that he would make a good falconer, for he understood birds very well. He maintained up to fifty falconers at a time in his court, and in his letters he requested Arctic gyrfalcons from Lübeck and even from Greenland. One of the two existing versions was modified by his son Manfred, also a keen falconer. Frederick loved exotic animals in general: his menagerie, with which he impressed the cold cities of Northern Italy and Europe, included hounds, giraffes, cheetahs, lynxes, leopards, exotic birds and an elephant. He was also alleged to have carried out a number of experiments on people. These experiments were recorded by the monk Salimbene di Adam in his Chronicles.[42] Among the experiments were shutting a prisoner up in a cask to see if the soul could be observed escaping though a hole in the cask when the prisoner died; feeding two prisoners, having sent one out to hunt and the other to bed and then having them disemboweled to see which had digested his meal better; imprisoning children and then denying them any human contact to see if they would develop a natural language. In the language deprivation experiment young infants were raised without human interaction in an attempt to determine if there was a natural language that they might demonstrate once their voices matured. It is claimed he was seeking to discover what language would have been imparted unto Adam and Eve by God. In his Chronicles Salimbene wrote that Frederick bade "foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments." Frederick was also interested in the stars, and his court was host to many astrologers and astronomers, including Michael Scot and Guido Bonatti. He often sent letters to the leading scholars of the time (not only in Europe) asking for solutions to questions of science, mathematics and physics.In 1224 he founded the University of Naples, the world's oldest state university: now called Università Federico II, it remained the sole atheneum of Southern Italy for centuries.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

Apollon Tapınağı / Temple of Apollo

 

Mevcut Tapınak, eski ve dini mağara olarak bilinen Plutonion üzerinde kurulmuştur. Yerli halkın en eski dini merkezi olan bu yerde, Apollon bölgenin ana Tanrıçası Kybele ile buluşmuştur. Eski kaynaklar, Ana Tanrıça Kybele rahibinin bu mağaraya indiğini ve zehirli gazdan etkilenmediğini bildirirler. Apollon Tapınağı’nda üst yapıya ait kalıntılar MS III. yüzyıldan geriye gitmemekle birlikte, temeller Geç Helenistik Döneme kadar uzanmaktadır.

Mermer giriş basamaklarından tanınan 70 metre uzunluğundaki Tapınak, temenos duvarı ile çevrili kutsal alan içinde bulunmaktadır. Temenos duvarı güney, batı ve kuzeyde bir kısmı kazılmış olan portiğe yaslanmıştır. Mermer portiğe ait dor düzenindeki yivli yarım sütunlar, astragal ve inci dizisi, ekhinusu da yumurta dizisi ile bezeli sütun başlıkları taşımaktadır.

Tapınak, daha geç bir döneme tarihlenmekte, fakat müzede bulunan iki ion bir korint düzenindeki nefis başlık ile bazı mimari parçalar MS I. yüzyıla tarihlenmekte ve daha eski çağlara dayanan bir tapınağın varlığına işaret etmektedir. Apollon Tapınağı’ndan günümüze kalan mermer merdivenden başka, mermer levhalar ile kaplı ve silmeli kornişleri olan bir podyum görülmektedir. Cephesi iki ante ve arasında yer alan iki sütun ile bezelidir. Tarihlenmesi ante ve başlıklarında, cella duvarında ve tabanında kullanılan yazıtlı bloklar sayesinde yapılabilmektedir. Bir tanesinin üzerinde Apollon kehanetine ait bir yazı okunmaktadır. Tapınak mimari bezemelere göre MS III. yüzyıla tarihlenmektedir.

Tapınağın arkasındaki merdivende, Apollon Tapınağı’ndan alınan parçalar, sütun gövdeleri, arşitrav parçaları, başlıklar, kaideler ile doldurulan bir alan görülmektedir. Bu yapıda, MÖ IV. yüzyıl heykel şemalarını yenileyen, kıvrımlı giysili olan, nitelikli bir kadın heykeli bulunmuştur. Yazıtından da anlaşıldığına göre; Zeuxis’in kızı Apphia imparatorluk tanrılarına ve Demos’a (Hierapolis halkının kişileştirilmesi) adamıştır.

Bir ucu, kuzeyindeki adını imparator Domitiandan alan Domitian kapısı ve diğer bir ucu güneyinde Güney Roma kapısına uzanan, 1 km uzunluğundaki Cadde görülmeye deger en önemli tarihi eserler arasındadır. Her iki tarafında sütunlu revarklar ve kamu yapıları bulunan cadde şehri bir uçtan diğer bir ucuna kadar ikiye ayırır. Ayrıca cadde giriş ve çıkışlarında bulunan kapılar ise tarihi hâlen omzunda taşıyan koca bir medeniyetin en güzel örnekleridir.

 

A temple was raised to Apollo Lairbenos, the town's principal god during the late Hellenistic period. This Apollo was linked to the ancient Anatolian sun god Lairbenos and the god of oracles Kareios. The site also included temples or shrines to Cybele, Artemis, Pluto, and Poseidon. Now only the foundations of the Hellenistic temple remain. The temple stood within a peribolos (15 by 20 metres (49 by 66 ft)) in Doric style.

The structures of the temple are later, though the presence of two Ionic capitals in the Museum, as well as of a Corinthian capital of the 1st century AD and other architectural fragments lead archeologists to suppose the existence of an earlier temple on the site.

The temple, which has a marble staircase, lies within a sacred area, about 70 metres (230 ft) long. It was surrounded by an enclosure wall (temenos). The back of the temple was built against the hill, the peribolos was surrounded on the remaining southern, western and northern sides, by a marble portico which has been partially excavated. This portico has pilasters bearing fluted Doric semi-columns supporting capitals that are decorated below with a row of astragali and beads and which, on the decorated below with a row of astragali and beads and which, on the echinus, bear a series of ovolos.

The new temple was reconstructed in the 3rd century in Roman fashion, recycling the stone blocks from the older temple. The reconstruction had a smaller area and now only its marble floor remains.

The temple of Apollo was deliberately built over an active fault. This fault was called the Plutonion. It was the oldest religious centre of the native community, the place where Apollo met with Cibele. It was said that only the priest of the Great Mother could enter the cave without being overpowered by the noxious underground fumes. Temples dedicated to Apollo were often built over geologically active sites, including his most famous, the temple at Delphi.

When the Christian faith was granted official primacy in the 4th century, this temple underwent a number of desecrations. Part of the peribolos was also dismantled to make room for a large Nympheum.

 

  

The hysterical children. That's what stands out most. The red carpet is lined with these screaming tykes, hundreds of small wonders packed ten feet deep on raised platforms. They are reaching out their hands for Him, shoving little notebooks and pink pens into His hand. The desperation in their cries has a familiar, specific timbre; they sound like hungry newborn infants.

 

It is March 27, and I am inching down the red carpet at Nickelodeon's annual Kids' Choice Awards—embedded with Taylor Lautner, Twilight's boy werewolf, now reportedly the highest-paid teenage actor in Hollywood. He's one of the highest-paid actors period, having just signed a $7.5 million deal to play Stretch Armstrong in a big-screen take on a toy no one has seen in thirty years. Lautner's regular security guard, a professional badass, notices me flinching at the shrieking. He smiles: "On the New Moon tour, I took Advil. Preventively."

 

Lautner—dressed in a wool blazer over a white V-neck T-shirt (both gifts from the designer Neil Barrett), his dark hair shellacked into a skyward-pointing spear—seems unfazed. Is it always like this? I ask. So he tells me about Brazil. How he and his Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart were trapped in a hotel suite when hundreds of teenage fans stormed the lobby, outwitted security, and charged the stairs to get to them. "We were in lockdown in this little room for forty-five minutes waiting for the SWAT team to arrive," Lautner says, his eyes wide. "We said to each other, 'Let's say they get into this room. What are they going to do? Tear us to shreds? What do they want?' "

 

Finally we are at the door to UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, finally inside the building, finally moving toward our seats in the front row, when I notice: For a kids' show, this is one fucking starry room. Adam Sandler, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Robert Downey Jr., Rihanna—they're all within earshot. Avatar's Zoe Saldana is sitting three seats away. Rosario Dawson and Olympic champion Shaun White will present the first award. It's a tribute to the primacy of the youth market. They've all come to kiss the (candy) ring.

 

Lautner, 18, sits down and begins to tell me how honored he is to be here, how honored he's been to be everywhere lately. Like at this year's Oscars, where he introduced a tribute to horror films alongside Stewart. "I would have passed out if she wasn't there!" Lautner says. "You're looking down and you're talking to George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio—and they're listening to you!" This is his baseline sentiment: honest, enthusiastic bafflement. It's probably the only suitable reaction. He talks about the MTV Video Music Awards, where he presented a trophy to his then maybe-girlfriend Taylor Swift, only to watch Kanye snatch the microphone. "I was standing behind her as it was happening, and 100 percent I was sure it was staged!" Lautner says, eyebrows raised. "I thought, 'This was something that they rehearsed.' I was enjoying the show! But then Taylor turned around and I saw her face."

 

Just then, at the UCLA auditorium, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, suddenly interrupts the conversation with a question. Katzenberg—59 years old, V-neck sweater, pleated khakis—leans in close. "Taylor," he says, "do you have two minutes? Will Smith wants to meet you."

 

A minute later, Lautner returns to his seat, winded. He looks around the arena, at the 7,000 fans and the lights and the cameras, and asks out loud, "Is this really happening? Am I really here?"

 

Those are pretty good questions. He might also ask: What on earth did I do to deserve that $7.5 million contract and the adoration of millions? He's handsome, yes. But in two Twilight films, Lautner has logged fifty minutes of screen time. Total. In the first movie, he spoke 239 words. Oh, and he was nearly fired from the sequel before filming began. (More on that soon.)

 

Finally the lights inside the UCLA arena dim, signaling the start of the show, and when Lautner's photograph appears on the JumboTron, the shrieking resumes. Lautner's security guard rushes over with one last message, whispering something into his ear before disappearing again into the darkness.

 

"What did he just say to you?"

 

Lautner locks eyes with me, touches my leg and laughs. "He said, 'If anything happens—' " Lautner points towards the exit sign—" 'we're going left.' "

 

*****

 

One week after the Kids' Choice Awards, Taylor Lautner pulls up for lunch in Valencia, California, a suburb forty-five minutes north of Hollywood. This is where he lives, with his parents and younger sister, in a home that's almost indistinguishable from the others in the neighborhood. Lautner suggests the Olive Garden for lunch. "Do you like this place?" he asks, a little unsure, adding: "My father turned me on to it." Without glancing at the menu, Lautner orders the Toscana soup, then asks to substitute the Caesar salad for the house. Before the waiter can reply, Lautner interrupts innocently: "I know," he says, "it'll be a dollar fifty extra. That's fine." Well, yes. Yes, it will be.

 

If the Olive Garden seems an unlikely place to meet one of the most watched teenagers in America, so be it. The location is as clear an indication as any of how far he's come, and how fast. His is a story filled with extreme coincidence, as if the heavens opened up and said, You. You with the teeth. Next year at this time, people will be able to draw your abs from memory.

 

Because he's only 18, his creation story takes about thirty seconds, but it begins at a karate school in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is 7 years old when (Random Fate-Sealing Circumstance #1) the school's owner invites his students to a martial-arts tournament in Louisville, Kentucky. There, Lautner meets Mike Chat, a karate coach who's been (Random Fate-Sealing Circumstance #2) a successful actor. Okay, he was the Blue Power Ranger, but still. Chat encourages Lautner to come out to L.A. for a martial-arts summer camp and later a monthlong stay. He hooks the boy up with an agent, and while Lautner returns home to Michigan without a job, he's still getting calls about auditions.

 

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...

Note to myself:

 

Free films on the net.

www.videoscourtesclic.com/films/comedie

 

www.cosmoetica.com/B1094-DES795.htm

 

Songza Playlists:

Shakin' All Over Jukebox Party

The Golden Age Of Burlesque

Essential Jazz

 

DJ Godfather setlist

I DJ PJ - PJ Megga Mix

ll DJ Godfather & Starski - On The Flo

lll Dj Slugo - Godzilla

lV Dj Godfather I Keep Bangin The Beat

V Many Voices Of Erik

Vl DJ Deeon - Shake Dat Butt

Vll SIXFOE "throw some dick at these hoes"

Vlll Dj Godfather & Starski - tek

lX Nehpets - Lay It Down (Millenium Remix)

 

James Holden influence: 'Consumed' de Plastikman

 

THE PERFECT VIBRATIONS FOR A LATE NIGHT FIX, JUST BEFORE GOING TO BED, GRAB SOME GOOD HEADPHONES AND PRESS PLAY. ABHI DIJON - TWELVE

 

Recomended films by friends for viewing :

Food, Inc., Primer, True Romance, Best Offer, Gardians of the Galaxy,

 

3d audio possible download: softarchive.net/blogs/downloaddownload/_daudioinc_dprecd_...

 

Artists to give a listen to says Cedric Bixler : zappa, dh peligro, jah wobble, michael rother, pat smear.... boyd rice or anita harris or delia derbshire.. fad gadget... film? yakuza aesthetic... jobriath to dethrone bowie... oshiri pen penz is the best japanese group ever... blues influences eugene chadbourne, sonny sharrock, james blood ulmer... THE MUSIC MACHINE...

 

Previous gigs @ Pourvoyeur, Petit Medley Simple Malt, Club Dix30, Bar Inc, Saint Édouard, Blizzarts, Brutus, Salon Officiel + partys privés dans plusieurs villes.

 

individualy message special invites, the experience starts at the door with the bouncers and first impressions, create the sense of comunity, always switch up the formula.

 

At the same time, do make sure the club/bar/lounge can use their resources to promote your event! To ensure the venue promotes your party and not the others, make it easy for them. Prepare a full media kit (images, event write up, etc) and send it to the venue well ahead of time. Score extra points by pre-writing a few suggested posts for social media that include a link to the event page / ticket purchase page.

 

Take control of the lighting in the club and set the mood. Learn to use the lighting board. Hire a VJ.

 

Have an aesthetic in mind and decorate your event to match

 

no my nails are not painted black but my toenails...well thats a different story

 

1. Home (2009)

2. Thrive (2011)

3. Paradise or Oblivion (2012)

4. Love, Reality and the Time of Transition (2011)

5. Earthlings (2005)

6. Everything You Know Is Wrong (2000)

7. Zeitgeist: Addendum (2008)

8. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011)

9. The Money Fix (2009)

10. The Wikileaks Documentary (2010)

11. Owned & Operated (2012)

12. Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis (2010)

13. Apologies of an Economic Hitman (2010)

14. The Beautiful Truth (2008)

15. The Awakening (2011)

16. What Would It Look Like? (2009)

17. The World According to Monsanto (2008)

18. Esoteric Agenda (2008)

19. Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging (2008)

20. College Conspiracy Scam in USA (2011)

21. The Indigo Evolution (2005)

22. Edible City: Grow the Revolution (2012)

23. Collapse (2009)

24. The Global Brain (1983)

25. The White Hole in Time (1993)

26. The Primacy of Consciousness (2011)

27. Fuel (2008)

28. Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil Crisis (2006)

29. What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire (2007)

30. Resonance: Beings of Frequency (2012)

31. War by Other Means (1992)

32. Endgame (2007)

33. War Made Easy (2007)

34. The War on Democracy (2007)

35. Rise Like Lions: The Occupy Wall Street Documentary (2011)

36. Propaganda (2012)

37. The Secret of Oz (2009)

38. The One Percent (2006)

39. The Shock Doctrine (2009)

40. Iran Is Not the Problem (2008)

41. PsyWar: The Real Battlefield Is the Mind (2010)

42. Vaccine Nation (2008)

43. Psychiatry: An Industry of Death (2006)

44. Flow: For the Love of Water (2008)

45. Kymatica (2009)

46. Pots, Pans, and Other Solutions (2012)

47. Manna: The Psilocybin Mushroom Documentary (2011)

48. What in the World Are They Spraying (2010)

49. Why in the World Are They Spraying (2012)

50. Globalization: The New Rulers of the World (2001)

51. Terrorstorm (2006)

52. Fall of the Republic (2009)

53. Crop Circles: Crossover From Another Dimension (2006)

54. The Day Before Disclosure (2010)

55. 9/11: The Road to Tyranny (2002)

56. 9/11: In Plane Site (2004)

57. 9/11: Press For Truth (2006)

58. The Revelation of the Pyramids (2010)

59. Ancient Knowledge (2012)

60. The Union: The Business Behind Getting High (2007)

61. Money As Debt (2006)

62. Money As Debt II (2009)

63. The Age of Stupid (2009)

64. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (2004)

65. Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview (2013)

66. Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century (2010)

67. Renaissance 2.0 (2010)

68. Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood (2008)

69. The War on Kids (2009)

70. Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002)

71. Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land (2004)

72. Occupation 101: Voices of the Silenced Majority (2006)

73. Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices (2005)

74. Big Sugar (2005)

75. The Fluoride Deception (2011)

76. Fluoridegate: An American Tragedy (2013)

77. An Inconvenient Tooth (2012)

78. The Great Culling: Our Water (2013)

79. Shots in the Dark: Silence on Vaccines (2009)

80. I Am Fishead: Are Corporate Leaders Psychopaths? (2011)

81. Capitalism Is the Crisis (2011)

82. Slavery By Consent (2012)

83. The Crisis of Civilization (2011)

84. No Logo: Brands, Globalization, and Resistance (2003)

85. 97% Owned (2012)

86. Culture in Decline – Episode 1: What Democracy? (2012)

87. Culture in Decline – Episode 2: Economics 101 (2012)

88. Culture in Decline – Episode 3: C.V.D. (2012)

89. Culture in Decline – Episode 4: War on Nature (2013)

90. Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 1: Akasha (2012)

91. Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 2: The Spiral (2012)

92. Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 3: The Serpent and the Lotus (2012)

93. Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds – Part 4: Beyond Thinking (2012)

94. Ethos: A Time for Change (2010)

95. Rich Media, Poor Democracy (2003)

96. Weapons of Mass Deception (2004)

97. Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within (2007)

98. American Blackout (2006)

99. Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections (2008)

100. Blue Gold: World Water Wars (2008)

101. Big Bucks, Big Pharma: Marketing Disease and Pushing Drugs (2006)

102. The End of Suburbia (2004)

103. Rethink Afghanistan (2009)

104. There’s No Tomorrow (2012)

105. Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers (2006)

106. Priceless (2012)

107. What the Bleep Do We Know? (2004)

108. Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead (2010)

109. The 11th Hour (2007)

110. Paradise With Side Effects (2004)

111. Starsuckers (2009)

112. Awakening the Dreamer: Changing the Dream (2011)

113. Religulous (2008)

114. Sir! No Sir! – The GI Movement to End the Vietnam War (2005)

115. Gasland (2010)

116. Hacking Democracy (2008)

117. Real Estate 4 Ransom: Why Does Land Cost the Earth? (2012)

118. Vanishing of the Bees (2009)

119. Tapped (2009)

The First 119 Originally posted on: OpenBoxThinking

120. DMT: The Spirit Molecule

121. Baraka (1992)

122. Samsara

123. Cut Poison Burn

124. The Business of Being Born

125. The Cove

126. Ayahuasca: Ancient Plant Medicine

127. Hempster – Plant the Seed

128. Coca Lives

129. Forks Over Knives

130. Dirty Pictures (The God Father of Ecstasy)

131. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

132. The Money Masters

133. The Secret of Oz

134. Spirit Science 1-15

135. Garbage Warrior

136. Top 10 Eco Films of All Time

137. What Babies Want

138. Ring of Power

139. House of Numbers

140. SiCKO

141. True History of Marijuana

142. Run From The Cure

143. Eye of The Illuminati

144. Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business (2011)

145. Shaman Voyage

146. Libertopia

147. Zeitgeist

148. Stepping Into The Fire

149. Propaganda

150. Secret Ancient Knowledge

151. The Holy Mountain

152. Food Inc.

153. The Silent Revelation of Truth

154. The Obama Deception

155. The Great Culling: Our Water

156. Dreaming Awake At The End of Time

157. The New American Century

158. ZERO: An Investigation into 9/11

159. The House I Live In

160. Black Whole

161. We Are Legion – The Story of the Hacktivists (2012)

162. Sirius – 2013

163. The Shock Doctrine

164. Manifesting the Mind: Footprints of the Shaman

165. Genetic Roulette

166. The Disclosure Project

167. Journey To Lucidity: The Planted Seed

- See more at: www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/166-free-documentarie...

gepigmenteerd polyurethaanschuim, metaal, spuitverf, hout, rubber, styrofoam en acrylglas

pigmented polyurethane foam, metal, aerosol paint, rubber, styrofoam and acryl glass

 

Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag 2013

Oromi market (Harar, Ethiopia).

 

Harar (Ethiopia) is a magical place! See my Harar photo series.

If you have only 12 days to finally visit Africa, you should perhaps focus on one place: let it be Harar, Ethiopia (July 2006).

For centuries, until about 1860, it was an independent city at the borders of two different worlds: the Abbysinian mountains and the deserts stretching to the Red Sea coast. Trade and religious affairs (Muslim) must have alternated primacy during its history. As a holy city to Islam it feels as a surprisingly relaxed place. Tom Waits can not imagine the kind of dark yet exalted bars you find here at night. The size of the walled old city is at least half that of Jerusalem's old city. Most important the people are really open and the city is one of the world's few cities that within a few days demonstrate their very own distinct living atmosphere you'll never forget.

(See also my friend Elmer's photos from this trip, where by change you can also see me on a photo.)

 

Kent Town Wesley Uniting Church

 

Built 1864 as Wesleyan Methodist Church.

Tapley’s Hill bluestone construction.

Transepts added 1867, vestries & classrooms 1869, lecture Hall 1874.

Opening service July 1865. First Pastor Rev S Ironside.

Church pioneers include Michael Kingsborough, Mayor 1870–71.

Originally Collegiate Church of Prince Alfred College.

*Ref: plaque by Kensington & Norwood Historical Society Inc. August 1994.

 

Kent Town was named after pioneer settler, Dr Benjamin Kent MD, who established East Park Farm in 1840 on Section 255 on land leased from Colonel Torrens. However, due to a dispute over ownership it was not subdivided until 1854 following Charles Robin’s purchase of the section. A mere two kilometres east of the city, Kent Town was the largest and most expensive sale of land in the colony and the close proximity made it a desirable residential area for prosperous merchants, enterprising businessmen and for many influential Wesleyan Methodists.

 

The reformist Wesleyan Methodists were part of South Australia’s great experiment in social democracy which fostered religious freedom and cultivated a ‘Paradise of Dissent’ that challenged the supremacy and authority of Anglicanism. A leading member of the community, Sir John Colton purchased three blocks at the corner of Kent Town and Grenfell Street on which to build a grand church to mark the 1864 jubilee of the Wesleyan Missionary Society and to be a symbol of Wesleyan achievement in the new province.

 

Prominent Wesleyans such as Francis Faulding of the pharmaceutical business, George P Harris, founder of Harris Scarf & Co, merchants Thomas & William Rhodes and W T Flint, insurance agent Thomas Padman, land agent George Cotton, importer Michael Kingsborough and local vigneron William Clarke donated money to the building of the church. An important benefactor was the wealthy mining investor and founding director of the Bank of Adelaide, Thomas Greaves Waterhouse, whose charismatic conversion to Wesleyan Methodism came after he married Eliza Faulding in 1852.

 

London trained architects, Edmund Wright (1824–1888) and Edward Woods (1837–1913) were commissioned to design the new church described as ‘English Gothic’ in style. Their design reflected the preoccupation with medieval forms and the devotion to ‘uplifting the spirit’ and the primacy of preaching in Methodism with its magnificent central pulpit. The church was constructed with a steeply pitched roof, pinnacles, arched window tracery, wall buttresses and an imposing grand interior that gave it an aura of religious splendour.

On Sunday 6 August 1865, the nave of the new church was opened by the evangelist American preacher, Reverend William ‘California’ Taylor, with over 4000 people attending the celebratory service. In 1868, transepts and a schoolroom were added to the building. The Kent Town Jubilee Church could seat 1100 people for a service making it one of the largest in the State.

 

As rivalry between the Wesleyans and the Anglicans grew the idea of a Wesleyan College was considered to counter the influence of the Collegiate School of St Peter’s at Hackney. T G Waterhouse purchased the last section of undeveloped land in Kent Town for the purpose of building a school devoted to the education of young men. In November 1867, one of the greatest controversies to beset the province of South Australia occurred when His Royal Highness Prince Alfred was invited to lay the foundation stone of the new Dissenters’ School and to give permission for it to be named Prince Alfred College.

 

For over a century, the Jubilee Church had a special place in the hearts of generations of Methodist who were moved to action by great preachers and beliefs which challenged the mores of South Australian society.

Ref: Jubilee Church story board

  

Kent Town Wesley Uniting Church

 

Built 1864 as Wesleyan Methodist Church.

Tapley’s Hill bluestone construction.

Transepts added 1867, vestries & classrooms 1869, lecture Hall 1874.

Opening service July 1865. First Pastor Rev S Ironside.

Church pioneers include Michael Kingsborough, Mayor 1870–71.

Originally Collegiate Church of Prince Alfred College.

*Ref: plaque by Kensington & Norwood Historical Society Inc. August 1994.

 

Kent Town was named after pioneer settler, Dr Benjamin Kent MD, who established East Park Farm in 1840 on Section 255 on land leased from Colonel Torrens. However, due to a dispute over ownership it was not subdivided until 1854 following Charles Robin’s purchase of the section. A mere two kilometres east of the city, Kent Town was the largest and most expensive sale of land in the colony and the close proximity made it a desirable residential area for prosperous merchants, enterprising businessmen and for many influential Wesleyan Methodists.

 

The reformist Wesleyan Methodists were part of South Australia’s great experiment in social democracy which fostered religious freedom and cultivated a ‘Paradise of Dissent’ that challenged the supremacy and authority of Anglicanism. A leading member of the community, Sir John Colton purchased three blocks at the corner of Kent Town and Grenfell Street on which to build a grand church to mark the 1864 jubilee of the Wesleyan Missionary Society and to be a symbol of Wesleyan achievement in the new province.

 

Prominent Wesleyans such as Francis Faulding of the pharmaceutical business, George P Harris, founder of Harris Scarf & Co, merchants Thomas & William Rhodes and W T Flint, insurance agent Thomas Padman, land agent George Cotton, importer Michael Kingsborough and local vigneron William Clarke donated money to the building of the church. An important benefactor was the wealthy mining investor and founding director of the Bank of Adelaide, Thomas Greaves Waterhouse, whose charismatic conversion to Wesleyan Methodism came after he married Eliza Faulding in 1852.

 

London trained architects, Edmund Wright (1824–1888) and Edward Woods (1837–1913) were commissioned to design the new church described as ‘English Gothic’ in style. Their design reflected the preoccupation with medieval forms and the devotion to ‘uplifting the spirit’ and the primacy of preaching in Methodism with its magnificent central pulpit. The church was constructed with a steeply pitched roof, pinnacles, arched window tracery, wall buttresses and an imposing grand interior that gave it an aura of religious splendour.

On Sunday 6 August 1865, the nave of the new church was opened by the evangelist American preacher, Reverend William ‘California’ Taylor, with over 4000 people attending the celebratory service. In 1868, transepts and a schoolroom were added to the building. The Kent Town Jubilee Church could seat 1100 people for a service making it one of the largest in the State.

 

As rivalry between the Wesleyans and the Anglicans grew the idea of a Wesleyan College was considered to counter the influence of the Collegiate School of St Peter’s at Hackney. T G Waterhouse purchased the last section of undeveloped land in Kent Town for the purpose of building a school devoted to the education of young men. In November 1867, one of the greatest controversies to beset the province of South Australia occurred when His Royal Highness Prince Alfred was invited to lay the foundation stone of the new Dissenters’ School and to give permission for it to be named Prince Alfred College.

 

For over a century, the Jubilee Church had a special place in the hearts of generations of Methodist who were moved to action by great preachers and beliefs which challenged the mores of South Australian society.

Ref: Jubilee Church story board

   

Thought to be a work by François Lemoine when it was acquired in the early nineteenth century, this beautiful and lyrical depiction of the Judgment of Paris is actually the work of Lemoine's contemporary, Etienne Jeaurat. Although Jeaurat is perhaps best remembered today for his more comedic and light-hearted genre scenes, he was also a highly accomplished academician. In 1747 he was one of the ten artists selected by Charles-François Le Normand de Tournehem to reaffirm the primacy and importance of history painting in the French Academy, and his resultant painting, Diogenes Drinking from his Hand after Breaking his Cup, was one of the 11 paintings commissioned and hung in the Galerie Apollon in the Louvre. In the present work, the figures' delicate facial features and the predominance of gray and blue tones are characteristic of Jeaurat's style. A preparatory sketch for The Judgment of Paris is in a private collection.

 

Although little studied by scholars until quite recently, the art collection of Jacques-Joseph de Boussairolles was one of the most important French private collections of its time. De Boussairolles was the son of a well-established family from Montpellier, who made his fortune in salt trading. He served on the Cour des Comptes in Montpellier from 1763 until its dissolution in 1791. Sympathetic to the idea of reform, Boussairolles was active politically during the early years of the Revolution, until being imprisoned in 1793. He was eventually released and restored to his land and fortune and went on to receive important commissions and titles under Napoleon. It was also during this time that he became an active art collector, amassing most of his fine collection between the years 1802 and his death in 1814. The present work was one of eight that he purchased with the help of the famed art dealer Abraham Fontanel from the sale of Jacques-Joseph Duché's collection in 1802. This sale of a fellow Montpellierien's collection was the catalyst that launched Boussairolles' collecting career. Fontanel remained his close friend and advisor and was active in forming the core of Boussairolles' collection. Today, paintings with Boussairolles provenance can be found in museums around the world, including the Musée du Louvre, Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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

 

-------------------------------------------

 

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.

Google Tradutor para empresas:Google Toolkit de tradução para appsTradutor de sitesGlobal Market Finder

 

Bagan; (formerly Pagan) is an ancient city located in the Mandalay Region of Burma (Myanmar). From the 9th to 13th centuries, the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Pagan, the first kingdom to unify 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 2200 temples and pagodas still survive to the present day.

 

The Bagan Archaeological Zone is a main draw for the country's nascent tourism industry. It is seen by many as equal in attraction to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

 

ETYMOLOGY

Bagan is the present-day standard Burmese pronunciation of the Burmese word Pugan, derived from Old Burmese Pyugam (meaning 'Pyu Village'). Its classical Pali name is Arimaddana-pura, lit. "the City that Tramples on Enemies". Its other names in Pali are in reference to its extreme dry zone climate: Tattadesa, "parched land", and Tampadipa, "bronzed country". The Burmese chronicles also report other classical names of Thiri Pyissaya and Tampawaddy.

 

HISTORY

7th to 13th CENTURIES

According to the Burmese chronicles, Bagan was founded in the second century CE, and fortified in 849 CE by King Pyinbya, 34th successor of the founder of early Bagan. 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.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 10000 religious monuments (approximately 1000 stupas, 10000 small temples and 3000 monasteries) in an area of 104 square kilometres 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. The city attracted monks and students from as far as India, Ceylon as well as 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.

 

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. 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.

 

14th to 19th CENTURIES

Bagan survived into the 15th century as a human settlement, 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. 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.

 

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.

 

20th CENTURY TO PRESENT

Bagan, located in an active earthquake zone, had suffered from many earthquakes over the ages, with over 400 recorded earthquakes between 1904 and 1975. The last major earthquake came on 8 July 1975, reaching 8 MM in Bagan and Myinkaba, and 7 MM in Nyaung-U. The quake damaged many temples, in many cases, such as the Bupaya, severely and irreparably. Today, 2229 temples and pagodas remain.

 

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 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, the city has not been so designated, allegedly mainly on account of the restorations.

 

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. 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.

 

There is a well-known saying of Myanmar people : "If you are a real Myanmar, you must have been to Bagan." Bagan is spirit of history of Myanmar.

 

GEOGRAPHY

The Bagan Archaeological Zone, defined as the 13 x 8 km area centered around Old Bagan, consisting of Nyaung U in the north and New Bagan in the south, lies in the vast expanse of plains in Upper Burma on the bend of the Irrawaddy river. It is located 290 kilometres southwest of Mandalay and 700 kilometres north of Yangon. Its coordinates are 21°10' North and 94°52' East.

 

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 prove 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 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 southeastern India, and to a smaller extent to Ceylon. 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.

 

Originally, an Indian/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. 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.

 

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. 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).

 

HOLLOW TEMPLES

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.

 

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. (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.)

 

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.

 

ECONOMY

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.

 

WIKIPEDIA

   

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.

 

El Cristo de la Luz was erected in 999 as a mosque. It is in much the same state as it was when it was originally built. The Arabic inscription in Kufic on the building states that Musa Ibn Ali built it.

 

Legend has it that a shaft of light guided the king to a figurine of the crucified Christ that had been hidden for centuries. The legend says that King Alfonso VI arrived in Toledo after capturing the city in 1085 when his horse fell in front of this chapel.

 

In 1186, Alfonso VIII gave the building to the Knights of the Order of St John, who established it as the Chapel of the Holy Cross (Ermita de la Santa Cruz). It was at this time that the mosque was renamed and the apse was added.

 

The small, almost cubic mosque (side lengths and height are each about eight meters) has a square ground plan. About half of the building material used is fired brick and half is roughly hewn quarry stone, which is mostly arranged in horizontal bands, following the Roman model. After the conquest of Toledo in 1085, the mosque building was converted into a church. In the 12th century this was expanded in the Mudejar style, so the former mosque became a kind of narthex. Inside the former mosque. The interior of the apse attached to the older mosque

 

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.

888 Chocolates has been closed for few years now, it did a good lunch I seem to remember. Today I noticed there's a new lunch spot open on the road opposite. I'm looking forward to checking it out in a couple of weeks.

 

On another note...

The trusty Renault is about to get some new tyres... I've decided the car is not worth enough as a trade-in to follow one of my favourite uncle's examples - he gets a new car whenever it needs new tyres!

 

Mid November update... good sense has prevailed, just had new Michelins fitted - Primacy 4s. Very pleased - they're quieter, and have better cornering (at least in the dry - it has yet to rain!) than the Continentals did.

This 272-page paperback is almost identical in size and format to Gregory’s earlier 2008 book entitled “An Illustrated Life”. But is different on several counts. You’re not buying a re-write of the first book. First of all, the 40+ artists featured are different from the earlier book (a mere handful are the same) and secondly, it’s easier to read, with the artist’s own ‘natural’ voice coming through. Thirdly, rather than journaling in general, this is about travel journals, so it moves beyond what I call “Object Drawing” or creating vignettes based around the people and objects that pass through our lives, but in documenting journey, what it means to document place or location, given the natural wanderlust or inner explorer that it is fundamental to many of us. Some like Giorgio Morandi stayed at home and never moved beyond his studio; another of my heroes, Euan Uglow, did the same. But that’s not the “natural” condition in which many of us live and create. Most artists, given the choice, would like to leave home.

 

I constantly dip into his previous book both to get inspiration and to reinforce validation. What shocked (and delighted) me originally about the book was that the text read, rather clunkily, like case studies in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Content-wise, the contributing artists all seemed to be enormously hung up on creating their own superstitions or routines around their journaling and sketching ("I never do this…", "I always do that…"). Text-wise, it read very much like answers to pre-set questions. Just like the case studies in the book, I too was developing and had developed my own irrational phobias, setting “limits” for myself just like a parent quarantining or setting parameter’s for his or her child’s behavior. Endless potential and enthusiasm is one thing, but most of us need a (self-imposed) discipline to stay on The Path, especially since we are largely teaching ourselves how to ‘see’ and create.

 

What the two books have in common is they both display Danny Gregory’s own penchant for a querky, cartoonish, irreverent style, loose flowing penmanship with bright enthusiastic colour and dry wit, mainly in the manner in which Gregory himself sketches and journals. That said, he overcomes, in both books, his own personal aesthetic by including a very wide range of artistic styles. It’s the broad sweep of personal styles which keeps me coming back for more. I particularly like the fact that Gregory replicates the global nature of the illustration/design/art work-worlds today beyond just a token one or two non-Western contributors. We need to continue this trend by looking for precedents in non-Western travel journaling such as Hiroshige, for example.

 

We all “like” artists who work in the same style as ourselves – that’s justifiable and understandable. But both books have thrown up for me new artists whose work I’ve either never seen before or who’ve only been shadowy figures in the background. A mark of success for both books is (a) whether you are on-message and drawing every day and (b) rushing to the Net to find out more about individual artists. The advertising exec in Gregory would like this: you need to have 'bought the product', not just 'seen the ad'. The first message I’ve absolutely “got” (not just from Gregory’s books but in particular from Veronica Lawlor who features in the second book). In the case of (b), I absolutely love Peter Cusack’s biro work (though I could never myself personally draw commuters as he does) and Simonetta Capecchi (I’ve been on a panorama jag ever since reading how she operates). Butch Belair’s work in that book, too, keeps me nourished in the area of watercolor painting. That I don’t like more of the work in the first book is a reflection of my own personal taste; they work in a cartoon-illustration style that I’m simply personally ‘ not in to’. That’s okay, because the text is a constant font of knowledge as I make my own experiments with technique and media. In terms of this recent book, I identify most strongly with the work of Ian Sidaway (his focus on composition and lack of text), with artists like Nina Johansson and Will Freeborn providing me with inspiration watercolour-wise. But, as in the first book, it’s the text which shines through most vividly for me. I’m either surprised by what other artists do or I either nod sagely “Yes, I’ve discovered that to be true too!”.

 

Concepts of “travel” and “journey”

 

The primacy of overseas travel, international travel, travel ‘abroad’ is always going to be a given. We’ve fetishized tourism to such a degree these days that it’s hard to swim against that particular tide. And it goes beyond just eschewing international resorts where one can sit in splendid cultural isolation, being served food and drink by the natives but otherwise seeing, talking, relaxing with one’s own. Everyone acknowledges that sketching on holiday creates a different pace, like swapping a fast car for a pushbike as one travels through a landscape. Some of us are hearing messages now about “slow travel” and considering its implications for “slow sketching”. In her contribution, Liz Steel acknowledges (extremely well) the inner tussle between the inner tourist and the inner sketcher and the sheer exhaustion following both paths can create.

 

On being there

 

Most artists are frankly middle-class, with well-paying jobs in the creative industries. Who we are as artists depends very much on how much we have travelled, especially overseas: it’s not just fundamental to our Curriculum Vitae, but to our networking and our career. No matter how superficial our travel is (though as sketcher-journalers we can always take the high moral ground against photographers), it is ultimately all about oneupmanship at dinner parties. A strong argument can be made that this has always been the case. We will never go back to the Middle Ages and glorify anonymity, never signing our work. The illustrators and designers interviewed by Gregory for his books certainly reinforce this, as does the primacy of jet-setting inherent in the Urban Sketching movement. Most brownie points in that movement go to those rock stars who constantly travelling. And for very successful illustrationists and designers these days, that’s what’s involved in being part of the (global) workforce today. Have Moleskine and plane ticket, will prostitute.

 

But there are cracks in this argument, which Gregory has been clever enough to allow to show through. There are some married-with-kids or who work in academe or who otherwise can, for obvious reasons, travel (in this narrow sense of international travel) less than others. I love the fact that Gregory has tapped into the vein of armchair traveling and those with limited means who swim against the tide, still “travel” while creating convincing travel journals, with all the inquisitiveness and creativity of someone “actually” there. Just as notions of “real” or “analogue” travel are breaking down, thanks to the Internet and Google Maps and photo galleries, so too are notions of travel documentation changing. To this extent, Andrea Joseph’s contribution is one of the book’s high points. As is Asnee Tasnaruangrong’s passing comment about sketching in retirement: “(it’s) what I do for a living, not financially, but for the joy of living.”

 

No matter how superficially a traveller-sketcher might document a place, there is an innate attraction in someone visiting 'our place' and seeing it through their eyes. Parisian friends were appalled at my being delighted by electrical light poles there; I’m sure Bangkokians would find very strange my being completely entranced by street vendors, tuk-tuks and motorcycle taxis in a recent trip there, given they just don’t exist in my own environment back home. Gregory acknowledges that we not only yearn for things foreign and unseen, but that we are also intrigued by foreigners who come to look (and journal about) us.

 

On text and image

 

What’s public and what’s private has been plaguing artists and sketchbook journalers since J.M.W.Turner (if not Da Vinci and Michelangelo before him, for example) and Gregory canvasses that dynamic in the modern era. To include or not to include text is again present, as is foreign language; scripts unfamiliar to the viewer become a half-way house of design, not “text”. Film maker Peter Greenaway has a lot to say on the struggle between text and image these days and this struggle lies at the heart of travel journaling also. The pace at which individual artists can rapidly change is exemplified in the contribution of Tommy Kane. Compare this with the Tom Kane of the earlier book. Reflect on the Tommy Kane contribution and meditate (even just for a split-second) on how the digital environment is changing our notions of text and the consumerism/consumption of our work.

 

I love the fact too that while many eschew photography (I travelled to Bangkok recently for a half-sketching/half-tourism holiday replacing my camera with a sketchbook, and was all the better for it – though I purloined my travelling companion’s digital camera for the occasional reference photo), Gregory presents a case study of someone who only photographs, creating massive (A2 sheets) works back in the studio, and with the help of digital software. As with Gregory’s first book, there is for us, as readers, a wide range to pick and choose from. Not just in experimenting with different media, but in approach.

 

On being ‘in the zone’ and research

 

Comedian John Cleese’s lecture on creativity completely validated what I feel while out sketching on location and what happens, internally and externally, to the sketcher-journaler is covered well in this book. Some prepare a lot before travelling, some operate on the spur of the moment. Some touch nothing on the page once it’s done on location, others spend months tinkering with their journals after they get home. For me, this is validation and valorisation of methods I’m already using or think I might want to use. This isn’t confusing for anyone new to travel journals because the over-riding message is to ‘just do it’ and let your own personal approach flow from that. I find I’m constantly telling my own students, “This is not a race against someone else. You’re the one moving forward, at your own pace, in your own way.” I think Gregory would agree.

 

P.S. Use a scalpel to carefully cut apart some of the unguillotined. pages.

P.P.S. Don't be fazed by the inclusion of "pare watercolor". I started thinking it meant "watercolor painting with no pencil foundation lines (or any other medium included)" but it doesn't constitute a new technical painting term. It may be an editing glitch or a mis-spelling of "pure watercolor". As Gregory himself would probably admit, life (as much as a bouncy, fun ride that it is) is never perfect!

 

sketchblog gasp2011.wordpress.com

 

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...

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.

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