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Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.
[Bibliography]
Peggy Guggenheim's career belongs in the history of 20th century art. Peggy used to say that it was her duty to protect the art of her own time, and she dedicated half of her life to this mission, as well as to the creation of the museum that still carries her name.
Peggy Guggenheim was born in New York on 26 August 1898, the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman. Benjamin Guggenheim was one of seven brothers who, with their father, Meyer (of Swiss origin), created a family fortune in the late 19th century from the mining and smelting of metals, especially silver, copper and lead. The Seligmans were a leading banking family. Peggy grew up in New York. In April 1912 her father died heroically on the SS Titanic.
In her early 20s, Peggy volunteered for work at a bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, in New York and thanks to this began making friends in intellectual and artistic circles, including the man who was to become her first husband in Paris in 1922, Laurence Vail. Vail was a writer and Dada collagist of great talent. He chronicled his tempestuous life with Peggy in a novel, Murder! Murder! of which Peggy wrote: "It was a sort of satire of our life together and, although it was extremely funny, I took offense at several things he said about me."
In 1921 Peggy Guggenheim traveled to Europe. Thanks to Laurence Vail (the father of her two children Sindbad and Pegeen, the painter), Peggy soon found herself at the heart of Parisian bohème and American ex-patriate society. Many of her acquaintances of the time, such as Constantin Brancusi, Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp, were to become lifelong friends. Though she remained on good terms with Vail for the rest of his life, she left him in 1928 for an English intellectual, John Holms, who was the greatest love of her life. There is a lengthy description of John Holms, a war hero with writer's block, in chapter five of Edwin Muir's An Autobiography. Muir wrote: "Holms was the most remarkable man I ever met." Unfortunately, Holms died tragically young in 1934.
In 1937, encouraged by her friend Peggy Waldman, Peggy decided to open an art gallery in London. When she opened her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in January 1938, she was beginning, at 39 years old, a career which would significantly affect the course of post-war art. Her friend Samuel Beckett urged her to dedicate herself to contemporary art as it was âa living thing,â and Marcel Duchamp introduced her to the artists and taught her, as she put it, âthe difference between abstract and Surrealist art.â The first show presented works by Jean Cocteau, while the second was the first one-man show of Vasily Kandinsky in England.
In 1939, tired of her gallery, Peggy conceived âthe idea of opening a modern museum in London,â with her friend Herbert Read as its director (2). From the start the museum was to be formed on historical principles, and a list of all the artists that should be represented, drawn up by Read and later revised by Marcel Duchamp and Nellie van Doesburg, was to become the basis of her collection.
In 1939-40, apparently oblivious of the war, Peggy busily acquired works for the future museum, keeping to her resolve to âbuy a picture a day.â Some of the masterpieces of her collection, such as works by Francis Picabia, Georges Braque, Salvador DalÃ- and Piet Mondrian, were bought at that time. She astonished Fernand Léger by buying his Men in the City on the day that Hitler invaded Norway. She acquired Brancusiâs Bird in Space as the Germans approached Paris, and only then decided to flee the city.
In July 1941, Peggy fled Nazi-occupied France and returned to her native New York, together with Max Ernst, who was to become her second husband a few months later (they separated in 1943).
Peggy immediately began looking for a location for her modern art museum, while she continued to acquire works for her collection. In October 1942 she opened her museum/gallery Art of This Century. Designed by the Rumanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, the gallery was composed of extraordinarily innovative exhibition rooms and soon became the most stimulating venue for contemporary art in New York City.
Of the opening night, she wrote: âI wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art" . There Peggy exhibited her collection of Cubist, abstract and Surrealist art, which was already substantially that which we see today in Venice. Peggy produced a remarkable catalogue, edited by André Breton, with a cover design by Max Ernst. She held temporary exhibitions of leading European artists, and of several then unknown young Americans such as Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, David Hare, Janet Sobel, Robert de Niro Sr, Clyfford Still, and Jackson Pollock, the âstarâ of the gallery, who was given his first show by Peggy late in 1943. From July 1943 Peggy supported Pollock with a monthly stipend and actively promoted and sold his paintings. She commissioned his largest painting, a Mural, which she later gave to the University of Iowa.
Pollock and the others pioneered American Abstract Expressionism. One of the principal sources of this was Surrealism, which the artists encountered at Art of This Century. More important, however, was the encouragement and support that Peggy, together with her friend and assistant Howard Putzel, gave to the members of this nascent New York avant-garde. Peggy and her collection thus played a vital intermediary role in the development of Americaâs first art movement of international importance.
In 1947 Peggy decided to return in Europe, where her collection was shown for the first time at the 1948 Venice Biennale, in the Greek pavilion. In this way the works of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were exhibited for the first time in Europe. The presence of Cubist, abstract, and Surrealist art made the pavilion the most coherent survey of Modernism yet to have been presented in Italy.
Soon after Peggy bought Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, where she came to live. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden curated by Giuseppe Marchiori, and from 1951 she opened her collection to the public.
In 1950 Peggy organized the first exhibition of Jackson Pollock in Italy, in the Ala Napoleonica of the Museo Correr in Venice. Her collection was in the meantime exhibited in Florence and Milan, and later in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Zurich. From 1951 Peggy opened her house and her collection to the public annually in the summer months. During her 30-year Venetian life, Peggy Guggenheim continued to collect works of art and to support artists, such as Edmondo Bacci and Tancredi Parmeggiani, whom she met in 1951. In 1962 Peggy Guggenheim was nominated Honorary Citizen of Venice.
In 1969 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York invited Peggy Guggenheim to show her collection there. In 1976 she donated her palace and works of art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Foundation had been created in 1937 by Peggy Guggenheimâs uncle Solomon, in order to operate his collection and museum which, since 1959, has been housed in Frank Lloyd Wrightâs famous spiral structure on 5th Avenue.
Peggy died aged 81 on 23 December 1979. Her ashes are placed in a corner of the garden of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, next to the place where she customarily buried her beloved dogs. Since this time, the Guggenheim Foundation has converted and expanded Peggy Guggenheim's private house into one of the finest small museums of modern art in the world.
[Info]
Address
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Dorsoduro 701
I-30123 Venezia
Opening hours
Daily 10 am - 6 pm
Closed Tuesdays and December 25
General information
tel: +39.041.2405.411
fax: +39.041.520.6885
e-mail: info@guggenheim-venice.it
Visitor services
tel: +39.041.2405.440/419
fax: +39.041.520.9083
e-mail: visitorinfo@guggenheim-venice.it
Photography
Photography is permitted without flash. You may not use tripods or monopods.
Animals
Animals of all sizes are not allowed in the galleries and in the gardens.
For information and assistance please contact "Sporting Dog Club".
Call Tel. +39 347 6242550 (Marie) or +39 347 4161321 (Roberto)
or write to sportingdoginvenice@gmail.com
Venice Art for All
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection joins the Venice Art for All project and becomes accessible to all, including people with limited mobility.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was probably begun in the 1750s by architect Lorenzo Boschetti, whose only other known building in Venice is the church of San Barnaba.
It is an unfinished palace. A model exists in the Museo Correr, Venice. Its magnificent classical façade would have matched that of Palazzo Corner, opposite, with the triple arch of the ground floor (which is the explanation of the ivy-covered pillars visible today) extended through both the piani nobili above. We do not know precisely why this Venier palace was left unfinished. Money may have run out, or some say that the powerful Corner family living opposite blocked the completion of a building that would have been grander than their own. Another explanation may rest with the unhappy fate of the next door Gothic palace which was demolished in the early 19th century: structural damage to this was blamed in part on the deep foundations of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
Nor is it known how the palace came to be associated with "leoni," lions. Although it is said that a lion was once kept in the garden, the name is more likely to have arisen from the yawning lion's heads of Istrian stone which decorate the façade at water level. The Venier family, who claimed descent from the gens Aurelia of ancient Rome (the Emperor Valerian and Gallienus were from this family), were among the oldest Venetian noble families. Over the centuries they provided eighteen Procurators of St Markâs and three Doges. Antonio Venier (Doge, 1382-1400) had such a strong sense of justice that he allowed his own son to languish and die in prison for his crimes. Francesco Venier (Doge, 1553-56) was the subject of a superb portrait by Titian (Madrid, Fundaciòn Thyssen-Bornemisza). Sebastiano Venier was a commander of the Venetian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and later became Doge (1577-78). A lively strutting statue of him, by Antonio dal Zotto (1907), can be seen today in the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
From 1910 to c. 1924 the house was owned by the flamboyant Marchesa Luisa Casati, hostess to the Ballets Russes, and the subject of numerous portraits by artists as various as Boldini, Troubetzkoy, Man Ray and Augustus John. In 1949, Peggy Guggenheim purchased Palazzo Venier from the heirs of Viscountes Castlerosse and made it her home for the following thirty years. Early in 1951, Peggy Guggenheim opened her home and collection to the public and continued to do so every year until her death in 1979.
In 1980, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened for the first time under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which Peggy Guggenheim had given her palazzo and collection during her lifetime.
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
[Permanent collection]
The core mission of the museum is to present the personal collection of Peggy Guggenheim. The collection holds major works of Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical painting, European abstraction, avant-garde sculpture, Surrealism, and American Abstract Expressionism, by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century. These include Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach), Braque (The Clarinet), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger, Brancusi (Maiastra, Bird in Space), Severini (Sea=Dancer), Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth), de Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet), Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red 1939), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Miro (Seated Woman II), Giacometti Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Klee (Magic Garden), Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Magritte (Empire of Light), DalÃ- (Birth of Liquid Desires), Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy), Gorky (Untitled), Calder (Arc of Petals) and Marini (Angel of the City).
The museum also exhibits works of art given to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for its Venetian museum since Peggy Guggenheim's death, as well as long-term loans from private collections.
Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection
In October 2012 eighty works of Italian, European and American art of the decades after 1945 were added to the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in Venice. They were the bequest of Hannelore B. Schulhof, who collected the works with her late husband Rudolph B. Schulhof. They include paintings by Burri, Dubuffet, Fontana, Hofmann, Kelly, Kiefer, Noland, Rothko, and Twombly, as well as sculptures by Calder, Caro, Holzer, Judd and Hepworth. The Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Garden exhibits works from this collection.
Gianni Mattioli Collection
The museum exhibits twenty six masterpieces on long-term loan from the renowned Gianni Mattioli Collection, including famous images of Italian Futurism, such as Materia and Dynamism of a Cyclist by Boccioni, Interventionist Demonstration by Carrà , The Solidity of Fog by Russolo, works by Balla, Severini (Blue Dancer), Sironi, Soffici, Rosai, Depero. The collection includes important early paintings by Morandi and a rare portrait by Modigliani.
Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden
The Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Sculpture Garden and other outdoor spaces at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents works from the permanent collections (by Arp, Duchamp-Villon, Ernst, Flanagan, Giacometti, Gilardi, Goldsworthy, Holzer, Marini, Minguzzi, Mirko, Merz, Moore, Ono, Paladino, Richier, Takis), as well as sculptures on temporary loan from foundations and private collections (by Calder, König , Marini, Nannucci, Smith).
Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.
St Edmund, Southwold, Suffolk
It is hard now to remember a time when Southwold was not fashionable. It must be coming on for thirty years ago now that the comedian Michael Palin made a film for television called East of Ipswich. It was a memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, and the basic comic premise was that in those days people used to go on holiday to seaside resorts on the East Anglian coast. In Palin's case, this was Southwold.
The amusement came from the idea that people in those days would sit in deckchairs beside the grey north sea, or shelter from the drizzle in genteel teashops or the amusement arcade on the pier. In the Costa Brava package tour days of the 1980s, the quaintness of this image made it seem like something from a different world.
And I remember Southwold in the 1980s. It was one of those agreeable little towns distant enough from anywhere bigger to maintain a life of its own. It still had its genteel tea shops, its dusty grocers, its quaint hotels and pubs all owned by Adnams, the old-fashioned and unfashionable local brewery. In the white heat of the Thatcherite cultural revolution, it seemed a place that would soon die on its feet quietly and peaceably.
And then, in the 1990s, the colour supplements discovered the East Anglian coast, and fell in love with it. The new fashions for antique-collecting, cooking with local produce and general country living, coupled with a snobbishness about how common foreign travel had become, conspired to make places like Southwold very sought after. Before Nigel Lawson's boom became a bust, the inflated house prices of London and the home counties gave people money to burn. And in their hoards, they came out of the big city to buy holiday homes in East Anglia.
Although they are often lumped together, the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk are actually very different from each other (Cambridgeshire and North Essex are also culturally part of East Anglia, but the North Essex coast is too close to London to have ever stopped being cheap and cheerful, and Cambridgeshire has no coastline). Norfolk's beaches are wide and sandy, with dunes and cliffs and rock pools to explore; towns like Cromer and Hunstanton seem to have stepped out of the pages of the Ladybird Book of the Seaside. Tiny villages along the Norfolk coast have secret little beaches of their own.
Suffolk's coast is wilder. Beaches are mainly pebbles rather than sand, and the marshes stretch inland, cutting the coast off from the rest of the county. Unlike Norfolk, Suffolk has no coast road, and so the settlements on the coast are isolated from each other, stuck at the end of narrow lanes that snake away from the A12 and peter out in the heathland above the sea. There are fewer of them too. It is still quicker to get from Walberswick to Southwold by water than by land. Because they are isolated from each other, they take on individual personalities and characteristic. Because they are isolated from the land, they become bastions of polite civilisation.
Between Felixstowe in the south, which no outsiders like (and consequently is the favourite of many Suffolk people) and Lowestoft in the north, which is basically an industrial town-on-sea (but which still has the county's best beaches - shhh, don't tell a soul) are half a dozen small towns that vie with each other for trendiness. Southwold is the biggest, and today it is also the most expensive place to live in all East Anglia. Genteel tea shops survive, but are increasingly shouldered by shops that specialise in ski-wear and Barbour jackets, Jack Wills and White Stuff, delicatessens that stock radicchio and seventeen different kinds of olive, jewellery shops and kitchen gadget shops and antique furniture shops where prices are exquisitely painful. Worst of all, the homely, shabby, smoke-filled Sole Bay Inn under the lighthouse has been converted by the now-trendy Adnams Brewery into a chrome and glass filled wine bar.
If you see someone in Norfolk driving a truck, they are probably wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shotgun; in Suffolk, they've more likely just bought a Victorian pine dresser from an antique shop, and they're taking it back to Islington. Does this matter? The fishing industry was dying anyway. The tourist industry was also dying. If places like Southwold, Aldeburgh and Orford become outposts of north London, at least they will still provide jobs for local people. But the local people won't be able to afford to live there, of course; they'll be bused in from Reydon, Leiston and Melton to provide services for people in holiday cottages which are the former homes they grew up in, but can no longer afford to buy. Does this seriously annoy me? Not as much as it does them, I'll bet.
So, lets go to Southwold, turning off the A12 at the great ship of Blythburgh church, the wide marshes of the River Blyth spreading aimlessly beyond the road. We climb and fall over ancient dunes, and then the road opens out into the flat marshes, the town spreads out beyond. We enter through Reydon (now actually bigger than Southwold, with houses at half the price) and over the bridge into the town of Southwold itself.
Having been so critical, I need to say here that Southwold is beautiful. It is quite the loveliest small town in all East Anglia. None of the half-timbered houses here that you find in places like Long Melford and Lavenham; here, the town was completely destroyed by fire in the 17th century, and so we have fine 18th and 19th century municipal buildings. One of the legacies of the fire was the creation of wide open spaces just off of the high street, called greens. The best one of all is Gun Hill Green, overlooking the bay where the last major naval battle in British waters was fought; the cannons still point out to sea. The houses here are stunning, gobsmacking, jawdroppingly wonderful. If I could afford to buy one of them as a weekend retreat, then you bet your life I would, and to hell with the people who moaned about it.
At the western end of the High Street is St Bartholomew's Green, and beyond it sits what is, for my money, Suffolk's single most impressive building. This is the great church of St Edmund, a vast edifice built all in one go in the second half of the 15th century. Only Lavenham can compete with it for scale and presence. Unlike the massing at St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham, St Edmund is defined by a long unbroken clerestory and aisles beneath - where St Peter and St Paul looks full of tension, ready to spring, St Edmund is languid and floating, a ship at ease.
Southwold church was just one of several vast late medieval rebuildings in this area. Across the river at Walberswick and a few miles upriver at Blythburgh the same thing happened. Blythburgh still survives, but Walberswick was derelicted to make a smaller church, as were Covehithe and Kessingland. Dunwich All Saints was lost to the sea. But Southwold was the biggest. Everything about it breathes massive permanence, from the solidity of the tower to the turreted porch, from the wide windows to the jaunty sanctus bell fleche.
Along the top of the aisles, grimacing faces look down. All of them are different. The pedestals atop the clerestory were intended for statues as at Blythburgh, but were probably never filled before the Reformation intervened. At the west end, above the great west window, you can see the vast inscription SAncT EDMUND ORA P: NOBIS ('Saint Edmund, pray for us') as bold a record of the mindset of late medieval East Anglian patriotism and Catholicism as you'll find.
As at Lavenham and Long Melford, the interior has been extensively restored, but not in as heavy or blunt a manner as at those two churches. St Edmund has, it must be said, benefited from the attentions of German bombers who put out all the dull Victorian glass during World War II. Here, the interior is vast, light and airy, and much of the restoration is 20th century work, not 19th century. Perhaps because of this, more medieval interior features have survived. Unlike Long Melford, Southwold does not have surviving medieval glass (Mr Dowsing saw to that in 1644), but it does have what is the finest screen in the county.
It stretches right the way across the church, and is effectively three separate screens; a rood screen across the chancel arch, and parclose screens across the north and south chancel aisles. All retain their original dado figures; there are 36 of them, more than anywhere else in Suffolk. They have been restored, particularly in the central range, but are fascinating because they retain a lot of original gessowork - this is where plaster of paris is applied to wood and allowed to dry; it is then carved to produce intricate details. The central screen shows 11 disciples and St Paul; they are, from left to right, Philip, Matthew, James the Less, Thomas, Andrew, Peter, Paul, John, James, Batholomew, Jude and Simon.
The south chancel chapel is light and open; the bosses above are said to represent Mary Tudor and her second husband Charles, Duke of Brandon. The screen here is painted with twelve Old Testament prophets, and Mortlock suggests that they are by a different hand to the images on the other two screens. Further, he observes that the subject is a usual one for the English Midlands, but rare for East Anglia, and that perhaps this part of the screen came from elsewhere. The same may be true of the other two parts - it is hard to think that the central screen was deliberately made too wide for the two arcades. Here on the south screen, some of the figures have surviving naming inscriptions, and Mortlock surmises that the complete sequence, from left to right, is Baruch, Hosea, Nahum, Jeremiah, Elias, Moses, David, Isaiah, Amos, Jonah and Ezekiel. Hover and click on them below.
The north aisle chapel is reserved as the blessed sacrament chapel, and also contains a quite extensive modern library. The screen is harder to explore, because the northern side is curtailed by a large chest, but it features Angels. Unlike the screens at Hitcham and Blundeston, which show angels holding instruments of the passion, these are the nine orders of angels, with Gabriel at their head, and flanked by angels holding symbols of the Trinity and the Eucharist. Mortlock says that they are so similar to the ones at Barton Turf in Norfolk that they may be by the same hand, in which case the central screen is also by that person. They are, from left to right, the Holy Trinity, Gabriel, Archangels, Powers, Dominions, Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Virtues, Messengers, and finally the Eucharist. The Holy Trinity angel still has part of the original dedicatory inscription beneath his feet.
If part or all of this screen came from elsewhere, where did it come from? Possibly either Walberswick, Covehithe or Kessingland, the three downsized churches mentioned earlier. More excitingly, it might have come from one of the churches along this coast that was lost to the sea; perhaps neighbouring St Nicholas at Easton Bavents, or, just to the south, St Peter and St John the Baptist, the two Dunwich churches lost in the 16th and 17th centuries. We'll never know.
If you turn back at the screen and face westwards, your eyes are automatically drawn to the towering font cover, part of the extensive 1930s redecoration of the building. The clerestory is almost like a glass atrium to house it. Also the work of the period is the repainting and regilding of the 15th century pulpit (a lot of people blanch at this, but I think it is gorgeous) and the lectern. Beneath the font cover, the font is clearly one of the rare seven sacraments series, and part of the same group as Westhall, Blythburgh and Wenhaston. As at Blythburgh and Wenhaston, the panels are completely erased, probably in the 19th century, an act of barbarous vandalism. Given that Westhall is probably the best of all in the county, we must assume that three major medieval art treasures were wiped out. Astonishingly, vague shadows survive of the former reliefs. You can easily make out the Mass panel, facing east as at Westhall, the Penance panel and even what may be the Baptism of Christ.
Stepping through the screen, the reredos ahead is by Benedict Williamson and the glass above by Ninian Comper, familiar names in the Anglo-catholic pantheon, and evidence of an enthusiasm here that still survives in High Church form. There is a good engraved glass image of St Edmund to the north of the sanctuary, very much in the 1960s fashion, but curiously placed. On the wall of the chancel to the west of it, the high organ case is also painted and gilded enthusiastically.
As well as the screen, Southwold's other great medieval survival is the set of return stalls either side of the eastern face of the chancel screen. They have misericord seats, but the best feature are the handrests between the seats. On the south side, carvings include a man with a horn-shaped hat and sinners being drawn into the mouth of hell. On the north side are a man playing two pipes, a monkey preaching and a beaver biting its own genitals; a tale from the medieval bestiary, apparently.
What else is there to see? Well, the church is full of delights, and rewards further visits which always seem to turn up something previously unnoticed. St George rides full tilt at a dragon on an old chest at the west end of the north aisle. There is good 19th century glass in the porch and at the west end of the nave. A clock jack stands, axe and bell in hand, at the west end, a twin to the one upriver at Blythburgh. This one has a name - he's called Southwold Jack, and he is one of the symbols of the Adnams brewery.
As Mortlock notes, there are very few surviving memorials. This is partly because St Edmund was not in the patronage of a great landed family, but it may also suggest that they were largely removed at the time of the 19th century restoration, as at Brandon. One moving one is for the child of a Vicar, and there are some interesting pre-Oxford Movement 19th century brasses in the south aisle.
High, high above all this, the roofs are models of Anglo-catholic melodrama, the canopy of honour to the rood and the chancel ceilure in particular. But there is a warmth about it all that is missing from, say, Eye, which underwent a similar makeover. This church feels full of life, and not a museum piece at all. I remember attending evensong here late one winter Saturday afternoon, and it was magical. On another visit, I came on one of the first days of Spring that was truly warm and bright, with not a cloud in the sky. As I cycled into town, a cold fret off of the sea was condensing the steam of the brewery, sending it in swirls and skeins around the tower of St Edmund like low cloud. It was so atmospheric that I almost forgave them for what they have done to the Sole Bay Inn.
St Edmund, Southwold, Suffolk
It is hard now to remember a time when Southwold was not fashionable. It must be coming on for thirty years ago now that the comedian Michael Palin made a film for television called East of Ipswich. It was a memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, and the basic comic premise was that in those days people used to go on holiday to seaside resorts on the East Anglian coast. In Palin's case, this was Southwold.
The amusement came from the idea that people in those days would sit in deckchairs beside the grey north sea, or shelter from the drizzle in genteel teashops or the amusement arcade on the pier. In the Costa Brava package tour days of the 1980s, the quaintness of this image made it seem like something from a different world.
And I remember Southwold in the 1980s. It was one of those agreeable little towns distant enough from anywhere bigger to maintain a life of its own. It still had its genteel tea shops, its dusty grocers, its quaint hotels and pubs all owned by Adnams, the old-fashioned and unfashionable local brewery. In the white heat of the Thatcherite cultural revolution, it seemed a place that would soon die on its feet quietly and peaceably.
And then, in the 1990s, the colour supplements discovered the East Anglian coast, and fell in love with it. The new fashions for antique-collecting, cooking with local produce and general country living, coupled with a snobbishness about how common foreign travel had become, conspired to make places like Southwold very sought after. Before Nigel Lawson's boom became a bust, the inflated house prices of London and the home counties gave people money to burn. And in their hoards, they came out of the big city to buy holiday homes in East Anglia.
Although they are often lumped together, the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk are actually very different from each other (Cambridgeshire and North Essex are also culturally part of East Anglia, but the North Essex coast is too close to London to have ever stopped being cheap and cheerful, and Cambridgeshire has no coastline). Norfolk's beaches are wide and sandy, with dunes and cliffs and rock pools to explore; towns like Cromer and Hunstanton seem to have stepped out of the pages of the Ladybird Book of the Seaside. Tiny villages along the Norfolk coast have secret little beaches of their own.
Suffolk's coast is wilder. Beaches are mainly pebbles rather than sand, and the marshes stretch inland, cutting the coast off from the rest of the county. Unlike Norfolk, Suffolk has no coast road, and so the settlements on the coast are isolated from each other, stuck at the end of narrow lanes that snake away from the A12 and peter out in the heathland above the sea. There are fewer of them too. It is still quicker to get from Walberswick to Southwold by water than by land. Because they are isolated from each other, they take on individual personalities and characteristic. Because they are isolated from the land, they become bastions of polite civilisation.
Between Felixstowe in the south, which no outsiders like (and consequently is the favourite of many Suffolk people) and Lowestoft in the north, which is basically an industrial town-on-sea (but which still has the county's best beaches - shhh, don't tell a soul) are half a dozen small towns that vie with each other for trendiness. Southwold is the biggest, and today it is also the most expensive place to live in all East Anglia. Genteel tea shops survive, but are increasingly shouldered by shops that specialise in ski-wear and Barbour jackets, Jack Wills and White Stuff, delicatessens that stock radicchio and seventeen different kinds of olive, jewellery shops and kitchen gadget shops and antique furniture shops where prices are exquisitely painful. Worst of all, the homely, shabby, smoke-filled Sole Bay Inn under the lighthouse has been converted by the now-trendy Adnams Brewery into a chrome and glass filled wine bar.
If you see someone in Norfolk driving a truck, they are probably wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shotgun; in Suffolk, they've more likely just bought a Victorian pine dresser from an antique shop, and they're taking it back to Islington. Does this matter? The fishing industry was dying anyway. The tourist industry was also dying. If places like Southwold, Aldeburgh and Orford become outposts of north London, at least they will still provide jobs for local people. But the local people won't be able to afford to live there, of course; they'll be bused in from Reydon, Leiston and Melton to provide services for people in holiday cottages which are the former homes they grew up in, but can no longer afford to buy. Does this seriously annoy me? Not as much as it does them, I'll bet.
So, lets go to Southwold, turning off the A12 at the great ship of Blythburgh church, the wide marshes of the River Blyth spreading aimlessly beyond the road. We climb and fall over ancient dunes, and then the road opens out into the flat marshes, the town spreads out beyond. We enter through Reydon (now actually bigger than Southwold, with houses at half the price) and over the bridge into the town of Southwold itself.
Having been so critical, I need to say here that Southwold is beautiful. It is quite the loveliest small town in all East Anglia. None of the half-timbered houses here that you find in places like Long Melford and Lavenham; here, the town was completely destroyed by fire in the 17th century, and so we have fine 18th and 19th century municipal buildings. One of the legacies of the fire was the creation of wide open spaces just off of the high street, called greens. The best one of all is Gun Hill Green, overlooking the bay where the last major naval battle in British waters was fought; the cannons still point out to sea. The houses here are stunning, gobsmacking, jawdroppingly wonderful. If I could afford to buy one of them as a weekend retreat, then you bet your life I would, and to hell with the people who moaned about it.
At the western end of the High Street is St Bartholomew's Green, and beyond it sits what is, for my money, Suffolk's single most impressive building. This is the great church of St Edmund, a vast edifice built all in one go in the second half of the 15th century. Only Lavenham can compete with it for scale and presence. Unlike the massing at St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham, St Edmund is defined by a long unbroken clerestory and aisles beneath - where St Peter and St Paul looks full of tension, ready to spring, St Edmund is languid and floating, a ship at ease.
Southwold church was just one of several vast late medieval rebuildings in this area. Across the river at Walberswick and a few miles upriver at Blythburgh the same thing happened. Blythburgh still survives, but Walberswick was derelicted to make a smaller church, as were Covehithe and Kessingland. Dunwich All Saints was lost to the sea. But Southwold was the biggest. Everything about it breathes massive permanence, from the solidity of the tower to the turreted porch, from the wide windows to the jaunty sanctus bell fleche.
Along the top of the aisles, grimacing faces look down. All of them are different. The pedestals atop the clerestory were intended for statues as at Blythburgh, but were probably never filled before the Reformation intervened. At the west end, above the great west window, you can see the vast inscription SAncT EDMUND ORA P: NOBIS ('Saint Edmund, pray for us') as bold a record of the mindset of late medieval East Anglian patriotism and Catholicism as you'll find.
As at Lavenham and Long Melford, the interior has been extensively restored, but not in as heavy or blunt a manner as at those two churches. St Edmund has, it must be said, benefited from the attentions of German bombers who put out all the dull Victorian glass during World War II. Here, the interior is vast, light and airy, and much of the restoration is 20th century work, not 19th century. Perhaps because of this, more medieval interior features have survived. Unlike Long Melford, Southwold does not have surviving medieval glass (Mr Dowsing saw to that in 1644), but it does have what is the finest screen in the county.
It stretches right the way across the church, and is effectively three separate screens; a rood screen across the chancel arch, and parclose screens across the north and south chancel aisles. All retain their original dado figures; there are 36 of them, more than anywhere else in Suffolk. They have been restored, particularly in the central range, but are fascinating because they retain a lot of original gessowork - this is where plaster of paris is applied to wood and allowed to dry; it is then carved to produce intricate details. The central screen shows 11 disciples and St Paul; they are, from left to right, Philip, Matthew, James the Less, Thomas, Andrew, Peter, Paul, John, James, Batholomew, Jude and Simon.
The south chancel chapel is light and open; the bosses above are said to represent Mary Tudor and her second husband Charles, Duke of Brandon. The screen here is painted with twelve Old Testament prophets, and Mortlock suggests that they are by a different hand to the images on the other two screens. Further, he observes that the subject is a usual one for the English Midlands, but rare for East Anglia, and that perhaps this part of the screen came from elsewhere. The same may be true of the other two parts - it is hard to think that the central screen was deliberately made too wide for the two arcades. Here on the south screen, some of the figures have surviving naming inscriptions, and Mortlock surmises that the complete sequence, from left to right, is Baruch, Hosea, Nahum, Jeremiah, Elias, Moses, David, Isaiah, Amos, Jonah and Ezekiel. Hover and click on them below.
The north aisle chapel is reserved as the blessed sacrament chapel, and also contains a quite extensive modern library. The screen is harder to explore, because the northern side is curtailed by a large chest, but it features Angels. Unlike the screens at Hitcham and Blundeston, which show angels holding instruments of the passion, these are the nine orders of angels, with Gabriel at their head, and flanked by angels holding symbols of the Trinity and the Eucharist. Mortlock says that they are so similar to the ones at Barton Turf in Norfolk that they may be by the same hand, in which case the central screen is also by that person. They are, from left to right, the Holy Trinity, Gabriel, Archangels, Powers, Dominions, Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Virtues, Messengers, and finally the Eucharist. The Holy Trinity angel still has part of the original dedicatory inscription beneath his feet.
If part or all of this screen came from elsewhere, where did it come from? Possibly either Walberswick, Covehithe or Kessingland, the three downsized churches mentioned earlier. More excitingly, it might have come from one of the churches along this coast that was lost to the sea; perhaps neighbouring St Nicholas at Easton Bavents, or, just to the south, St Peter and St John the Baptist, the two Dunwich churches lost in the 16th and 17th centuries. We'll never know.
If you turn back at the screen and face westwards, your eyes are automatically drawn to the towering font cover, part of the extensive 1930s redecoration of the building. The clerestory is almost like a glass atrium to house it. Also the work of the period is the repainting and regilding of the 15th century pulpit (a lot of people blanch at this, but I think it is gorgeous) and the lectern. Beneath the font cover, the font is clearly one of the rare seven sacraments series, and part of the same group as Westhall, Blythburgh and Wenhaston. As at Blythburgh and Wenhaston, the panels are completely erased, probably in the 19th century, an act of barbarous vandalism. Given that Westhall is probably the best of all in the county, we must assume that three major medieval art treasures were wiped out. Astonishingly, vague shadows survive of the former reliefs. You can easily make out the Mass panel, facing east as at Westhall, the Penance panel and even what may be the Baptism of Christ.
Stepping through the screen, the reredos ahead is by Benedict Williamson and the glass above by Ninian Comper, familiar names in the Anglo-catholic pantheon, and evidence of an enthusiasm here that still survives in High Church form. There is a good engraved glass image of St Edmund to the north of the sanctuary, very much in the 1960s fashion, but curiously placed. On the wall of the chancel to the west of it, the high organ case is also painted and gilded enthusiastically.
As well as the screen, Southwold's other great medieval survival is the set of return stalls either side of the eastern face of the chancel screen. They have misericord seats, but the best feature are the handrests between the seats. On the south side, carvings include a man with a horn-shaped hat and sinners being drawn into the mouth of hell. On the north side are a man playing two pipes, a monkey preaching and a beaver biting its own genitals; a tale from the medieval bestiary, apparently.
What else is there to see? Well, the church is full of delights, and rewards further visits which always seem to turn up something previously unnoticed. St George rides full tilt at a dragon on an old chest at the west end of the north aisle. There is good 19th century glass in the porch and at the west end of the nave. A clock jack stands, axe and bell in hand, at the west end, a twin to the one upriver at Blythburgh. This one has a name - he's called Southwold Jack, and he is one of the symbols of the Adnams brewery.
As Mortlock notes, there are very few surviving memorials. This is partly because St Edmund was not in the patronage of a great landed family, but it may also suggest that they were largely removed at the time of the 19th century restoration, as at Brandon. One moving one is for the child of a Vicar, and there are some interesting pre-Oxford Movement 19th century brasses in the south aisle.
High, high above all this, the roofs are models of Anglo-catholic melodrama, the canopy of honour to the rood and the chancel ceilure in particular. But there is a warmth about it all that is missing from, say, Eye, which underwent a similar makeover. This church feels full of life, and not a museum piece at all. I remember attending evensong here late one winter Saturday afternoon, and it was magical. On another visit, I came on one of the first days of Spring that was truly warm and bright, with not a cloud in the sky. As I cycled into town, a cold fret off of the sea was condensing the steam of the brewery, sending it in swirls and skeins around the tower of St Edmund like low cloud. It was so atmospheric that I almost forgave them for what they have done to the Sole Bay Inn.
One of many treasures to be viewed in Florence. This one is historical but, of course, Florence is also known for its art treasues.
FLORENCE AND ITS ART TREASURES
By SARAH J. LIPPINCOTT
From WITH THE WORLD’S GREAT TRAVELLERS, EDITED BY CHARLES MORRIS AND OLIVER H. G. LEIGH Vol. IV
CHICAGO, UNION BOOK COMPANY 1901
[Mrs. Sarah J. Lippincott (“Grace Greenwood”), in her popular “Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe,” has given a well-written and appreciative account of Florence and its objects of art and interest, which we here reproduce. Our extract begins with a railway journey from Leghorn.]
The railway, which is a very good one, runs through a pleasant country cultivated like a garden, which grows more and more lovely till you reach Florence. The station is near Cascine, the fashionable drive and promenade lying just beyond the city walls, along the Arno; so that our[Pg 17] first lookout was upon a gay and beautiful scene,—those noble grounds thronged with equestrians, and pedestrians, and elegant equipages.
From that moment I have been charmed with Florence beyond all expectation and precedent. Every picturing of fancy, every dream of romance, has been met and surpassed. It is a city of enchantment, rich in incomparable treasures for the lover of poetry and art. In merely driving from the station to our hotel, on the Arno, near the Ponte Vecchio, I was struck by the noble style of architecture; uniform in solidity, and in a sort of antique solemnity, yet not monotonously gloomy or curiously quaint.
But when we drove about in the brightness of a lovely morning, and saw the grand and ponderous old palaces, the noble churches, the beautiful towers, the graceful bridges,—when we caught, at almost every turn, natural pictures which art could never approach,—I could only express by broken sentences and exclamations, childishly repeated, the rare and glowing pleasure I enjoyed.
O pictures of beauty, O visions of brightness, how must ye fade under my leaden pencil! It is strange, but I never feel so poor in expression as when my very soul is staggering under the weight of new treasures of thought and feeling.
One of our first visits was to the Royal Gallery, in the Uffizi. Through several rooms and corridors, making little pause in any, we passed to the Tribune,—for its size, doubtless the richest room in the world in great works of art. In the centre stands the Venus de Medici, “the wondrous statue that enchants the world,” says the poet; but as for me, I bow not before it with any heartiness of adoration. Exquisite, tender, and delicate beyond my fairest fancy, I found the form; graceful to the last point of perfection seemed to me the attitude and action; but the smallness[Pg 18] and the insignificant character of the head, and the simpering senselessness of the face, place it without my Olympus. I deny its divinity in toto, and bear my offerings to other shrines. Yet the Venus de Medici does not strike me as a voluptuous figure; it certainly is not powerfully and perilously so, wanting, as it does, all strength of passion and noble development of soul; for, paradoxical as it may seem, a soul of wild depths and passionate intensity must lie beneath the alluring warmth and brightness of a refined and perfect sensuality.
Of another, and a far more dangerous character, I should say, is the Venus of Titian, which hangs near it. Here is voluptuousness, gorgeous, undisguised, yet subtle, and in a certain sense poetic and refined. She is neither innocent nor unconscious, yet not bold, nor coarse, nor meretricious. She proudly and quietly revels in her own marvellous beauties, if not like a goddess who knows herself every inch divine, at least like a woman by character and position quite as free from the obligations of morality and purity. For all the wonderful beauty of this great picture, I cannot like it, cannot even tolerate it; but, with an inexpressible feeling of relief, turn from it to the Bella Donna and the Flora of the same artist. The latter is to me the most fascinating and delicious picture I have ever beheld; the richness, the fulness, the golden splendor of its beauty, flood my soul with a strange and passionate delight.
There is no high peculiar sentiment about it, though it is grand in its pure simplicity; yet its soft, sunny, luxurious loveliness alone brings tears to my eyes,—tears which I dash away jealously, lest they hide for one instant the transcendent vision.
In the Tribune are several of the finest paintings of Raphael,—the Fornarina, a rich, glowing picture, but a face I cannot like; the young St. John, a glorious figure, and[Pg 19] the Madonna del Cardellino, one of the loveliest of his holy families. There is also a great picture by Andrea del Sarto, which impressed me much; the Adoration of the Magi, by Albert Dürer, the heads full of a simple grandeur peculiar to that noble artist; and an exquisite little Virgin and Child, by Correggio. In another room, after looking at a bewildering number of pictures, most of which have already passed from my mind, I came upon a head of Medusa, by Leonardo da Vinci, which I fear will haunt me to my dying day. It is surely the most terrible painting I have ever beheld.
In the magnificent Pitti palace, among many glorious pictures, I saw two before which my heart bowed in most living adoration—the Madonna della Seggiola of Raphael, and a Virgin and Child of Murillo. The former is surely the sweetest group by the divine painter; and the last, if not of a very elevated character, pure and tender, and surpassingly lovely. In this gallery are Titian’s Bella Donna, Magdalene, and Marriage of St. Catharine. The first of these, which is a portrait, seems to me far the finest. The more I see of them the more am I impressed with the conviction that there is nothing in all his grand and varied works displaying such profound and pre-eminent genius, such subtle, masterly, miraculous power, as the portraits of Titian.
In this palace we saw Canova’s Venus, which I liked no better than I expected. There is about the head, attitude, and figure an affected, fine-ladyish air, dainty, and conscious, and passionless, which is worse than the absolute voluptuousness which would be in character at least with the earthly Venus.
I am more and more convinced that there is in sculpture but one divine mother of pure Love,—the grand and majestic Venus of Milo.
[Pg 20]
To-day we have driven out to Fiesole, and seen the massive walls of the ancient Etruscan city. These ramparts, which are called “Cyclopean constructions,” are said to be at least three thousand years old, and yet look as though they might endure to the end of time. From a hill above the town we had a large and lovely view of the beautiful valley of the Arno, and looked down upon Florence, lapped in its midst, small, compact, yet beautiful and stately. I never beheld a more enchanting picture than the broad and bright one there spread before me: the blue mountains, the gleaming river, the green and smiling valley; hills covered with olives and myrtles; roads winding between hedges of roses to innumerable villas, nestled in flowery nooks, or crowning breezy heights. Oh, this was enchantment of fairy-land, no dream of poetry; it was in very truth a paradise on earth.
On our return we visited the house of Michael Angelo, which is reverently kept by his descendants, as nearly as possible, in the same state in which he left it. It is a handsome, quaint old house, quiet, shadowy, and somewhat sombre, still pervaded with the awe-inspiring atmosphere of the colossal genius of that Titanic artist.
As I stood in his studio, or in the little cabinet where he used to write, and saw before me the many objects once familiar to his eye and hand, I felt that it was but yesterday that he was borne forth from his beloved home, and that it was the first funereal stillness and sadness which pervaded it now.
We afterwards drove to “Dante’s stone,” a slab of marble by the side of the way, on which he used to sit in the long summer evenings, rapt in mournful meditations, and dreaming his immortal dreams. It is now as sacred to his memory as the stone above his grave.
For the past two afternoons we have driven in the Cascine,[Pg 21] by far the most delightful drive and place of reunion I have ever seen. It is much smaller and, of course, less magnificent than Hyde Park, but pleasanter, I think, in having portions more sheltered, wild, and quiet for riders and promenaders. In the centre of the grounds, opposite the Grand Duke’s farm-house, is an open space where the band is stationed, and the carriages come together to exchange compliments and hear music. Here are always to be seen many splendid turnouts, open carriages filled with elegantly-dressed ladies; gallant officers and gay dames on horseback; flower-girls, bearing about the most delicious lilies and roses, pinks and lilacs, mignonette and heliotrope, freighting the golden evening air with their intoxicating fragrance and amazing you with their paradisian profusion,—altogether a cheering and charming scene, colored and animated by the very soul of innocent pleasure.
This afternoon we met Charles Lever, riding with his wife and two daughters. They are all fine riders, were well mounted, and looked a very happy family party. Mr. Lever is much such a man as you would look to see in the author of Charles O’Malley,—hale and hearty, careless, merry, and a little dashing in his air.
This evening I have spent with the Brownings, to whom I brought letters. They live in that Casa Guidi which Mrs. Browning has already immortalized by the grandest poem ever penned by woman....
Mr. and Mrs. Browning have taken up their residence in Florence, a place in every way congenial to them. I know that thousands of her unknown friends across the water will rejoice to hear that the health of Mrs. Browning improves with every year spent in Italy. Yet she is still very delicate,—but a frail flower, ceaselessly requiring all the sheltering and fostering care, all the wealth and watchfulness of love, which is round about her....
[Pg 22]
Yesterday I saw, for the first time, the grand, antique group of Niobe and her children. Of these wonderful figures, by far the most noble and pathetic are those of the mother and the young daughter she is seeking to shield. Oh, the proud anguish, the wild, hopeless, maternal agony, of that face haunts me, and will haunt me forever.
I afterwards saw the Mercury of John of Bologna,—a marvel of beauty, grace, and lightness. We visited the treasure-room of the Pitti palace, and saw all the Grand Duke’s plate, among which are several magnificent articles by Benvenuto Cellini. In the evening we drove in the Cascine, and to the Hill of Bellosguardo, from whence we had an enchanting view of Florence and the Val d’Arno,—and so the day ended. To-day we have made the tour of the churches. In the solemn old cathedral, whose wonderful dome was the admiration and study of Michael Angelo, there were extraordinary religious ceremonies, on the occasion of some great festa. Some archbishop or other officiated in very gorgeous robes, of course,—in capital condition, and looking indolent, proud, and stupid, as another matter of course. The court came in great state and pomp, with much trumpeting and beating of the drum. The Grand Duke was accompanied by the Grand Duchess and his household, by the Guardia Nobile, and by numerous ladies and gentlemen of high rank, all in full dress. Those ball costumes of the courtly dames—gay silks and lace, diamonds, flowers, and plumes—looked strange enough after the uniform and decent sombreness of the dress prescribed for the “functions” of St. Peter’s.
The Grand Duke is a man of ordinary size, and appears not far from seventy years of age, though it is said he is hardly sixty. His hair and moustaches are nearly white, and he wears the white coat of the Austrian uniform, and so looks more miller-like than majestic. There was a[Pg 23] sort of sullen sadness in his air, which I confess I was rather gratified to remark,—remembering all the treachery of the past, and beholding all the degradation of the present. The Grand Duchess is a dignified-looking woman enough, but the ladies in attendance on her to-day dazzled alone with their diamonds.
After hearing some fine music, we went to the Santa Croce, the Westminster Abbey of Florence, where are the tombs of its most illustrious dead. Of these, the noblest is that of Michael Angelo, and the poorest, yet more pretentious, that of Dante. Canova has here a monument to Alfieri, which is affected and sentimental, like nearly all his works; and the tombs of Galileo and Machiavelli are anything but pleasing and imposing. Infinitely better were the most simple slabs than such pompous piles.
At the San Lorenzo we saw that marvellous mausoleum, the Medicean Chapel,—the richest yet plainest structure of the kind in the world. There is here a peculiar assumption and ostentation of simplicity,—your eye, accustomed to the crowded ornament and vivid gorgeousness of ordinary princely chapels, is shocked and cheated at the first glance by the sombre magnificence, the sumptuous bareness, of this singular structure; but right soon is disappointment changed to admiration and amazement, as you see that all those lofty walls, from floor to roof, are composed of the most rare and beautiful marbles and precious stones, wrought into exquisite mosaics. Then you see the stupendous and beautiful cenotaphs, and the solemn dark statues of the Medici, and, at length, fully realize all their royal waste of wealth over this mausoleum, all their princely pomp of death.
In the Sagrestia Nuova, built by Michael Angelo, are the statues of Lorenzo and Julian de Medici, with their attendant groups, the Morn and Night, Evening and Day, and[Pg 24] the Virgin and Child,—surely the noblest works of that mighty artist. I instinctively bowed in awe before the gloomy grandeur of Lorenzo; and there was something in his still frown which shook my soul more than the warlike air and almost startling action of Julian. The unfinished group of the Virgin and Child has much tenderness and sweetness with all its force and grandeur; but, as a general thing, I must think that Michael Angelo’s female figures are far more remarkable for gigantic proportions and muscular development than for grace, beauty, or any fine spiritual character. This Virgin is majestic almost to sublimity, yet truly gentle, lovable, divinely maternal....
In what was the refectory of an old monastery, but which was afterwards used as a carriage-house, has been found, within a few years past, a noble fresco by Raphael,—a Last Supper. This we went to see, and I felt it to be one of the purest and most touching creations of that angelic painter. In this picture, the “beloved disciple” seems to have fallen asleep on the breast of the Master, and to have bowed his head lower and lower, till it lies upon the table, while the hand of Jesus is laid caressingly upon his shoulder. There is something so exquisitely sweet and sad, so divinely pitiful, yet humanely tender, in the action, that the very memory of it blinds my eyes with tears.
After dinner we drove in the Cascine, where we met all the world. As it was an exceedingly beautiful sunset, and the evening of a festa, the band continued to play, and the brilliant crowd remained long. I revelled in the delicious air and the cheerful scene as fully as was possible, with the intrusive consciousness that I was breathing the one and beholding the other for the last time—probably forever—certainly for many years.
Mrs. H. and I here took leave of a brace of charming[Pg 25] young nobles, in whom, I fear, we had become too deeply interested. These were two beautiful Russian boys, brothers, of the ages of nine and seven, with whom we voyaged on the Mediterranean and formed an acquaintance which has been continued in Florence. In all my life I never saw such enchanting little fellows,—simple, natural, frank, and free, yet perfect gentlemen in air and expression, displaying, with the utmost ease, grace and polish of manner, tact, wit, and savoir-faire truly astonishing. They always came to our carriage at the Cascine, and, lounging on the steps, chatted to us in French between the pieces of music. To-night, as the youngest was describing to me, very graphically, the different countries through which he had travelled and the cities which he had visited, I advised him to go next to England, and assured him that he would be greatly interested and amused by the sights and pleasures of London. With the slightest possible shrug, he replied, “Oui, madame, c’est une grande ville, sans doute; mais pour tous les amusements il n’y a qu’une ville dans le monde,—c’est Paris.” ...
As I looked back upon Florence for the last time, when I could distinguish only the battlemented Palazzo Vecchio, with its fine old tower, and that incomparable group, the Duomo, the Campanile, and the Baptistery, and a slender, shining line, which I knew for the Arno, I suddenly felt my sight struggling through tears,—real hearty tears. Ah, Bella Firenze, I went from you reluctantly, almost rebelliously; I grieved to leave those glorious galleries, through which I seemed to have merely run; I grieved to leave the Cascine, with its delicious drives and walks, its music and gayety; but I “sorrowed most of all” at parting, so soon, with my friends the Brownings. My friends, how rich I feel in being able to write these words!
I think I must venture to say a little more of them, as,[Pg 26] after writing of my first evening at Casa Guidi, I was so happy as to enjoy much of their society. Robert Browning is a brilliant talker, and more—a pleasant, suggestive conversationist and a sympathetic listener. He has a fine humor, a keen sense of the ridiculous, which he indulges, at times, with the hearty abandon of a boy. In the gentle stream of Elizabeth Browning’s familiar talk shine deep and soft the high thoughts and star-bright imaginations of her rare poetic nature. The two have oneness of spirit, with distinct individuality; they are mated, not merged together.
In the atmosphere of so much learning and genius, you naturally expect to perceive some mustiness of old folios, some uncomfortable brooding of solemn thought; to feel about you somewhat of the stretch and struggle of grand aspiration and noble effort, or the exhausted stillness of a brief suspension of the “toil divine.” But in this household all is simple, cheerful, and reposeful; here is neither lore nor logic to appall one; here is not enough din of mental machinery to drown the faintest heart-throb; here one breathes freely, acts naturally, and speaks honestly.
P3220341
The Castel Vecchio Bridge or Scaliger Bridge (Italian: Ponte Scaligero) is a fortified bridge over the Adige River. The segmental arch bridge featured the world's largest span at the time of its construction (48.70 m) built 1354-1356) by Cangrande II della Scala, to grant him a safe way of escape from the annexed eponymous castle in the event of a rebellion of the population against his tyrannic rule. The solidity of the construction allowed it to resist untouched until, in the late 18th century, the French troops destroyed the tower on the left bank (although it probably dated from the occupation of Verona by the Visconti or the Republic of Venice).
The bridge was however totally destroyed, along with the Ponte Pietra, by the retreating German troops on April 24, 1945. A faithful reconstruction begun in 1949 and was finished in 1951, with the exception of the left tower.
The bridge is in red brick in the upper part, as are all landmarks in Verona from the Scaliger era, and in white marble in the lower one. It includes three spans of decreasing length starting from pentagonal towers.
River Dargle Flood Defence Scheme.
These images were taken during the second week of October 2016.
Meanwhile, at the Silverbridge site, adjacent to the N11 dual-carriageway:
We last visited here 2 years ago in November 2014, where bank stabilisation works involving excavation, repair and building of a support wall structure were being carried out by JONS Construction on behalf of the National Roads Authority.
We would occasionally catch sight of this work in the distance. Quite an impressive little piece of structural engineering.
Having built a retaining concave wall, backfilled for solidity, they were also drilling, fixing and sealing ground anchors to pin the entire structure together.
Now we see that further works are being undertaken.
Word has it that extra ‘stabilisation work’ has to be done to protect the integrity of the riverbank. At the section here we can see that there’s not much space between the edge of the rock face and the Armco at the side of the dual-carriageway.
Have yet to determine what precisely that will entail. Serious work to re-inforce the side access ramp down to the river.
Gabions consist of steel ‘baskets’ filled with rock pieces. They are filled and then fixed together to provide protection and strength to the existing river bank. They allow ground water to flow through them which helps prevent waterlogging of the bank behind them. Existing examples of these were used, back in 2012, to line the north bank of the existing riverbank adjacent to The Slang/Rehills stretch.
Long shallow versions of gabions, known as ‘mattresses’, were used to cover the excavated riverbed, and also to protect the edges of the river channel, particularly at bends in the river.
Working in these confined spaces puts a premium on safety and communication.
I particularly like the clever way in which the operator of the ‘Hitachi - Zaxis 130 LCN’ excavator is able to ‘slide’ laterally along the pipes without the need to crab sideways on the tracks.
The Iron Bridge is a bridge that crosses the River Severn in Shropshire, England. Opened in 1781, it was the first arch bridge in the world to be made of cast iron, and was greatly celebrated after construction owing to its use of the new material.
In 1934 it was designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument and closed to vehicular traffic. Tolls for pedestrians were collected until 1950, when ownership of the bridge was transferred to Shropshire County Council. It now belongs to Telford and Wrekin Borough Council. The bridge, the adjacent settlement of Ironbridge and the Ironbridge Gorge form the UNESCO Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site. The bridge is a Grade I listed building, and a way-point on the South Telford Heritage Trail.
The site, adjacent to where a ferry had run between Madeley and Benthall, was chosen for its high approaches on each side and the relative solidity of the ground. The Act of Parliament described how the bridge was to be built from a point in Benthall parish near the house of Samuel Barnett to a point on the opposite shore near the house of Thomas Crumpton. Pritchard died on 21 December 1777 in his tower-house at Eyton on Severn, only a month after work had begun, having been ill for over a year.
The masonry and abutments were constructed between 1777 and 1778, and the ribs were lifted into place in the summer of 1779. The nascent bridge first spanned the river on 2 July 1779, and it was opened to traffic on 1 January 1781.
The bridge is built from five cast iron ribs that give a span of 30.6 metres (100 ft). Exactly 378 long tons 10 cwt (847,800 lb or 384.6 t) of iron was used in the construction of the bridge, and there are almost 1700 individual components, the heaviest weighing 5.5 long tons (5.6 t). Components were cast individually to fit with each other, rather than being of standard sizes, with discrepancies of up to several centimetres between 'identical' components in different locations.
Decorative rings and ogees between the structural ribs of the bridge suggest that the final design was of Pritchard, as the same elements appear in a gazebo he rebuilt. A foreman at the foundry, Thomas Gregory, drew the detailed designs for the members, resulting in the use of carpentry jointing details such as mortise and tenon joints and dovetails.
Two supplemental arches, of similar cast iron construction, carry a tow-path on the south bank and also act as flood arches.
Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The museum was originally the private collection of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who began displaying the artworks to the public seasonally in 1951.
After her death in 1979. it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which eventually opened the collection year-round. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was Guggenheim's home.
Collection
The collection is principally based on the personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim, a former wife of artist Max Ernst and a niece of the mining magnate, Solomon R. Guggenheim. She collected the artworks mostly between 1938 and 1946, buying works in Europe "in dizzying succession" as World War II began, and later in America, where she discovered the talent of Jackson Pollock, among others. The museum "houses an impressive selection of modern art. Its picturesque setting and well-respected collection attract some 400,000 visitors per year", making it "the most-visited site in Venice after the Doge's Palace". Works on display include those of prominent Italian futurists and American modernists. Pieces in the collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract expressionism. During Peggy Guggenheim's 30-year residence in Venice, her collection was seen at her home in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and at special exhibitions in Amsterdam (1950), Zurich (1951), London (1964), Stockholm (1966), Copenhagen (1966), New York (1969) and Paris (1974).
Peggy Guggenheim, Marseille, 1937
Among the artists represented in the collection are,
from Italy, De Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet) and Severini (Sea Dancer);
from France, Braque (The Clarinet), Metzinger (Au Vélodrome), Gleizes (Woman with animals), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger (Study of a Nude and Men in the City) Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth);
from Spain, Dali - (Birth of Liquid Desires), Miro (Seated Woman II) and Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach);
from other European countries,
Constantin Brancusi (including a sculpture from the Bird in Space series), Max Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Giacometti (Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Gorky (Untitled), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Klee (Magic Garden), Magritte (Empire of Light) and Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938, Composition with Red 1939); and from the US, Calder (Arc of Petals) and Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy).
In one room, the museum also exhibits a few paintings by Peggy's daughter Pegeen Vail Guggenheim
In addition to the permanent collection, the museum houses 26 works on long-term loan from the Gianni Mattioli Collection, including images of Italian futurism by artists including Boccioni (Materia, Dynamism of a Cyclist), Carrà (Interventionist Demonstration), Russolo (The Solidity of Fog) and Severini (Blue Dancer), as well as works by Balla, Depero, Rosai, Sironi and Soffici.In 2012, the museum received 83 works from the Rudolph and Hannelore Schulhof Collection, which will have its own gallery within in the building.
Building and Venice Biennale
Entrance to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which Peggy Guggenheim purchased in 1949. Although sometimes mistaken for a modern building,it is an 18th-century palace designed by the Venetian architect Lorenzo Boschetti. The building was unfinished, and has an unusually low elevation on the Grand Canal. The museum's website describes it thus:
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
The palazzo was Peggy Guggenheim's home for thirty years.
In 1951, the palazzo, its garden, now called the Nasher Sculpture Garden, and her art collection were opened to the public from April to October for viewing. Her collection at the palazzo remained open during the summers until her death in Camposampiero, northern Italy, in 1979; she had donated the palazzo and the 300-piece collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1976.
The foundation, then under the direction of Peter Lawson-Johnston, took control of the palazzo and the collection in 1979 and re-opened the collection there in April 1980 as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
After the Foundation took control of the building in 1979, it took steps to expand gallery space; by 1985, "all of the rooms on the main floor had been converted into galleries ... the white Istrian stone facade and the unique canal terrace had been restored" and a protruding arcade wing, called the barchessa, had been rebuilt by architect Giorgio Bellavitis. Since 1985, the museum has been open year-round.[11] In 1993, apartments adjacent to the museum were converted to a garden annex, a shop and more galleries.
In 1995, the Nasher Sculpture Garden was completed, additional exhibition rooms were added, and a café was opened. A few years later, in 1999 and in 2000, the two neighboring properties were acquired. In 2003, a new entrance and booking office opened to cope with the increasing number of visitors, which reached 350,000 in 2007. Since 1993, the museum has doubled in size, from 2,000 to 4,000 square meters.
Since 1985, the United States has selected the foundation to operate the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, an exhibition held every other summer. In 1986, the foundation purchased the Palladian-style pavilion, built in 1930
Management and attendance
Philip Rylands was appointed director of the collection in 2000.[18] As of 2012, the collection was the most visited art gallery in Venice and the 11th most visited in Italy.
2014 lawsuit
Following the gift of works to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation by Hannelore and Rudolph Schulhof of Germany in 2012, works collected by Peggy Guggenheim were removed from the Palazzo and placed in storage to make room for the display of the new works.
The Schulhofs were honoured with inscriptions of their names alongside Guggenheim's at both entrances of the museum. Their son, Michael P. Schulhof, has been a trustee of the Guggenheim foundation since 2009.
In 2014, seven French descendants of Peggy Guggenheim sued the foundation for violating her will and agreements with the foundation, which they say require that the collection "remain intact and on display". The descendants also claim, among other things, that the resting place of Guggenheim's ashes in the gardens of the Palazzo have been desecrated by the display of sculptures donated by Patsy and Raymond Nasher nearby and by the use of the burial site for fundraising parties.
The lawsuit requests that the founder's bequest be revoked or that the collections, gravesite and signage be restored. The foundation calls the lawsuit "meritless". Other descendants of Peggy Guggenheim support the foundation.
"Political language... Is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." - George Orwell
This is Bruno Breda from Buenos Aires, Argentina, along with his dog Holis. He says, "I have finished my model JWST built in cardboard and plastic panels especially the sunshields, to which I preferred to give more solidity to cost to make less realism to the model. It is designed based on the work of Nina Heimpel, the 3d model of this same web page, and the YouTube video "James Webb Space Telescope Launch and Deployment" of the Northrop Grumman channel. I really enjoyed doing it and trying to improve it. Thank you very much, and we hope that [its] "big brother" is very soon in space, helping us to understand even more the cosmos."
Share your model of Webb with us! jwst.nasa.gov/content/features/educational/paperModel/mod...
Marino Marini 1901 1980
The angel of the City
L'angelo della cittÃ
1948 Cast/ fusione 1950 ?
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The museum was originally the private collection of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who began displaying the artworks to the public seasonally in 1951.
After her death in 1979. it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which eventually opened the collection year-round. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was Guggenheim's home.
Collection
The collection is principally based on the personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim, a former wife of artist Max Ernst and a niece of the mining magnate, Solomon R. Guggenheim. She collected the artworks mostly between 1938 and 1946, buying works in Europe "in dizzying succession" as World War II began, and later in America, where she discovered the talent of Jackson Pollock, among others. The museum "houses an impressive selection of modern art. Its picturesque setting and well-respected collection attract some 400,000 visitors per year", making it "the most-visited site in Venice after the Doge's Palace". Works on display include those of prominent Italian futurists and American modernists. Pieces in the collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract expressionism. During Peggy Guggenheim's 30-year residence in Venice, her collection was seen at her home in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and at special exhibitions in Amsterdam (1950), Zurich (1951), London (1964), Stockholm (1966), Copenhagen (1966), New York (1969) and Paris (1974).
Peggy Guggenheim, Marseille, 1937
Among the artists represented in the collection are,
from Italy, De Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet) and Severini (Sea Dancer);
from France, Braque (The Clarinet), Metzinger (Au Vélodrome), Gleizes (Woman with animals), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger (Study of a Nude and Men in the City) Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth);
from Spain, Dali - (Birth of Liquid Desires), Miro (Seated Woman II) and Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach);
from other European countries,
Constantin Brancusi (including a sculpture from the Bird in Space series), Max Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Giacometti (Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Gorky (Untitled), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Klee (Magic Garden), Magritte (Empire of Light) and Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938, Composition with Red 1939); and from the US, Calder (Arc of Petals) and Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy).
In one room, the museum also exhibits a few paintings by Peggy's daughter Pegeen Vail Guggenheim
In addition to the permanent collection, the museum houses 26 works on long-term loan from the Gianni Mattioli Collection, including images of Italian futurism by artists including Boccioni (Materia, Dynamism of a Cyclist), Carrà (Interventionist Demonstration), Russolo (The Solidity of Fog) and Severini (Blue Dancer), as well as works by Balla, Depero, Rosai, Sironi and Soffici.In 2012, the museum received 83 works from the Rudolph and Hannelore Schulhof Collection, which will have its own gallery within in the building.
Building and Venice Biennale
Entrance to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which Peggy Guggenheim purchased in 1949. Although sometimes mistaken for a modern building,it is an 18th-century palace designed by the Venetian architect Lorenzo Boschetti. The building was unfinished, and has an unusually low elevation on the Grand Canal. The museum's website describes it thus:
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome caesura in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
The palazzo was Peggy Guggenheim's home for thirty years.
In 1951, the palazzo, its garden, now called the Nasher Sculpture Garden, and her art collection were opened to the public from April to October for viewing. Her collection at the palazzo remained open during the summers until her death in Camposampiero, northern Italy, in 1979; she had donated the palazzo and the 300-piece collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1976.
The foundation, then under the direction of Peter Lawson-Johnston, took control of the palazzo and the collection in 1979 and re-opened the collection there in April 1980 as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
After the Foundation took control of the building in 1979, it took steps to expand gallery space; by 1985,all of the rooms on the main floor had been converted into galleries ... the white Istrian stone facade and the unique canal terrace had been restored" and a protruding arcade wing, called the barchessa, had been rebuilt by architect Giorgio Bellavitis. Since 1985, the museum has been open year-round. In 1993, apartments adjacent to the museum were converted to a garden annex, a shop and more galleries.
In 1995, the Nasher Sculpture Garden was completed, additional exhibition rooms were added, and a café was opened. A few years later, in 1999 and in 2000, the two neighboring properties were acquired. In 2003, a new entrance and booking office opened to cope with the increasing number of visitors, which reached 350,000 in 2007. Since 1993, the museum has doubled in size, from 2,000 to 4,000 square meters.
Since 1985, the United States has selected the foundation to operate the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, an exhibition held every other summer. In 1986, the foundation purchased the Palladian-style pavilion, built in 1930
Management and attendance
Philip Rylands was appointed director of the collection in 2000.[18] As of 2012, the collection was the most visited art gallery in Venice and the 11th most visited in Italy.
2014 lawsuit
Following the gift of works to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation by Hannelore and Rudolph Schulhof of Germany in 2012, works collected by Peggy Guggenheim were removed from the Palazzo and placed in storage to make room for the display of the new works.
The Schulhofs were honoured with inscriptions of their names alongside Guggenheim's at both entrances of the museum. Their son, Michael P. Schulhof, has been a trustee of the Guggenheim foundation since 2009.
In 2014, seven French descendants of Peggy Guggenheim sued the foundation for violating her will and agreements with the foundation, which they say require that the collection remain intact and on display. The descendants also claim, among other things, that the resting place of Guggenheim's ashes in the gardens of the Palazzo have been desecrated by the display of sculptures donated by Patsy and Raymond Nasher nearby and by the use of the burial site for fundraising parties.
The lawsuit requests that the founder's bequest be revoked or that the collections, gravesite and signage be restored. The foundation calls the lawsuit meritless. Other descendants of Peggy Guggenheim support the foundation.
This is Bruno Breda from Buenos Aires, Argentina, along with his dog Holis. He says, "I have finished my model JWST built in cardboard and plastic panels especially the sunshields, to which I preferred to give more solidity to cost to make less realism to the model. It is designed based on the work of Nina Heimpel, the 3d model of this same web page, and the YouTube video "James Webb Space Telescope Launch and Deployment" of the Northrop Grumman channel. I really enjoyed doing it and trying to improve it. Thank you very much, and we hope that [its] "big brother" is very soon in space, helping us to understand even more the cosmos."
Share your model of Webb with us! jwst.nasa.gov/content/features/educational/paperModel/mod...
Pericle Fazzini 1913 1987
Grande donna seduta (Sibilla)
1947 cast/fusione 1956
Bronze Bronzo
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The museum was originally the private collection of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who began displaying the artworks to the public seasonally in 1951.
After her death in 1979. it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which eventually opened the collection year-round. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was Guggenheim's home.
Collection
The collection is principally based on the personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim, a former wife of artist Max Ernst and a niece of the mining magnate, Solomon R. Guggenheim. She collected the artworks mostly between 1938 and 1946, buying works in Europe "in dizzying succession" as World War II began, and later in America, where she discovered the talent of Jackson Pollock, among others. The museum "houses an impressive selection of modern art. Its picturesque setting and well-respected collection attract some 400,000 visitors per year", making it "the most-visited site in Venice after the Doge's Palace". Works on display include those of prominent Italian futurists and American modernists. Pieces in the collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract expressionism. During Peggy Guggenheim's 30-year residence in Venice, her collection was seen at her home in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and at special exhibitions in Amsterdam (1950), Zurich (1951), London (1964), Stockholm (1966), Copenhagen (1966), New York (1969) and Paris (1974).
Peggy Guggenheim, Marseille, 1937
Among the artists represented in the collection are,
from Italy, De Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet) and Severini (Sea Dancer);
from France, Braque (The Clarinet), Metzinger (Au Vélodrome), Gleizes (Woman with animals), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger (Study of a Nude and Men in the City) Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth);
from Spain, Dali - (Birth of Liquid Desires), Miro (Seated Woman II) and Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach);
from other European countries,
Constantin Brancusi (including a sculpture from the Bird in Space series), Max Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Giacometti (Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Gorky (Untitled), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Klee (Magic Garden), Magritte (Empire of Light) and Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938, Composition with Red 1939); and from the US, Calder (Arc of Petals) and Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy).
In one room, the museum also exhibits a few paintings by Peggy's daughter Pegeen Vail Guggenheim
In addition to the permanent collection, the museum houses 26 works on long-term loan from the Gianni Mattioli Collection, including images of Italian futurism by artists including Boccioni (Materia, Dynamism of a Cyclist), Carrà (Interventionist Demonstration), Russolo (The Solidity of Fog) and Severini (Blue Dancer), as well as works by Balla, Depero, Rosai, Sironi and Soffici.In 2012, the museum received 83 works from the Rudolph and Hannelore Schulhof Collection, which will have its own gallery within in the building.
Building and Venice Biennale
Entrance to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which Peggy Guggenheim purchased in 1949. Although sometimes mistaken for a modern building,it is an 18th-century palace designed by the Venetian architect Lorenzo Boschetti. The building was unfinished, and has an unusually low elevation on the Grand Canal. The museum's website describes it thus:
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome caesura in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
The palazzo was Peggy Guggenheim's home for thirty years.
In 1951, the palazzo, its garden, now called the Nasher Sculpture Garden, and her art collection were opened to the public from April to October for viewing. Her collection at the palazzo remained open during the summers until her death in Camposampiero, northern Italy, in 1979; she had donated the palazzo and the 300-piece collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1976.
The foundation, then under the direction of Peter Lawson-Johnston, took control of the palazzo and the collection in 1979 and re-opened the collection there in April 1980 as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
After the Foundation took control of the building in 1979, it took steps to expand gallery space; by 1985 all of the rooms on the main floor had been converted into galleries ... the white Istrian stone facade and the unique canal terrace had been restored and a protruding arcade wing, called the barchessa, had been rebuilt by architect Giorgio Bellavitis. Since 1985, the museum has been open year-round.In 1993, apartments adjacent to the museum were converted to a garden annex, a shop and more galleries.
In 1995, the Nasher Sculpture Garden was completed, additional exhibition rooms were added, and a café was opened. A few years later, in 1999 and in 2000, the two neighboring properties were acquired. In 2003, a new entrance and booking office opened to cope with the increasing number of visitors, which reached 350,000 in 2007. Since 1993, the museum has doubled in size, from 2,000 to 4,000 square meters.
Since 1985, the United States has selected the foundation to operate the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, an exhibition held every other summer. In 1986, the foundation purchased the Palladian-style pavilion, built in 1930
Management and attendance
Philip Rylands was appointed director of the collection in 2000.[18] As of 2012, the collection was the most visited art gallery in Venice and the 11th most visited in Italy.
2014 lawsuit
Following the gift of works to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation by Hannelore and Rudolph Schulhof of Germany in 2012, works collected by Peggy Guggenheim were removed from the Palazzo and placed in storage to make room for the display of the new works.
The Schulhofs were honoured with inscriptions of their names alongside Guggenheim's at both entrances of the museum. Their son, Michael P. Schulhof, has been a trustee of the Guggenheim foundation since 2009.
In 2014, seven French descendants of Peggy Guggenheim sued the foundation for violating her will and agreements with the foundation, which they say require that the collection remain intact and on display. The descendants also claim, among other things, that the resting place of Guggenheim's ashes in the gardens of the Palazzo have been desecrated by the display of sculptures donated by Patsy and Raymond Nasher nearby and by the use of the burial site for fundraising parties.
The lawsuit requests that the founder's bequest be revoked or that the collections, gravesite and signage be restored. The foundation calls the lawsuit meritless. Other descendants of Peggy Guggenheim support the foundation.
Bauhaus Museum Weimar, Germany
German architect Heike Hanada designed a minimalist concrete museum to celebrate the Bauhaus in Weimar, where the design school was founded 100 years ago. The building is dedicated to the design school creates a physical cultural presence for the Bauhaus in the German city where it was based between 1919 and 1925. Located near the Nazi-era Gauforum square and the Neue Museum Weimar, the Bauhaus Museum is a simple five-storey concrete box broken only with its entrance and a couple of windows. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. Equally spaced horizontal grooves run around the facades of the museum, with the words "bauhaus museum" repeated in a band near the top of the building. Hanada designed the museum to be a public building for the city and has attempted to clearly connect it to the neighbouring park. With elements such as plinths, fasciae, portals, stairways and a terrace to the park, the architecture incorporates classical themes that underscore its public character.
The museum contains 2,000 m2 of exhibition space, which will be used to display around 1,000 items from the Weimar Bauhaus collection. A shop and entrance hall is located on the ground floor, with a cafe and toilets below, and three floors dedicated to telling the story of the Bauhaus above. Each of the galleries overlooks double-height spaces and are accessed from a long ceremonial staircase that stretches the height of the building. The visitors ascend a succession of interchanging open spaces and staircases until they finally arrive at the top floor where they are presented with an unobstructed view of the park. The cascading staircases are encased by ceiling-high walls and function as free-standing, enclosed bodies in the interior space. The collection is arranged to inform visitors about the history of the design school, with the gallery on the first floor dedicated to its origins in Weimar and the Bauhaus manifesto that Walter Gropius wrote in 1919. The second floor has exhibits that show how these ideas were implemented, with galleries dedicated to each of the Bauhaus directors – Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe – at the top of the building.
The museum in Weimar has opened to coincide with the centenary of the Bauhaus, which was established in the city in 1919. The school was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new school building for the institution. Following a short time based in Berlin the school closed for good in 1933. Although only open for just over a decade, the Bauhaus is the most influential art and design school in history. The ideas and people associated with the school had an incredible impact on design and architecture, and to mark its centenary we created a series exploring its key works and figures.
Bauhaus Museum Weimar, Germany
German architect Heike Hanada designed a minimalist concrete museum to celebrate the Bauhaus in Weimar, where the design school was founded 100 years ago. The building is dedicated to the design school creates a physical cultural presence for the Bauhaus in the German city where it was based between 1919 and 1925. Located near the Nazi-era Gauforum square and the Neue Museum Weimar, the Bauhaus Museum is a simple five-storey concrete box broken only with its entrance and a couple of windows. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. Equally spaced horizontal grooves run around the facades of the museum, with the words "bauhaus museum" repeated in a band near the top of the building. Hanada designed the museum to be a public building for the city and has attempted to clearly connect it to the neighbouring park. With elements such as plinths, fasciae, portals, stairways and a terrace to the park, the architecture incorporates classical themes that underscore its public character.
The museum contains 2,000 m2 of exhibition space, which will be used to display around 1,000 items from the Weimar Bauhaus collection. A shop and entrance hall is located on the ground floor, with a cafe and toilets below, and three floors dedicated to telling the story of the Bauhaus above. Each of the galleries overlooks double-height spaces and are accessed from a long ceremonial staircase that stretches the height of the building. The visitors ascend a succession of interchanging open spaces and staircases until they finally arrive at the top floor where they are presented with an unobstructed view of the park. The cascading staircases are encased by ceiling-high walls and function as free-standing, enclosed bodies in the interior space. The collection is arranged to inform visitors about the history of the design school, with the gallery on the first floor dedicated to its origins in Weimar and the Bauhaus manifesto that Walter Gropius wrote in 1919. The second floor has exhibits that show how these ideas were implemented, with galleries dedicated to each of the Bauhaus directors – Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe – at the top of the building.
The museum in Weimar has opened to coincide with the centenary of the Bauhaus, which was established in the city in 1919. The school was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new school building for the institution. Following a short time based in Berlin the school closed for good in 1933. Although only open for just over a decade, the Bauhaus is the most influential art and design school in history. The ideas and people associated with the school had an incredible impact on design and architecture, and to mark its centenary we created a series exploring its key works and figures.
Lifting The Veil
Used soft/dry pastels, pastel pencils, ballpoint pens, woodless color pencils, mechanical pencil, charcoal, acrylic paint on canson mixed media sketching paper 11x14 Sun/lens flare added in digitally and manually
Time: 2-3hrs
Inspired by ideas I have been really reflecting on lately, with my own reference sources used. This is another pretty big concept work I have been really thinking on/contemplating about a lot lately as it is something that has a great deal of meaning to me and is without a doubt, something that many can relate to... I'm sure you have heard the phrase, "Lifting the veil" to describe something that is hidden being made known or revealed, and to me....It makes me think about all the big questions and concepts of fascination and intrigue, things that are not quite fully understood but are always there reminding us of it's reality...
Such things like,
1.Who/What Are We?
2.What is Consciousness Really and What Are It's Limits?
3.Where Did We Come From?
4.Why Can't I Remember What Happened Before This? Why....
5.What Happens After Death, Does the Spirit Leave the Body and What Happens Specifically?
6.What is the truth behind Dreams, and if reality is nothing but a dream, what does that mean if true?
7.What/Who Is God?
8.What is Beyond The Vastness Of Space?
9.How Did It Really Begin?
10.How Does It End?
11.What Happened Before the beginning?
12.What Is Reality?
13.What Is Truth?
14.How Can Something Neither Be Created Or Destroyed but Is Infinite? and How Does one Associate Themselves With It If All We Are Is Conscious Energy, so they don't forget as they evolve and move on from one state to another?
15.What is reincarnation and if it's a reality, then why do some seem to remember while so many others forget?
16.How are things like ESP possible and what does that mean as to who we are and what we really are capable of?
17.What is spirit/Soul?
18.What is the secret behind synchronicities?
19.What really is deja vu?
20.How is precognition, premonitions, lucid dreaming, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, astral projection, shared dreaming, remote viewing, various forms of clairvoyance, ect possible and what does that mean for us individually?
21.ET
22. How can spirits be trapped after death.
23.EVP (electronic voice phenomenon)
24.What is the truth taught by the esoteric mystery schools over the millenia's
25. What is the truth behind the history of the human species and our true origins on this planet?
26.What's inside a black hole? lol :P
27.Truth behind parallel extra-dimensional and alternate realities and what that means as to the architecture of all potential realities that might exist and how it relates to us....each and every one
28.As Above So Below
29.Law of Attraction
30.What's beyond the unimaginable, beyond the unseen and unknown, considering our imaginations are seemingly infinite...
31.Karma
32.Is it possible to be completely and totally centered, balanced and whole...
33.EGO
34.Potential of Human Mind.
35.If the reality you perceive is based from electrical signals interpreted by your brain from the physical senses you possess and use, then how is it possible to both see and hear without using those physical senses, literally seeing with your eyes and hearing with your ears...inside your head. Even the sense of smell and touch can be generated within your mind without actually smelling or touching something physically.
36.How exactly are we are able to view memories?
37.THE FACT THAT WE EVEN EXIST AT ALL...........................
38.How does reality maintain the illusion of solidity if atoms are mostly empty space?
39.How can particles exist as both a wave form and a particle and be in two places at the same time, and what does that mean for the consciousness we experience and how it can be used and/or controlled?
40.God Particle
Questions Questions Questions....on one hand, it's great because it leaves so much room for mystery and literally endless possibilities, but it also can be damaging and have a negative effect on the observer, especially if you are one that likes absolutes and things that have a certainty to them (not saying that I do) but in general, it is something I have related myself to on more than one occasion, so this piece of artwork represents and reflects my desire to LIFT THE VEIL on these subjects, ideas, concepts, perceptions, perspective, ect...
As I was writing this description out I kid you not, I had music on in the background and I took a moment to change the song to something else, something random, and I clicked on a song called, "The Seeker" and about half way in, it talks specifically-literally about LIFTING THE VEIL haha and how the secrets are revealed through death....Freaky synchronicity but also, I have heard this song before so it might have been my subconscious trying to communicate a message to me consciously which brings me back to the lists of questions lol How to become totally conscious with the various forms and states of consciousness itself...
Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.
Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.
Guanyin seated in royal-ease pose.
Chinese, Southern Song, c.1250.
This sculpture of Guanyin can be read as either male or female, which indicates the deity's universal and inclusive nature. The figure is identified as Guanyin by the image of the Amitabha Buddha in the crown. The flexible pose of royal ease, with a raised leg and casually draped arm, did not become associated with the deity until late in the ninth century. Despite the languid posture, the torso retains a sense of solidity, disturbed nether by significant movement nor by dramatic distortion. The paridhana skirt gracefully draping the lower portion of the figure is confidently natural, but conforms to the shape of the body. Such temple sculptures were periodically redecorated and the addition of relief designs on the surface of the skirt and scarves were probably added sometime during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey.
The Fort Aguada is one of the largest and impressive forts preserved as one of the best known landmarks in Goan history. Its prominence has grown from the fact that its headland on which it is built offers a wonderful site for military architects due to its shielding of the vital sea access from the heart of the Portuguese territory thereby making it an ideal site for seaward as well as landward defense.
The elimination of the Maratha threat and the acquisition of the New Conquest added more glory to its importance right upto the end of the 18th century when Goa's future borders were established. The most vital part of it was its impregnability to survive attacks by enemies through land or sea or simultaneously from both sides which often happened.
The most feared threat for the Portuguese came from the Europeans in the east, which came true when a Dutch squadron approached the Mandovi in 1604. The Reis Magos Fort, Gaspar Dias Fort and the Cabo Fort proved to be futile in keeping them at bay and though eventually warded off, the Dutch succeeded in burning quite a number of Portuguese ships. In 1606, they returned back and settled at the entrance of the river, blocking the harbour and preventing the entry or departure of all the ships.
The Portuguese naval strength was now actually not enough to face the Dutch for an open sea battle whereby they had to resort to defensive methods against the Dutch to keep them at a safe distance meanwhile work on building a fort was started on the headland which was completely finished in 1612. During the reign of the Catholic King Dom Filippe of Portugal, the construction of the fortress began with orders from the municipality levying 1 percent duty towards protection and defence of ships approaching the fort. The Fortress was finally completed in 1612 by the members of the Municipality under the administration of Viceroy Ruy Tavara.
The water link with the sea on the north side was extended with the use of the Nerul river which dissolves into creeks beyond the peninsula and the whole of the headland was utilized as well making it a thoroughly defensible island. The fort was built as per the design laid down by the Italian military architects employed by the Portuguese government in Lisbon. On the highest point of the headland, there is a citadel which is linked by a defended passage to the riverside. The entire area at sea level is surrounded by fat walls with occasionally occurring bastions along the riverside. The outer wall part has now disappeared though there are still fragments which can be seen, distinctively along the river.
A delight for a military architect was the position of the fort citadel situated at the heart of the fort on the western tip of the headland commanding any seaward approach. It is now used as a jail outside the area of the fort and can still be visited. Similar to all forts built by the Portuguese where the fort configuration usually conforms towards the ground, this one is in form of a square with bastions for artillery placed at each of its three corners, while the fourth corner is occupied by a main gate. Each of the three corners are strongly defended by a dry moat and extremely thick walls while the fourth faces out on the steep slope towards the river. The embrasures are far and wide enough to allow a broad field of fire for the cannons. At one time, 200 cannons were a part of this fort, quite a massive artillery! The bastions are arrow shaped with rounded corners.
The solidity of the Aguada fort can be seen from the fact that neither this one has any delicate turrets nor the battlement lines are bisected by any towers. The citadel gateway being narrow is also blocked by heavy and iron studded doors thereby preventing easy access. The narrow bridge over the ditch makes it all the more difficult while the ramp into the fort inside the gateway curves off at a sharp angle and the steep steps upto the battlements do not make access any easier either. The 1st lighthouse was built here two and half centuries later. The main gate has a magazine adjacent to it, which has a unique half round design in order to deflect any enemy shots.
One of the distinctive features of the Aguada headlands are the Lighthouses built as early as 1864 thereby marking them as one of the oldest and first lighthouses to be built in Asia. Earlier to this, ships were normally guided by bonfire beacons lit on the Hill of the Pilots above the Immaculate Conception Church at Panjim. The 1st lighthouse initially built served purpose right upto 1976 when it was replaced by a square, modern lighthouse located nearby the walls of the citadel. This one is open to visitors and it makes all the watching more enjoyable due to the scenic views one gets to see when he/she climbs up the spiral staircase with a metal ladder within the lighthouse.
The old model is a splendid structure, and form a distance dominates the skyline. The Viceroy, together with the architect and engineer, is suitably, commemorated on a copper plaque in the ‘turret’ of the tower. Somewhat squat and with a solid appearance relieved by a balustrade around the platform and a curving staircase up to the lamp housing, it is most satisfying building. This is where the great bell from the Augustinian church in Old Goa was brought before being transferred to Panjim Church. Wherever it was hung it must have deafened the light house the lighthouse keeper. There is a third and smaller lighthouse, the Aguada Beacon, at the foot of the slopes near the buildings on the river bank. Built in 1890, it marks the entrance to the river.
The splendid structure of the lighthouse has a turret in which on a copper plaque are built and commemorated statues of the Viceroy, together with the architect and the engineer. The building has a solid appearance with the presence of a balustrade around the platform with a curving staircase to the lamp housing. The great bell from the Augustinian church was initially brought here before getting transferred to the Panjim church. Its peals must have deafened the lighthouse surroundings not to mention, the lighthouse keeper too. A smaller lighthouse, ‘The Aguada Beacon’, built in 1890 near the foot of the slopes besides the buildings on the river bank, marks the entrance to the river.
The lighthouse is surrounded by magnificent places where Panjim lies to the east along the river, with its Miramar and Caranzalem beaches leading to the Cabo with the Governor’s house on its point. Beyond the lighthouse lies the estuary of the Zuari river and the Mormugao port with the islands of St. George and Cambariem offshore. On the western side lie the famous northern beaches of Baga and Calangute. While the Candolim church is located inland to these beaches.
A huge underground cistern beneath the steps leading down from the centre of the citadel courtyard provides the water supply with its arched caverns having a capacity of more than 10 million litres or two and quarter million gallons to be precise. This was enhanced by the presence of several springs of clear sweet water which were instrumental in the naming of the fort Aguada which literally means ‘a place for watering’.
Another significant aspect of the Fort Aguada was the small chapel dedicated to ‘Our Lady of Good Voyage’, this being named due to ships anchoring at this place after a long journey and restocking before embarking on another journey. A jetty extends out towards the sea on the northern side where the Taj Group hotel is located just within the outer walls of the fort. The canon provides the necessary fire cover at the foot of the steep slopes, hidden from the guns of the citadel above. The cistern was excavated which in turn arranged for the stone from which the fortress walls were built. The fortress has many passages and rooms and narrow steps leading into more deeper and darker passageways to lost magazines and storerooms.
Parallel walls form a defensible passageway which connect the citadel with the anchorage below, where at river level, there are located old buildings not to forget the first chapel already mentioned above. The largest of all springs, the Mother of Water or Mae de Agua is also found here. This part of the fort is closed for visitors as it is utilized as a prison. At the new gates to the prison area, there is a statue of a man and a woman, the man holding the body of a child in his arms while the woman has her arms raised to show the breaking of chain bondage in front of the national emblem of India, the Ashoka Pillar which has an inscription which is dedicated to the memory of people, dead and alive, known and unknown and who have laid down their life for the cause of freedom from foreign powers.
The ceremony for commemoration of the beginning of the struggle is held on 18th June each year. The prison was in extensive use as it housed the revolutionaries of the 19th century when in 1946, the first peaceful non violence movement was initiated. All through the fight for freedom, nationalist supporters found themselves imprisoned here. The barrack built by British forces at the beginning of the 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars is no longer visible now.
The Fort Aguada is one of the largest and impressive forts preserved as one of the best known landmarks in Goan history. Its prominence has grown from the fact that its headland on which it is built offers a wonderful site for military architects due to its shielding of the vital sea access from the heart of the Portuguese territory thereby making it an ideal site for seaward as well as landward defense.
The elimination of the Maratha threat and the acquisition of the New Conquest added more glory to its importance right upto the end of the 18th century when Goa's future borders were established. The most vital part of it was its impregnability to survive attacks by enemies through land or sea or simultaneously from both sides which often happened.
The most feared threat for the Portuguese came from the Europeans in the east, which came true when a Dutch squadron approached the Mandovi in 1604. The Reis Magos Fort, Gaspar Dias Fort and the Cabo Fort proved to be futile in keeping them at bay and though eventually warded off, the Dutch succeeded in burning quite a number of Portuguese ships. In 1606, they returned back and settled at the entrance of the river, blocking the harbour and preventing the entry or departure of all the ships.
The Portuguese naval strength was now actually not enough to face the Dutch for an open sea battle whereby they had to resort to defensive methods against the Dutch to keep them at a safe distance meanwhile work on building a fort was started on the headland which was completely finished in 1612. During the reign of the Catholic King Dom Filippe of Portugal, the construction of the fortress began with orders from the municipality levying 1 percent duty towards protection and defence of ships approaching the fort. The Fortress was finally completed in 1612 by the members of the Municipality under the administration of Viceroy Ruy Tavara.
The water link with the sea on the north side was extended with the use of the Nerul river which dissolves into creeks beyond the peninsula and the whole of the headland was utilized as well making it a thoroughly defensible island. The fort was built as per the design laid down by the Italian military architects employed by the Portuguese government in Lisbon. On the highest point of the headland, there is a citadel which is linked by a defended passage to the riverside. The entire area at sea level is surrounded by fat walls with occasionally occurring bastions along the riverside. The outer wall part has now disappeared though there are still fragments which can be seen, distinctively along the river.
A delight for a military architect was the position of the fort citadel situated at the heart of the fort on the western tip of the headland commanding any seaward approach. It is now used as a jail outside the area of the fort and can still be visited. Similar to all forts built by the Portuguese where the fort configuration usually conforms towards the ground, this one is in form of a square with bastions for artillery placed at each of its three corners, while the fourth corner is occupied by a main gate. Each of the three corners are strongly defended by a dry moat and extremely thick walls while the fourth faces out on the steep slope towards the river. The embrasures are far and wide enough to allow a broad field of fire for the cannons. At one time, 200 cannons were a part of this fort, quite a massive artillery! The bastions are arrow shaped with rounded corners.
The solidity of the Aguada fort can be seen from the fact that neither this one has any delicate turrets nor the battlement lines are bisected by any towers. The citadel gateway being narrow is also blocked by heavy and iron studded doors thereby preventing easy access. The narrow bridge over the ditch makes it all the more difficult while the ramp into the fort inside the gateway curves off at a sharp angle and the steep steps upto the battlements do not make access any easier either. The 1st lighthouse was built here two and half centuries later. The main gate has a magazine adjacent to it, which has a unique half round design in order to deflect any enemy shots.
One of the distinctive features of the Aguada headlands are the Lighthouses built as early as 1864 thereby marking them as one of the oldest and first lighthouses to be built in Asia. Earlier to this, ships were normally guided by bonfire beacons lit on the Hill of the Pilots above the Immaculate Conception Church at Panjim. The 1st lighthouse initially built served purpose right upto 1976 when it was replaced by a square, modern lighthouse located nearby the walls of the citadel. This one is open to visitors and it makes all the watching more enjoyable due to the scenic views one gets to see when he/she climbs up the spiral staircase with a metal ladder within the lighthouse.
The old model is a splendid structure, and form a distance dominates the skyline. The Viceroy, together with the architect and engineer, is suitably, commemorated on a copper plaque in the ‘turret’ of the tower. Somewhat squat and with a solid appearance relieved by a balustrade around the platform and a curving staircase up to the lamp housing, it is most satisfying building. This is where the great bell from the Augustinian church in Old Goa was brought before being transferred to Panjim Church. Wherever it was hung it must have deafened the light house the lighthouse keeper. There is a third and smaller lighthouse, the Aguada Beacon, at the foot of the slopes near the buildings on the river bank. Built in 1890, it marks the entrance to the river.
The splendid structure of the lighthouse has a turret in which on a copper plaque are built and commemorated statues of the Viceroy, together with the architect and the engineer. The building has a solid appearance with the presence of a balustrade around the platform with a curving staircase to the lamp housing. The great bell from the Augustinian church was initially brought here before getting transferred to the Panjim church. Its peals must have deafened the lighthouse surroundings not to mention, the lighthouse keeper too. A smaller lighthouse, ‘The Aguada Beacon’, built in 1890 near the foot of the slopes besides the buildings on the river bank, marks the entrance to the river.
The lighthouse is surrounded by magnificent places where Panjim lies to the east along the river, with its Miramar and Caranzalem beaches leading to the Cabo with the Governor’s house on its point. Beyond the lighthouse lies the estuary of the Zuari river and the Mormugao port with the islands of St. George and Cambariem offshore. On the western side lie the famous northern beaches of Baga and Calangute. While the Candolim church is located inland to these beaches.
A huge underground cistern beneath the steps leading down from the centre of the citadel courtyard provides the water supply with its arched caverns having a capacity of more than 10 million litres or two and quarter million gallons to be precise. This was enhanced by the presence of several springs of clear sweet water which were instrumental in the naming of the fort Aguada which literally means ‘a place for watering’.
Another significant aspect of the Fort Aguada was the small chapel dedicated to ‘Our Lady of Good Voyage’, this being named due to ships anchoring at this place after a long journey and restocking before embarking on another journey. A jetty extends out towards the sea on the northern side where the Taj Group hotel is located just within the outer walls of the fort. The canon provides the necessary fire cover at the foot of the steep slopes, hidden from the guns of the citadel above. The cistern was excavated which in turn arranged for the stone from which the fortress walls were built. The fortress has many passages and rooms and narrow steps leading into more deeper and darker passageways to lost magazines and storerooms.
Parallel walls form a defensible passageway which connect the citadel with the anchorage below, where at river level, there are located old buildings not to forget the first chapel already mentioned above. The largest of all springs, the Mother of Water or Mae de Agua is also found here. This part of the fort is closed for visitors as it is utilized as a prison. At the new gates to the prison area, there is a statue of a man and a woman, the man holding the body of a child in his arms while the woman has her arms raised to show the breaking of chain bondage in front of the national emblem of India, the Ashoka Pillar which has an inscription which is dedicated to the memory of people, dead and alive, known and unknown and who have laid down their life for the cause of freedom from foreign powers.
The ceremony for commemoration of the beginning of the struggle is held on 18th June each year. The prison was in extensive use as it housed the revolutionaries of the 19th century when in 1946, the first peaceful non violence movement was initiated. All through the fight for freedom, nationalist supporters found themselves imprisoned here. The barrack built by British forces at the beginning of the 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars is no longer visible now.
St Edmund, Southwold, Suffolk
I kept meaning to come back to Southwold - the church, I mean, for I found myself in the little town from time to time. I finally kept my promise to myself in the summer of 2017, tipping up on a beautiful sunny day only to find the church closed for extensive repairs. The days got shorter, and by the time the church reopened it was too late in the year for me to try again. In fact, it was not until late October 2018 that I made it back there, on another beautiful day.
Southwold is well-known to people who have never even been there I suppose, signifying one side of Suffolk to which Ipswich is perhaps the counter in the popular imagination. Some thirty years ago, the comedian Michael Palin made a film for television called East of Ipswich. It was a memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, and the basic comic premise behind the film was that in those days families would go on holiday to seaside resorts on the East Anglian coast. In the child Palin's case, it was Southwold.
The amusement came from the idea that people in those days would sit in deckchairs beside the grey north sea, or shelter from the drizzle in genteel teashops or the amusement arcade on the pier. In the Costa Brava package tour days of the 1980s, the quaintness of this image made it seem like something from a different world.
I remember Southwold in the 1980s. It was one of those agreeable little towns distant enough from anywhere bigger to maintain a life of its own. It still had its genteel tea shops, its dusty grocers, its quaint hotels and pubs all owned by Adnams, the old-fashioned and unfashionable local brewery. In the white heat of the Thatcherite cultural revolution, it seemed a place that would soon die on its feet quietly and peaceably.
And then, in the 1990s, the colour supplements discovered the East Anglian coast, and fell in love with it. The new fashions for antique-collecting, cooking with local produce and general country living, coupled with a snobbishness about how vulgar foreign package trips had become, conspired to make places like Southwold very sought after. Before Nigel Lawson's boom became a bust, the inflated house prices of London and the home counties gave people money to burn. And in their hoards, they came out of the big city to buy holiday homes in East Anglia.
Although they are often lumped together, the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk are very different to each other (Cambridgeshire and North Essex are also culturally part of East Anglia, but the North Essex coast is too close to London to have ever stopped being cheap and cheerful, and Cambridgeshire has no coastline). Norfolk's beaches are wide and sandy, with dunes and cliffs and rock pools to explore. Towns like Cromer and Hunstanton seem to have stepped out of the pages of the Ladybird Book of the Seaside. Tiny villages along the Norfolk coast have secret little beaches of their own.
Suffolk's coast is wilder. Beaches are mainly pebbles rather than sand, and the marshes stretch inland, cutting the coast off from the rest of the county. Unlike Norfolk, Suffolk has no coast road, and so the settlements on the coast are isolated from each other, stuck at the ends of narrow lanes which snake away from the A12 and peter out in the heathland above the sea. There are fewer of them too. It is still quicker to get from Walberswick to Southwold by water than by land. Because they are isolated from each other, they take on individual personalities and characteristics. Because they are isolated from the land, they become bastions of polite civilisation.
Between Felixstowe in the south, which no outsiders like (and consequently is the favourite of many Suffolk people) and Lowestoft in the north, which is basically an industrial town-on-sea (but which still has the county's best beaches - shhh, don't tell a soul) are half a dozen small towns that vie with each other for trendiness. Southwold is the biggest, and today it is also the most expensive place to live in all East Anglia. Genteel tea shops survive, but are increasingly shouldered by shops that specialise in ski-wear and Barbour jackets, delicatessens that stock radicchio and seventeen different kinds of olive, jewellery shops and kitchen gadget shops and antique furniture shops where prices are exquisitely painful. Worst of all, the homely, shabby, smoke-filled Sole Bay Inn under the lighthouse has been converted by the now-trendy Adnams Brewery into a chrome and glass filled wine bar.
If you see someone in Norfolk driving a truck, they are probably wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shotgun. in Suffolk, they've more likely just bought a Victorian pine dresser from an antique shop, and they're taking it back to Islington. Does this matter? The fishing industry was dying anyway. The tourist industry was also dying. If places like Southwold, Aldeburgh and Orford become outposts of north London, at least they will still provide jobs for local people. But the local people won't be able to afford to live there, of course. They'll be bussed in from Reydon, Leiston and Melton to provide services for people in holiday cottages which are the former homes they grew up in, but can no longer afford to buy. Does this seriously annoy me? Not as much as it does them, I'll bet.
So, lets go to Southwold, turning off the A12 at the great ship of Blythburgh church, the wide marshes of the River Blyth spreading aimlessly beyond the road. We climb and fall over ancient dunes, and then the road opens out into the flat marshes, the town spreads out beyond. We enter through Reydon (now actually bigger than Southwold, with houses at half the price) and over the bridge into the town of Southwold itself.
Having been so critical, I need to say here that Southwold is beautiful. It is quite the loveliest small town in all East Anglia. None of the half-timbered houses here that you find in places like Long Melford and Lavenham. Here, the town was completely destroyed by fire in the 17th century, and so we have fine 18th and 19th century municipal buildings. One of the legacies of the fire was the creation of wide open spaces just off of the high street, called greens. The best one of all is Gun Hill Green, overlooking the bay where the last major naval battle in British waters was fought. The cannons still point out to sea. The houses here are stunning, gobsmacking, jaw-droppingly wonderful. If I could afford to buy one of them as a weekend retreat, then you bet your life I would, and to hell with the people who moaned about it.
At the western end of the High Street is St Bartholomew's Green, and beyond it sits what is, for my money, Suffolk's single most impressive building. This is the great church of St Edmund, a vast edifice built all in one go in the second half of the 15th century. Only Lavenham can compete with it for scale and presence. Unlike the massing at St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham, St Edmund is defined by a long unbroken clerestory and aisles beneath - where St Peter and St Paul looks full of tension, ready to spring, St Edmund is languid and floating, a ship at ease.
Southwold church was just one of several vast late medieval rebuildings in this area. Across the river at Walberswick and a few miles upriver at Blythburgh the same thing happened. Blythburgh still survives, but Walberswick was derelicted to make a smaller church, as were Covehithe and Kessingland. Dunwich All Saints was lost to the sea. But Southwold was the biggest. Everything about it breathes massive permanence, from the solidity of the tower to the turreted porch, from the wide windows to the jaunty sanctus bell fleche.
Along the top of the aisles, grimacing faces look down. All of them are different. The pedestals atop the clerestory were intended for statues as at Blythburgh, but were probably never filled before the Reformation intervened. At the west end, above the great west window, you can see the vast inscription SAncT EDMUND ORA P: NOBIS ('Saint Edmund, pray for us') as bold a record of the mindset of late medieval East Anglian Catholicism as you'll find.
As at Lavenham and Long Melford, the interior has been extensively restored, but not in as heavy or blunt a manner as at those two churches. St Edmund has, it must be said, benefited from the attentions of German bombers who put out all the dull Victorian glass with blast damage during World War II. Here, the interior is vast, light and airy, and much of the restoration is 20th century work, not 19th century.
Perhaps because of this, more medieval interior features have survived. Unlike Long Melford, Southwold does not have surviving medieval glass (Mr Dowsing saw to that in 1644), but it does have what is the finest screen in the county.
It stretches right the way across the church, and is effectively three separate screens. There is a rood screen across the chancel arch, and parclose screens across the north and south chancel aisles. All retain their original dado figures. There are 36 of them, more than anywhere else in Suffolk. They have been restored, particularly in the central range, but are fascinating because they retain a lot of original gesso work, where plaster of Paris is applied to wood and allowed to dry. It is then carved to produce intricate details.
The central screen shows the eleven remaining disciples and St Paul. They are, from left to right, Philip, Bartholomew, James the Less, Thomas, Andrew, Peter, Paul, John, James, Simon, Jude and Matthew.
The south chancel chapel is light and open. The bosses above are said to represent Mary Tudor and her second husband Charles, Duke of Brandon. The screen here is painted with twelve Old Testament prophets, and Mortlock suggests that they are by a different hand to the images on the other two screens. Here on the south screen, some of the figures have surviving naming inscriptions, and Mortlock surmises that the complete sequence, from left to right, is Baruch, Hosea, Nahum, Jeremiah, Elias, Moses, David, Isaiah, Amos, Jonah and Ezekiel. Further, he observes that the subject is a usual one for the English Midlands, but rare for East Anglia, and that perhaps this part of the screen came from elsewhere. The same may be true of the other two parts - it is hard to think that the central screen was deliberately made too wide for the two arcades.
The north aisle chapel is reserved as the blessed sacrament chapel. The screen is harder to explore, because the northern side is curtailed by a large chest, but it features angels. Unlike the screens at Hitcham and Blundeston, which show angels holding instruments of the passion, these are the nine orders of angels, with Gabriel at their head, and flanked by angels holding symbols of the Trinity and the Eucharist. Mortlock says that they are so similar to the ones at Barton Turf in Norfolk that they may be by the same hand, in which case the central screen is also by that person. They are, from left to right, the Holy Trinity, Gabriel, Archangels, Powers, Dominions, Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Virtues, Messengers, and finally the Eucharist. The Holy Trinity angel still has part of the original dedicatory inscription beneath his feet.
If part or all of this screen came from elsewhere, where did it come from? Possibly either Walberswick, Covehithe or Kessingland, the three downsized churches mentioned earlier. More excitingly, it might have come from one of the churches along this coast that was lost to the sea, perhaps neighbouring St Nicholas at Easton Bavents, or, just to the south, St Peter or St John the Baptist, the two Dunwich churches lost in the 16th and 17th centuries. We'll never know.
If you turn back at the screen and face westwards, your eyes are automatically drawn to the towering font cover, part of the extensive 1930s redecoration of the building. The clerestory is almost like a glass atrium intended to house it. Also the work of the period is the repainting and regilding of the 15th century pulpit (a lot of people blanch at this, but I think it is gorgeous) and the lectern. Beneath the font cover, the font is clearly one of the rare seven sacraments series, and part of the same group as Westhall, Blythburgh and Wenhaston. As at Blythburgh and Wenhaston, the panels are completely erased, probably in the 19th century, an act of barbarous vandalism. Given that Westhall is probably the best of all in the county, we must assume that three major medieval art treasures were wiped out. Astonishingly, vague shadows survive of the former reliefs; you can easily make out the Mass panel, facing east as at Westhall, the Penance panel and even what may be the Baptism of Christ.
Stepping through the screen, the reredos ahead is by Benedict Williamson and the glass above by Ninian Comper, familiar names in the Anglo-catholic pantheon, and evidence of an enthusiasm here that still survives in High Church form. There is a good engraved glass image of St Edmund to the north of the sanctuary, very much in the 1960s fashion, but curiously placed. On the wall of the chancel to the west of it, the high organ case is also painted and gilded enthusiastically.
As well as the screen, Southwold's other great medieval survival is the set of return stalls either side of the eastern face of the chancel screen. They have misericord seats, but the best feature are the handrests between the seats. On the south side, carvings include a man with a horn-shaped hat and sinners being drawn into the mouth of hell. On the north side are a man playing two pipes, a monkey preaching and a beaver biting its own genitals, a tale from the medieval bestiary, apparently.
What else is there to see? Well, the church is full of delights, and rewards further visits which always seem to turn up something previously unnoticed. St George rides full tilt at a dragon on an old chest at the west end of the north aisle. There is good 19th century glass in the porch and at the west end of the nave. A clock jack stands, axe and bell in hand, at the west end, a twin to the one upriver at Blythburgh. This one has a name, he's called Southwold Jack, and he is one of the symbols of the Adnams brewery.
As Mortlock notes, there are very few surviving memorials. This is partly because St Edmund was not in the patronage of a great landed family, but it may also suggest that they were largely removed at the time of the 19th century restoration, as at Brandon. One moving one is for the child of a vicar, and there are some interesting pre-Oxford Movement 19th century brasses in the south aisle.
High, high above all this, the roofs are models of Anglo-Catholic melodrama, the canopy of honour to the rood and the chancel ceilure in particular. But there is a warmth about it all that is missing from, say, Eye, which underwent a similar makeover. This church feels full of life, and not a museum piece at all. I remember attending evensong here late one winter Saturday afternoon, and it was magical. On another visit, I came on one of the first days of spring that was truly warm and bright, with not a cloud in the sky. As we drove into town, a cold fret off of the sea was condensing the steam of the brewery, sending it in swirls and skeins around the tower of St Edmund like low cloud. It was so atmospheric that I almost forgave them for what they have done to the Sole Bay Inn.
My very first HDR. Please let me know what you think. I know people traditionally do an extremely oversaturated photograph for their first HDR, but I decided to do something a little more subtle. Any criticism is completely welcome.
"Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind
I'm with you in Rockland.. where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free.
I'm with you in Rockland.. in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night."
-Ginsberg
If there's one place in London that merits an Art Deco Fair, it's Eltham Palace,
with its Art Deco entrance hall, created by the textile magnates the Courtaulds in 1936. The much-loved weekend fair is held twice a year - once in the summer and a second time in September - giving visitors the chance to buy original 1930s objects, from furniture and collectables to hats, handbags and jewellery. Browse the original 1930s objects, from jewellery to furniture while you take in the magnificent Art Deco surroundings of the Palace. Ticket price includes entry to Eltham Palace and gardens and you can see the house by guided tour.
About Eltham Palace
Restored by English Heritage, this fantastic house boasts Britain's finest Art Deco interior and offers visitors the chance to indulge in the opulence of 1930s Britain whilst at the same time experiencing the solidity and symbolism of medieval London. Eltham Palace began to evolve during the 15th century when Edward IV commissioned the Great Hall, which survives today as a testament to the craftsmanship of the period. More about Eltham Palace
The altarpiece of the Virgo inter Virgines was donated in 1509 to the convent of the Carmelites of Sion in Bruges.
Mary, enthroned between two musical angels, holds the Baby Jesus, who is picking grapes off a bunch – a symbol of the Eucharist. She is receiving the homage of a gathering of martyrs with a child-like charm, recognizable by their attributes, each depicted in the manner of precious ornaments. From left to right : Dorothy with her basket of roses (the lawyer Theophilus had promised to convert to Christianity if she sent him roses and apples from the Garden of Christ), Catherine of Alexandria with a crown adorned with the Catherine Wheel (which miraculously broke instead of killing her), Agnes, with a lamb at her feet (the saint was killed aged 14 because she refused to marry a pagan), behind her, an anonymous woman, then Fausta with a saw (the instrument of her martyrdom), Apollonia with a set of tongs (which were used to pull out her teeth), Godelina with a scarf (which her husband used to have her strangled), Cecilia beside an organ (she sang praises to the Lord until her dying breath), Barbara, whose headdress is adorned with a tower (her father had her locked away there) and Lucy holding her eyes (which some maintain were gouged out while others assert that she gouged them out herself). The man, in the upper left corner is the painter Gérard David himself, and the woman on the right in the white cornet is most probably his wife, Cornelia.
The saints stand out against a neutral background with a visual force reminiscent of a bas-relief, but which is animated by the faces and the beauty of the materials. In this dense ensemble, the unusually accentuated upright stance of the Virgin, in its almost statuesque solidity, seems to echo the Madonna of Bruges of Michelangelo, who arrived in the city in 1506.
Bonhams
Les Grandes Marques du Monde à Paris
The Grand Palais Éphémère
Place Joffre
Parijs - Paris
Frankrijk - France
February 2023
Estimated : € 200.000 - 240.000
Sold for $ 207.000
Described by former Aston Martin Chairman Victor Gauntlett as "a stylish thoroughbred, beautifully built, luxurious, fast and immensely safe," the V8 was built in several variants, one of the more exclusive being the Volante Convertible. Introduced in response to customer demand for such a car, the Volante first appeared in June 1978. Arguably the ultimate in soft-top luxury, the newcomer boasted a lined, power-operated top which, when erected, endowed the walnut embellished interior with all the solidity and refinement associated with the saloon version. Although its open-car aerodynamics meant that top speed suffered with the top down, the Volante's 150mph maximum nevertheless ranked it among the world's fastest convertibles.
The V8 Volante received the same periodic upgrades and refinements as the saloon version, adopting BBS wheels in 1983 and switching to Weber-Marelli fuel injection – and a flatter bonnet – in 1986. V8 Volante and Vantage Volante chassis numbers ran from '15001' to '15849', a total of 849 cars. The last V8 Volantes were built in 1989.
According to copies of Aston Martin's factory build records, this elegant V8 Volante was hand built at Aston Martin's Newport Pagnell plant during the spring of 1989, and was among the last 80 cars produced in the final year of production. The car received the final inspections in March 1989 and was then shipped from the UK to the USA. The car was of left-hand-drive configuration and was equipped with the desirable ZF five-speed manual transmission. The Volante was finished in British Racing Green with a fawn leather interior, beige carpeting and a fawn Everflex convertible top, just as it appears today. It is believed that this car was among just 13 V8 Volantes produced for the United States market in 1989, not all of which would have had the desirable ZF manual ZF transmission.
The new V8 Volante was delivered to its first owner, a Mr A M Pilaro of Southampton, NY through the Greenwich, Connecticut-based Aston Martin agency, Miller Motors. The car is believed to have remained with this first owner until 2016, being kept in excellent original condition. The CARFAX report issued for the Volante has recorded the mileage since new, and many New York State inspections are logged on the report.
The current vendor purchased the Aston at Bonhams' Amelia Island sale in March 2017. At that time we said the following: "Today this highly original Aston Martin shows less than 17,500 miles on the odometer, a figure that is indeed believed to be original. A major service was recently performed by Aston Martin of Long Island, NY. A solid and very well cared for car; close inspection of the Aston Martin V8 Volante reveals mostly original finishes throughout. The luxurious cabin presents beautifully, with the original interior and wood finishes intact. The dash pad and steering wheel are neatly colour-coded in green, matching the car's exterior. A set of custom luggage can be found in the trunk, also trimmed in green. The exterior looks magnificent, with sparkling chrome and brightwork, and the original BBS alloy wheels in place."
Our vendor paid the shipping costs back to Europe and paid the necessary EU duties. The owner then spent some £38,000 with respected marque specialist Chris Shenton on various works including the installation of the aesthetically more appealing EU-specification chromed bumpers (bills on file).
As a desirably equipped example built in the final year of the V8 Volante production run, this immaculate Aston Martin features all the refinements accumulated during the V8's evolution and must be considered among the best examples currently available. A set of AML fitted luggage is included in the sale.
Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.
Bauhaus Museum Weimar, Germany
German architect Heike Hanada designed a minimalist concrete museum to celebrate the Bauhaus in Weimar, where the design school was founded 100 years ago. The building is dedicated to the design school creates a physical cultural presence for the Bauhaus in the German city where it was based between 1919 and 1925. Located near the Nazi-era Gauforum square and the Neue Museum Weimar, the Bauhaus Museum is a simple five-storey concrete box broken only with its entrance and a couple of windows. The enclosing shell of light-grey concrete lends the cube stability and dynamic solidity. Equally spaced horizontal grooves run around the facades of the museum, with the words "bauhaus museum" repeated in a band near the top of the building. Hanada designed the museum to be a public building for the city and has attempted to clearly connect it to the neighbouring park. With elements such as plinths, fasciae, portals, stairways and a terrace to the park, the architecture incorporates classical themes that underscore its public character.
The museum contains 2,000 m2 of exhibition space, which will be used to display around 1,000 items from the Weimar Bauhaus collection. A shop and entrance hall is located on the ground floor, with a cafe and toilets below, and three floors dedicated to telling the story of the Bauhaus above. Each of the galleries overlooks double-height spaces and are accessed from a long ceremonial staircase that stretches the height of the building. The visitors ascend a succession of interchanging open spaces and staircases until they finally arrive at the top floor where they are presented with an unobstructed view of the park. The cascading staircases are encased by ceiling-high walls and function as free-standing, enclosed bodies in the interior space. The collection is arranged to inform visitors about the history of the design school, with the gallery on the first floor dedicated to its origins in Weimar and the Bauhaus manifesto that Walter Gropius wrote in 1919. The second floor has exhibits that show how these ideas were implemented, with galleries dedicated to each of the Bauhaus directors – Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe – at the top of the building.
The museum in Weimar has opened to coincide with the centenary of the Bauhaus, which was established in the city in 1919. The school was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius designed a new school building for the institution. Following a short time based in Berlin the school closed for good in 1933. Although only open for just over a decade, the Bauhaus is the most influential art and design school in history. The ideas and people associated with the school had an incredible impact on design and architecture, and to mark its centenary we created a series exploring its key works and figures.
St Edmund, Southwold, Suffolk
I kept meaning to come back to Southwold - the church, I mean, for I found myself in the little town from time to time. I finally kept my promise to myself in the summer of 2017, tipping up on a beautiful sunny day only to find the church closed for extensive repairs. The days got shorter, and by the time the church reopened it was too late in the year for me to try again. In fact, it was not until late October 2018 that I made it back there, on another beautiful day.
Southwold is well-known to people who have never even been there I suppose, signifying one side of Suffolk to which Ipswich is perhaps the counter in the popular imagination. Some thirty years ago, the comedian Michael Palin made a film for television called East of Ipswich. It was a memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, and the basic comic premise behind the film was that in those days families would go on holiday to seaside resorts on the East Anglian coast. In the child Palin's case, it was Southwold.
The amusement came from the idea that people in those days would sit in deckchairs beside the grey north sea, or shelter from the drizzle in genteel teashops or the amusement arcade on the pier. In the Costa Brava package tour days of the 1980s, the quaintness of this image made it seem like something from a different world.
I remember Southwold in the 1980s. It was one of those agreeable little towns distant enough from anywhere bigger to maintain a life of its own. It still had its genteel tea shops, its dusty grocers, its quaint hotels and pubs all owned by Adnams, the old-fashioned and unfashionable local brewery. In the white heat of the Thatcherite cultural revolution, it seemed a place that would soon die on its feet quietly and peaceably.
And then, in the 1990s, the colour supplements discovered the East Anglian coast, and fell in love with it. The new fashions for antique-collecting, cooking with local produce and general country living, coupled with a snobbishness about how vulgar foreign package trips had become, conspired to make places like Southwold very sought after. Before Nigel Lawson's boom became a bust, the inflated house prices of London and the home counties gave people money to burn. And in their hoards, they came out of the big city to buy holiday homes in East Anglia.
Although they are often lumped together, the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk are very different to each other (Cambridgeshire and North Essex are also culturally part of East Anglia, but the North Essex coast is too close to London to have ever stopped being cheap and cheerful, and Cambridgeshire has no coastline). Norfolk's beaches are wide and sandy, with dunes and cliffs and rock pools to explore. Towns like Cromer and Hunstanton seem to have stepped out of the pages of the Ladybird Book of the Seaside. Tiny villages along the Norfolk coast have secret little beaches of their own.
Suffolk's coast is wilder. Beaches are mainly pebbles rather than sand, and the marshes stretch inland, cutting the coast off from the rest of the county. Unlike Norfolk, Suffolk has no coast road, and so the settlements on the coast are isolated from each other, stuck at the ends of narrow lanes which snake away from the A12 and peter out in the heathland above the sea. There are fewer of them too. It is still quicker to get from Walberswick to Southwold by water than by land. Because they are isolated from each other, they take on individual personalities and characteristics. Because they are isolated from the land, they become bastions of polite civilisation.
Between Felixstowe in the south, which no outsiders like (and consequently is the favourite of many Suffolk people) and Lowestoft in the north, which is basically an industrial town-on-sea (but which still has the county's best beaches - shhh, don't tell a soul) are half a dozen small towns that vie with each other for trendiness. Southwold is the biggest, and today it is also the most expensive place to live in all East Anglia. Genteel tea shops survive, but are increasingly shouldered by shops that specialise in ski-wear and Barbour jackets, delicatessens that stock radicchio and seventeen different kinds of olive, jewellery shops and kitchen gadget shops and antique furniture shops where prices are exquisitely painful. Worst of all, the homely, shabby, smoke-filled Sole Bay Inn under the lighthouse has been converted by the now-trendy Adnams Brewery into a chrome and glass filled wine bar.
If you see someone in Norfolk driving a truck, they are probably wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shotgun. in Suffolk, they've more likely just bought a Victorian pine dresser from an antique shop, and they're taking it back to Islington. Does this matter? The fishing industry was dying anyway. The tourist industry was also dying. If places like Southwold, Aldeburgh and Orford become outposts of north London, at least they will still provide jobs for local people. But the local people won't be able to afford to live there, of course. They'll be bussed in from Reydon, Leiston and Melton to provide services for people in holiday cottages which are the former homes they grew up in, but can no longer afford to buy. Does this seriously annoy me? Not as much as it does them, I'll bet.
So, lets go to Southwold, turning off the A12 at the great ship of Blythburgh church, the wide marshes of the River Blyth spreading aimlessly beyond the road. We climb and fall over ancient dunes, and then the road opens out into the flat marshes, the town spreads out beyond. We enter through Reydon (now actually bigger than Southwold, with houses at half the price) and over the bridge into the town of Southwold itself.
Having been so critical, I need to say here that Southwold is beautiful. It is quite the loveliest small town in all East Anglia. None of the half-timbered houses here that you find in places like Long Melford and Lavenham. Here, the town was completely destroyed by fire in the 17th century, and so we have fine 18th and 19th century municipal buildings. One of the legacies of the fire was the creation of wide open spaces just off of the high street, called greens. The best one of all is Gun Hill Green, overlooking the bay where the last major naval battle in British waters was fought. The cannons still point out to sea. The houses here are stunning, gobsmacking, jaw-droppingly wonderful. If I could afford to buy one of them as a weekend retreat, then you bet your life I would, and to hell with the people who moaned about it.
At the western end of the High Street is St Bartholomew's Green, and beyond it sits what is, for my money, Suffolk's single most impressive building. This is the great church of St Edmund, a vast edifice built all in one go in the second half of the 15th century. Only Lavenham can compete with it for scale and presence. Unlike the massing at St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham, St Edmund is defined by a long unbroken clerestory and aisles beneath - where St Peter and St Paul looks full of tension, ready to spring, St Edmund is languid and floating, a ship at ease.
Southwold church was just one of several vast late medieval rebuildings in this area. Across the river at Walberswick and a few miles upriver at Blythburgh the same thing happened. Blythburgh still survives, but Walberswick was derelicted to make a smaller church, as were Covehithe and Kessingland. Dunwich All Saints was lost to the sea. But Southwold was the biggest. Everything about it breathes massive permanence, from the solidity of the tower to the turreted porch, from the wide windows to the jaunty sanctus bell fleche.
Along the top of the aisles, grimacing faces look down. All of them are different. The pedestals atop the clerestory were intended for statues as at Blythburgh, but were probably never filled before the Reformation intervened. At the west end, above the great west window, you can see the vast inscription SAncT EDMUND ORA P: NOBIS ('Saint Edmund, pray for us') as bold a record of the mindset of late medieval East Anglian Catholicism as you'll find.
As at Lavenham and Long Melford, the interior has been extensively restored, but not in as heavy or blunt a manner as at those two churches. St Edmund has, it must be said, benefited from the attentions of German bombers who put out all the dull Victorian glass with blast damage during World War II. Here, the interior is vast, light and airy, and much of the restoration is 20th century work, not 19th century.
Perhaps because of this, more medieval interior features have survived. Unlike Long Melford, Southwold does not have surviving medieval glass (Mr Dowsing saw to that in 1644), but it does have what is the finest screen in the county.
It stretches right the way across the church, and is effectively three separate screens. There is a rood screen across the chancel arch, and parclose screens across the north and south chancel aisles. All retain their original dado figures. There are 36 of them, more than anywhere else in Suffolk. They have been restored, particularly in the central range, but are fascinating because they retain a lot of original gesso work, where plaster of Paris is applied to wood and allowed to dry. It is then carved to produce intricate details.
The central screen shows the eleven remaining disciples and St Paul. They are, from left to right, Philip, Bartholomew, James the Less, Thomas, Andrew, Peter, Paul, John, James, Simon, Jude and Matthew.
The south chancel chapel is light and open. The bosses above are said to represent Mary Tudor and her second husband Charles, Duke of Brandon. The screen here is painted with twelve Old Testament prophets, and Mortlock suggests that they are by a different hand to the images on the other two screens. Here on the south screen, some of the figures have surviving naming inscriptions, and Mortlock surmises that the complete sequence, from left to right, is Baruch, Hosea, Nahum, Jeremiah, Elias, Moses, David, Isaiah, Amos, Jonah and Ezekiel. Further, he observes that the subject is a usual one for the English Midlands, but rare for East Anglia, and that perhaps this part of the screen came from elsewhere. The same may be true of the other two parts - it is hard to think that the central screen was deliberately made too wide for the two arcades.
The north aisle chapel is reserved as the blessed sacrament chapel. The screen is harder to explore, because the northern side is curtailed by a large chest, but it features angels. Unlike the screens at Hitcham and Blundeston, which show angels holding instruments of the passion, these are the nine orders of angels, with Gabriel at their head, and flanked by angels holding symbols of the Trinity and the Eucharist. Mortlock says that they are so similar to the ones at Barton Turf in Norfolk that they may be by the same hand, in which case the central screen is also by that person. They are, from left to right, the Holy Trinity, Gabriel, Archangels, Powers, Dominions, Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Virtues, Messengers, and finally the Eucharist. The Holy Trinity angel still has part of the original dedicatory inscription beneath his feet.
If part or all of this screen came from elsewhere, where did it come from? Possibly either Walberswick, Covehithe or Kessingland, the three downsized churches mentioned earlier. More excitingly, it might have come from one of the churches along this coast that was lost to the sea, perhaps neighbouring St Nicholas at Easton Bavents, or, just to the south, St Peter or St John the Baptist, the two Dunwich churches lost in the 16th and 17th centuries. We'll never know.
If you turn back at the screen and face westwards, your eyes are automatically drawn to the towering font cover, part of the extensive 1930s redecoration of the building. The clerestory is almost like a glass atrium intended to house it. Also the work of the period is the repainting and regilding of the 15th century pulpit (a lot of people blanch at this, but I think it is gorgeous) and the lectern. Beneath the font cover, the font is clearly one of the rare seven sacraments series, and part of the same group as Westhall, Blythburgh and Wenhaston. As at Blythburgh and Wenhaston, the panels are completely erased, probably in the 19th century, an act of barbarous vandalism. Given that Westhall is probably the best of all in the county, we must assume that three major medieval art treasures were wiped out. Astonishingly, vague shadows survive of the former reliefs; you can easily make out the Mass panel, facing east as at Westhall, the Penance panel and even what may be the Baptism of Christ.
Stepping through the screen, the reredos ahead is by Benedict Williamson and the glass above by Ninian Comper, familiar names in the Anglo-catholic pantheon, and evidence of an enthusiasm here that still survives in High Church form. There is a good engraved glass image of St Edmund to the north of the sanctuary, very much in the 1960s fashion, but curiously placed. On the wall of the chancel to the west of it, the high organ case is also painted and gilded enthusiastically.
As well as the screen, Southwold's other great medieval survival is the set of return stalls either side of the eastern face of the chancel screen. They have misericord seats, but the best feature are the handrests between the seats. On the south side, carvings include a man with a horn-shaped hat and sinners being drawn into the mouth of hell. On the north side are a man playing two pipes, a monkey preaching and a beaver biting its own genitals, a tale from the medieval bestiary, apparently.
What else is there to see? Well, the church is full of delights, and rewards further visits which always seem to turn up something previously unnoticed. St George rides full tilt at a dragon on an old chest at the west end of the north aisle. There is good 19th century glass in the porch and at the west end of the nave. A clock jack stands, axe and bell in hand, at the west end, a twin to the one upriver at Blythburgh. This one has a name, he's called Southwold Jack, and he is one of the symbols of the Adnams brewery.
As Mortlock notes, there are very few surviving memorials. This is partly because St Edmund was not in the patronage of a great landed family, but it may also suggest that they were largely removed at the time of the 19th century restoration, as at Brandon. One moving one is for the child of a vicar, and there are some interesting pre-Oxford Movement 19th century brasses in the south aisle.
High, high above all this, the roofs are models of Anglo-Catholic melodrama, the canopy of honour to the rood and the chancel ceilure in particular. But there is a warmth about it all that is missing from, say, Eye, which underwent a similar makeover. This church feels full of life, and not a museum piece at all. I remember attending evensong here late one winter Saturday afternoon, and it was magical. On another visit, I came on one of the first days of spring that was truly warm and bright, with not a cloud in the sky. As we drove into town, a cold fret off of the sea was condensing the steam of the brewery, sending it in swirls and skeins around the tower of St Edmund like low cloud. It was so atmospheric that I almost forgave them for what they have done to the Sole Bay Inn.
Užutrakis Manor Park stands in the town of Trakai, 2.8 km to the south-east of the Rykantai-Trakai road on the north-eastern shore of Lake Galvė, on a peninsula between lakes Galvė and Skaistis. The Park comprises a main house, park, outbuildings (stable, spirit distillery, smithy, granary, houses for a watchman, ferryman and gardener, barns and so on). Most of the outbuildings stand in the northern part of the Park.
Užutrakis is mentioned in written sources from the fourteenth century when it was called Algirdas Island and was a commercial estate (folwark) owned by the Tatar noblemen Davyd Kalmimovich, the Malshkoviches and Tomas Salavich. In 1723 it was purchased by Stanisław Seliawa. In 1753 the latter’s daughter Gieysztorowa-Narbuttowa sold the manor to a canon of Vilnius Cathedral, Dominyk Karol Karp from whom it was purchased in 1783 by Lauryn Odinec who built a brick Unite church in the park that functioned until 1839. In the early nineteenth century Užutrakis was owned by the Koreiwo family.
On Dec. 19 1897 the manor was purchased by Count Józef Tyszkiewicz (1868-1917) and he arranged that on June 5 1901 Tsar Nicholas II granted majoratus status to the manor, preventing it from being parcelled out. After his father died in 1917 Andrzej Tyszkiewicz (1899-1962) inherited the manor and ran it until Sept. 1 1939.
After Lithuanian regained control of the Vilnius District in 1939-40 the manor was occupied by troops of the Second Kęstutis Regiment, but on Aug 3 1940 when the Soviet union annexed Lithuania the manor park was nationalised. During World War Two German troops ran the estate an after the war the manor was home to a high-ranking KGB officers’ sanatorium and later it was a rest home and a young pioneers’ camp. Until 1991 it was home to a Soviet tourist enterprise.
The Užutrakis ensemble was formed by Józef Tyszkiewicz and his wife Jadwiga Swiętopułk-Czetwertyńska and it was put into effect at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Polish architect Józef Huss (1846-1904) and the French landscape gardener Edouard Fran?ois André (1840-1911). Huss designed a neo-renaissance palace and terrace which were built in 1896-1901 and became the compositional centre of the park. The two-storey Main House is a compact rectangle in modest neo-classical style and it has hardly been rebuilt to this day. The solidity of the building is stressed by the high intermediate lower floor and the corners that are stern up to the cornice. The composition of the western fa?ade that faces Lake Galvė is dominated by a deep-set Ionic portico placed within the side wings. The eastern fa?ade is crowned by a triangular pediment above which there is an Attic relief depicting vases and cartouches with the arms of the Tyszkiewiczes (Leliava, or lily) and Swiętopułk-Czetwertyńskis (the Russian Mounted knight). The facades are composed symmetrically and split by palettes, the end of the wings are given pediments with clear modillions and the windows are framed by straight piping.
On the ground floor there are seven symmetrical halls with large oblong windows and in the very middle of the building is a hall with a sky-lit staircase. Modest living rooms used to be on the first floor and had square windows.
The floor-slope roof is crowned by a ventilation shaft adorned with decorative features with a pointed end on which the count’s coat of arms used to hang. The house interior was decorated in Louis XVI style.
The ballustraded terrace is an integral part of the western fa?ade. It is set out on the supporting wall of stone and the corners are made of red brick which gives a military air to the building. The panorama view of Lake Galvė and Trakai Island Castle opens up from this terrace.
Užutrakis Manor was supported by a strong estate of 800 ha with commercial manor farms and villages. The park itself was not small – it covered 80.43 ha. The working part of the manor had 19 brick and wooden outhouses: dwelling houses for then gardener and ferryman, a mares’ stable, smithy, stable, cow byres and so forth. The manor estate still contains the remains of the small Uniate church.
After the Trakai Historical National park was founded in 1991 and the Trakai Historical National park Planning Scheme was confirmed by Lithuanian Republic Government Resolution of Dec 6 1993 Užutrakis Manor Estate Park was declared an architectural landscape reserve. Lithuanian Republic Government Resolution 1052 (July 27 1995) On Liquidating the Trakai State Tourism Enterprise transferred control of the estate to the Management of the Trakai Historical National Park. Lithuanian Republic Resolution 69 (Jan. 11 1996) On the Use of Užutrakis Former Manor Ensemble it was decided to use the former manor ensemble for official state functions. Lithuanian Republic Government Resolution 1465 (Dec. 23 1999) On Declaring Non-Movable Cultural treasures to be Cultural Monuments declared this object to be Monument G208KP. Instruction 157 of the Cultural treasures Protection Department of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania (June 5 2000) On the Special Plan for Former Užutrakis Manor Park G208KP confirmed the monument protection regulations for the Park. Lithuanian Republic Government Resolution 760 (May 28 2002) On Land Management Rights for the Management of Trakai Historical National Park and the Lithuanian Republic Government Resolution 912 (Dec. 6 1993) and amendments to Resolution 69 (Jan. 11 1996) approved the territorial planning documents for the manor estate whereby its maintenance and use are regulated.
Marino Marini 1901 1980
The angel of the City
L'angelo della cittÃ
1948 Cast/ fusione 1950 ?
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The museum was originally the private collection of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who began displaying the artworks to the public seasonally in 1951.
After her death in 1979. it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which eventually opened the collection year-round. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was Guggenheim's home.
Collection
The collection is principally based on the personal art collection of Peggy Guggenheim, a former wife of artist Max Ernst and a niece of the mining magnate, Solomon R. Guggenheim. She collected the artworks mostly between 1938 and 1946, buying works in Europe "in dizzying succession" as World War II began, and later in America, where she discovered the talent of Jackson Pollock, among others. The museum "houses an impressive selection of modern art. Its picturesque setting and well-respected collection attract some 400,000 visitors per year", making it "the most-visited site in Venice after the Doge's Palace". Works on display include those of prominent Italian futurists and American modernists. Pieces in the collection embrace Cubism, Surrealism and Abstract expressionism. During Peggy Guggenheim's 30-year residence in Venice, her collection was seen at her home in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni and at special exhibitions in Amsterdam (1950), Zurich (1951), London (1964), Stockholm (1966), Copenhagen (1966), New York (1969) and Paris (1974).
Peggy Guggenheim, Marseille, 1937
Among the artists represented in the collection are,
from Italy, De Chirico (The Red Tower, The Nostalgia of the Poet) and Severini (Sea Dancer);
from France, Braque (The Clarinet), Metzinger (Au Vélodrome), Gleizes (Woman with animals), Duchamp (Sad Young Man on a Train), Léger (Study of a Nude and Men in the City) Picabia (Very Rare Picture on Earth);
from Spain, Dali - (Birth of Liquid Desires), Miro (Seated Woman II) and Picasso (The Poet, On the Beach);
from other European countries,
Constantin Brancusi (including a sculpture from the Bird in Space series), Max Ernst (The Kiss, Attirement of the Bride), Giacometti (Woman with Her Throat Cut, Woman Walking), Gorky (Untitled), Kandinsky (Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, White Cross), Klee (Magic Garden), Magritte (Empire of Light) and Mondrian (Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938, Composition with Red 1939); and from the US, Calder (Arc of Petals) and Pollock (The Moon Woman, Alchemy).
In one room, the museum also exhibits a few paintings by Peggy's daughter Pegeen Vail Guggenheim
In addition to the permanent collection, the museum houses 26 works on long-term loan from the Gianni Mattioli Collection, including images of Italian futurism by artists including Boccioni (Materia, Dynamism of a Cyclist), Carrà (Interventionist Demonstration), Russolo (The Solidity of Fog) and Severini (Blue Dancer), as well as works by Balla, Depero, Rosai, Sironi and Soffici.In 2012, the museum received 83 works from the Rudolph and Hannelore Schulhof Collection, which will have its own gallery within in the building.
Building and Venice Biennale
Entrance to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which Peggy Guggenheim purchased in 1949. Although sometimes mistaken for a modern building,it is an 18th-century palace designed by the Venetian architect Lorenzo Boschetti. The building was unfinished, and has an unusually low elevation on the Grand Canal. The museum's website describes it thus:
Palazzo Venier dei Leoni's long low façade, made of Istrian stone and set off against the trees in the garden behind that soften its lines, forms a welcome "caesura" in the stately march of Grand Canal palaces from the Accademia to the Salute.
The palazzo was Peggy Guggenheim's home for thirty years.
In 1951, the palazzo, its garden, now called the Nasher Sculpture Garden, and her art collection were opened to the public from April to October for viewing. Her collection at the palazzo remained open during the summers until her death in Camposampiero, northern Italy, in 1979; she had donated the palazzo and the 300-piece collection to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1976.
The foundation, then under the direction of Peter Lawson-Johnston, took control of the palazzo and the collection in 1979 and re-opened the collection there in April 1980 as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
After the Foundation took control of the building in 1979, it took steps to expand gallery space; by 1985, "all of the rooms on the main floor had been converted into galleries ... the white Istrian stone facade and the unique canal terrace had been restored" and a protruding arcade wing, called the barchessa, had been rebuilt by architect Giorgio Bellavitis. Since 1985, the museum has been open year-round.[11] In 1993, apartments adjacent to the museum were converted to a garden annex, a shop and more galleries.
In 1995, the Nasher Sculpture Garden was completed, additional exhibition rooms were added, and a café was opened. A few years later, in 1999 and in 2000, the two neighboring properties were acquired. In 2003, a new entrance and booking office opened to cope with the increasing number of visitors, which reached 350,000 in 2007. Since 1993, the museum has doubled in size, from 2,000 to 4,000 square meters.
Since 1985, the United States has selected the foundation to operate the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, an exhibition held every other summer. In 1986, the foundation purchased the Palladian-style pavilion, built in 1930
Management and attendance
Philip Rylands was appointed director of the collection in 2000.[18] As of 2012, the collection was the most visited art gallery in Venice and the 11th most visited in Italy.
2014 lawsuit
Following the gift of works to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation by Hannelore and Rudolph Schulhof of Germany in 2012, works collected by Peggy Guggenheim were removed from the Palazzo and placed in storage to make room for the display of the new works.
The Schulhofs were honoured with inscriptions of their names alongside Guggenheim's at both entrances of the museum. Their son, Michael P. Schulhof, has been a trustee of the Guggenheim foundation since 2009.
In 2014, seven French descendants of Peggy Guggenheim sued the foundation for violating her will and agreements with the foundation, which they say require that the collection "remain intact and on display". The descendants also claim, among other things, that the resting place of Guggenheim's ashes in the gardens of the Palazzo have been desecrated by the display of sculptures donated by Patsy and Raymond Nasher nearby and by the use of the burial site for fundraising parties.
The lawsuit requests that the founder's bequest be revoked or that the collections, gravesite and signage be restored. The foundation calls the lawsuit "meritless". Other descendants of Peggy Guggenheim support the foundation.
The Fort Aguada is one of the largest and impressive forts preserved as one of the best known landmarks in Goan history. Its prominence has grown from the fact that its headland on which it is built offers a wonderful site for military architects due to its shielding of the vital sea access from the heart of the Portuguese territory thereby making it an ideal site for seaward as well as landward defense.
The elimination of the Maratha threat and the acquisition of the New Conquest added more glory to its importance right upto the end of the 18th century when Goa's future borders were established. The most vital part of it was its impregnability to survive attacks by enemies through land or sea or simultaneously from both sides which often happened.
The most feared threat for the Portuguese came from the Europeans in the east, which came true when a Dutch squadron approached the Mandovi in 1604. The Reis Magos Fort, Gaspar Dias Fort and the Cabo Fort proved to be futile in keeping them at bay and though eventually warded off, the Dutch succeeded in burning quite a number of Portuguese ships. In 1606, they returned back and settled at the entrance of the river, blocking the harbour and preventing the entry or departure of all the ships.
The Portuguese naval strength was now actually not enough to face the Dutch for an open sea battle whereby they had to resort to defensive methods against the Dutch to keep them at a safe distance meanwhile work on building a fort was started on the headland which was completely finished in 1612. During the reign of the Catholic King Dom Filippe of Portugal, the construction of the fortress began with orders from the municipality levying 1 percent duty towards protection and defence of ships approaching the fort. The Fortress was finally completed in 1612 by the members of the Municipality under the administration of Viceroy Ruy Tavara.
The water link with the sea on the north side was extended with the use of the Nerul river which dissolves into creeks beyond the peninsula and the whole of the headland was utilized as well making it a thoroughly defensible island. The fort was built as per the design laid down by the Italian military architects employed by the Portuguese government in Lisbon. On the highest point of the headland, there is a citadel which is linked by a defended passage to the riverside. The entire area at sea level is surrounded by fat walls with occasionally occurring bastions along the riverside. The outer wall part has now disappeared though there are still fragments which can be seen, distinctively along the river.
A delight for a military architect was the position of the fort citadel situated at the heart of the fort on the western tip of the headland commanding any seaward approach. It is now used as a jail outside the area of the fort and can still be visited. Similar to all forts built by the Portuguese where the fort configuration usually conforms towards the ground, this one is in form of a square with bastions for artillery placed at each of its three corners, while the fourth corner is occupied by a main gate. Each of the three corners are strongly defended by a dry moat and extremely thick walls while the fourth faces out on the steep slope towards the river. The embrasures are far and wide enough to allow a broad field of fire for the cannons. At one time, 200 cannons were a part of this fort, quite a massive artillery! The bastions are arrow shaped with rounded corners.
The solidity of the Aguada fort can be seen from the fact that neither this one has any delicate turrets nor the battlement lines are bisected by any towers. The citadel gateway being narrow is also blocked by heavy and iron studded doors thereby preventing easy access. The narrow bridge over the ditch makes it all the more difficult while the ramp into the fort inside the gateway curves off at a sharp angle and the steep steps upto the battlements do not make access any easier either. The 1st lighthouse was built here two and half centuries later. The main gate has a magazine adjacent to it, which has a unique half round design in order to deflect any enemy shots.
One of the distinctive features of the Aguada headlands are the Lighthouses built as early as 1864 thereby marking them as one of the oldest and first lighthouses to be built in Asia. Earlier to this, ships were normally guided by bonfire beacons lit on the Hill of the Pilots above the Immaculate Conception Church at Panjim. The 1st lighthouse initially built served purpose right upto 1976 when it was replaced by a square, modern lighthouse located nearby the walls of the citadel. This one is open to visitors and it makes all the watching more enjoyable due to the scenic views one gets to see when he/she climbs up the spiral staircase with a metal ladder within the lighthouse.
The old model is a splendid structure, and form a distance dominates the skyline. The Viceroy, together with the architect and engineer, is suitably, commemorated on a copper plaque in the ‘turret’ of the tower. Somewhat squat and with a solid appearance relieved by a balustrade around the platform and a curving staircase up to the lamp housing, it is most satisfying building. This is where the great bell from the Augustinian church in Old Goa was brought before being transferred to Panjim Church. Wherever it was hung it must have deafened the light house the lighthouse keeper. There is a third and smaller lighthouse, the Aguada Beacon, at the foot of the slopes near the buildings on the river bank. Built in 1890, it marks the entrance to the river.
The splendid structure of the lighthouse has a turret in which on a copper plaque are built and commemorated statues of the Viceroy, together with the architect and the engineer. The building has a solid appearance with the presence of a balustrade around the platform with a curving staircase to the lamp housing. The great bell from the Augustinian church was initially brought here before getting transferred to the Panjim church. Its peals must have deafened the lighthouse surroundings not to mention, the lighthouse keeper too. A smaller lighthouse, ‘The Aguada Beacon’, built in 1890 near the foot of the slopes besides the buildings on the river bank, marks the entrance to the river.
The lighthouse is surrounded by magnificent places where Panjim lies to the east along the river, with its Miramar and Caranzalem beaches leading to the Cabo with the Governor’s house on its point. Beyond the lighthouse lies the estuary of the Zuari river and the Mormugao port with the islands of St. George and Cambariem offshore. On the western side lie the famous northern beaches of Baga and Calangute. While the Candolim church is located inland to these beaches.
A huge underground cistern beneath the steps leading down from the centre of the citadel courtyard provides the water supply with its arched caverns having a capacity of more than 10 million litres or two and quarter million gallons to be precise. This was enhanced by the presence of several springs of clear sweet water which were instrumental in the naming of the fort Aguada which literally means ‘a place for watering’.
Another significant aspect of the Fort Aguada was the small chapel dedicated to ‘Our Lady of Good Voyage’, this being named due to ships anchoring at this place after a long journey and restocking before embarking on another journey. A jetty extends out towards the sea on the northern side where the Taj Group hotel is located just within the outer walls of the fort. The canon provides the necessary fire cover at the foot of the steep slopes, hidden from the guns of the citadel above. The cistern was excavated which in turn arranged for the stone from which the fortress walls were built. The fortress has many passages and rooms and narrow steps leading into more deeper and darker passageways to lost magazines and storerooms.
Parallel walls form a defensible passageway which connect the citadel with the anchorage below, where at river level, there are located old buildings not to forget the first chapel already mentioned above. The largest of all springs, the Mother of Water or Mae de Agua is also found here. This part of the fort is closed for visitors as it is utilized as a prison. At the new gates to the prison area, there is a statue of a man and a woman, the man holding the body of a child in his arms while the woman has her arms raised to show the breaking of chain bondage in front of the national emblem of India, the Ashoka Pillar which has an inscription which is dedicated to the memory of people, dead and alive, known and unknown and who have laid down their life for the cause of freedom from foreign powers.
The ceremony for commemoration of the beginning of the struggle is held on 18th June each year. The prison was in extensive use as it housed the revolutionaries of the 19th century when in 1946, the first peaceful non violence movement was initiated. All through the fight for freedom, nationalist supporters found themselves imprisoned here. The barrack built by British forces at the beginning of the 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars is no longer visible now.
Epes Sargent
West Building, Main Floor—Gallery 60B
•Date: c. 1760
•Medium: Oil on Canvas
•Dimensions:
oOverall: 126.6 × 101.7 cm (49 13/16 × 40 1/16 in.)
oFramed: 144.8 × 118.1 cm (57 × 46½ in.)
•Credit Line: Gift of the Avalon Foundation
•Accession Number: 1959.4.1
•Artists/Makers:
oJohn Singleton Copley (painter) American, 1738-1815
Overview
John Singleton Copley, America’s most important colonial painter, was born in Boston of Irish parents. In 1748 Copley’s widowed mother married Peter Pelham, a painter and engraver. Copley’s stepfather probably gave him some art lessons but died when Copley was only 13. In later years the painter claimed he was self–taught.
Copley, who was extremely observant, presumably learned about art largely by watching other English–trained painters who were working in the New World and by studying engravings imported from Europe. Much more important was his innate ability to record details objectively and to suggest character. Gilbert Stuart would later say of the uncompromising realism in Copley’s Epes Sargent, “Prick that hand and blood will spurt forth.”
About 70 years old when he posed for Copley, Sargent had dropped out of Harvard College to enter business in his native Gloucester. After the death of his first wife, this prosperous merchant and shipowner married a rich widow from Salem. Copley’s portrayal shows him nonchalantly leaning on a marble pedestal as a symbol of prestige; since carved stone monuments were rather rare in the colonies, this imaginary device must be borrowed from European prints of potentates.
Such penetrating likenesses made Copley the best–paid artist in colonial America. By shipping some of his canvases to London for criticism, Copley soon became known in England.
Provenance
John James Dixwell [1806-1876], Boston, the sitter’s great-great-grandson;[1] his daughter, Caroline Dixwell Clements [Mrs. George Henry Clements, 1856-1931], New York;[2] her daughter, Anna Clements Knauth [Mrs. Oswald Whitman Knauth, 1890-1965], New York;[3] her son, Arnold Whitman Knauth II [b. 1918], Rockport, Massachusetts; (Milch Galleries, New York), 1958; (Hirschl and Adler Galleries, Inc., New York), 1958-1959;[4] purchased 1959 by NGA with funds from the Avalon Foundation.
[1]Dixwell, lender to the exhibition at the Boston Atheneum in 1863, is the earliest recorded owner of the portrait. It probably descended from the sitter to his son Epes [1721-1779], to his son Epes [1748-1822], to his daughter Esther [Mrs. John Dixwell, 1776-1865], mother of John James Dixwell; see Emma Worcester Sargent and Charles Sprague Sargent, Epes Sargent of Gloucester and his Descendants, Boston and New York, 1923, 10-13.
[2]Sargent and Sargent 1923, 14; Social Register, New York, 1932 (New York, 1931), 153.
[3]Sargent and Sargent 1923, 15; obituary, The New York Times, 12 April 1965, 35.
[4]Information from M. P. Naud, Hirschl and Adler Galleries, in conversation with Mary Ellen Fraser, intern, NGA, 26 July 1988; conservation report from Hirschl and Adler Galleries, 30 March 1959, in NGA conservation files.
Associated Names
•Clements, Caroline Dixwell
•Dixwell, John James
•Hirschl & Adler Galleries
•Knauth, Anna Clements
•Knauth, II, Arnold Whitman
•Milch, Inc., E. & A.
Exhibition History
•1863—Pictures lent to the Sanitary Fair for Exhibition, Boston Athenaeum, 1863, no. 140.
•1864—Paintings and Statuary exhibited for the Benefit of the National Sailors’ Fair, at the Athenaeum Gallery, Boston Athenaeum, 1864, no. 338.
•1871—Forty-Seventh Exhibition of Paintings at the Athenaeum Gallery, Boston, 1871, no. 238.
•1888—Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1888-1892.
•1893—Retrospective Exhibit of American Painting, World’s Columbian Exposition, Department of Fine Arts, Chicago, 1893, no. 203.
•1909—The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: American Paintings, Furniture, Silver and Other Objects of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1909, no. 8.
•1911—An Exhibition of Colonial Portraits, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1911, no. 16.
•1917—An Exhibition of Early American Paintings, Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1917, no. 18.
•1936—An Exhibition of Paintings by John Singleton Copley, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1936-1937, no. 5.
•1940—Survey of American Painting, Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 1940, no. 62.
•1942—Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1942-1945.
•1945—National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945-1948.
•1949—From Colony to Nation: An Exhibition of American Painting, Silver and Architecture From 1650 to the War of 1812, Art Institute of Chicago, 1949, no. 29.
•1962—Masterpieces of Art, Seattle World’s Fair, 1962, no. 10.
•1963—Four Centuries of American Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1963-1964, unnumbered.
•1965—John Singleton Copley, 1738-1815, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Musuem of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1965-1966, no. 14.
•1968—Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, 1968, no cat.
•1969—In Memoriam, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1969, unnumbered checklist.
•1976—American Art: 1750-1800, Towards Independence, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1976, no. 11.
•1976—The Classical Spirit in American Portraiture, Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, 1976, no. 3.
•1995—John Singleton Copley in America, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Milwaukee Art Museum, 1995-1996, no. 11, repro.
Bibliography
•1863—Catalogue of Pictures lent to the Sanitary Fair for Exhibition. Together with Cataolgue of Paintings and Statuary, of the Athenaeum Gallery, Beacon Street, Boston., Exh. cat. Boston Atheneum, 1863: 13, no. 140.
•1864—Catalogue of Paintings and Statuary exh. for the Benefit of the National Sailors’ Fair, at the Athenaeum Gallery, Exh. cat. Boston Athenaeum, 1864: 117, no. 338.
•1867—Tuckerman, Henry T. Book of the Artists. 1867. 5th ed. 1870. Reprint. New York, 1966: 73.
•1871—Catalogue of the Forty-Seventh Exhibition of Paintings at the Athenaeum Gallery, Exh. cat. 2nd ed. Boston, 1871: 10, no. 238.
•1873—Perkins, Augustus Thorndike. A Sketch of the Life and a List of Some of the Works of John Singleton Copley. Boston, 1873: 16, 101-102, 105.
•1892—Museum of Fine Arts. Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings, With a Summary of other Works of Art, Exhibited on the Second Floor. 3rd ed. Boston, 1892: 15, no. 144.
•1893—Retrospective Exhibit of American Painting. Exh. cat. World’s Columbian Exposition, Department of Fine Arts, Chicago, 1893: no. 203.
•1904—Isham, Samuel. “The Art of Copley.” Masters in Art Boston, 1904: 5:39, pl. 7.
•1909—The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: American Paintings, Furniture, Silver and Other Objects of Art, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration 2. Exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1909: no. 8.
•1911—An Exhibition of Colonial Portraits, Exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1911: no. 16.
•1915—Bayley, Frank W. The Life and Works of John Singleton Copley. Boston, 1915: 214-215.
•1917—An Exhibition of Early American Paintings, Exh. cat. Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1917: no. 18.
•1923—Sargent, Emma Worcester, and Charles Sprague Sargent. Epes Sargent of Gloucester and his Descendants. Boston and New York, 1924: 6-8, frontispiece.
•1924—Cortissoz, Royal. “The Field of Art.” Scribner’s Magazine 76 (July 1924). Reprinted as “Early American Portraiture” In Personalities in Art New York and London, 1925: 110.
•1927—Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr., Charles Rufus Morey, William James Henderson. The American Spirit in Art. The Pageant of America. 15 vols. Ralph Henry Gabriel, ed. New Haven, 1927: 10, repro. (“Painting” by Mather).
•1930—Bolton, Theodore and Harry Lorin Binsse. “John Singleton Copley.” The Antiquarian 15 (December 1930): 118.
•1936—An Exhibition of Paintings by John Singleton Copley, Exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1936-1937: no. 5.
•1937—Morgan, John Hill. “Some Notes on John Singleton Copley.” Antiques 31 (March 1937): 117.
•1937—Shipton, Clifford K., ed. Sibley’s Harvard Graduates. Vol. 5, Biographical Sketches of those who attended Harvard College in the Classes 1701-1712. Boston, 1937: 645-646, repro. opp. 645.
•1938—Parker, Barbara Neville and Anne Bolling Wheeler. John Singleton Copley: American Portraits in Oil, Pastel, and Miniature with Biographical Sketches. Boston, 1938: 11, 171-172, pl. 21.
•1939—Morgan, John Hill. John Singleton Copley. Windham, Connecticut, 1939: 12.
•1940—Hagen, Oskar. The Birth of the American Tradition in Art. New York, 1940: 101.
•1940—Lane, James W. “This Year the Carnegie National.” Art News 39 (October 1940): 12, repro. 8.
•1942—“Reunion in Minneapolis,” Art Digest 17 (15 October 1942): 15.
•1949—From Colony to Nation: An Exhibition of American Painting, Silver and Architecture From 1650 to the War of 1812, Exh. cat. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1949: no. 29.
•1950—Barker, Virgil. “Copley’s American Portraits.” Magazine of Art 43 (March 1950): 83.
•1951—Walker, John. Paintings from America. Harmondsworth, England, 1951: 15, 42, pl. 2.
•1960—The National Gallery of Art and Its Collections. Foreword by Perry B. Cott and notes by Otto Stelzer. National Gallery of Art, Washington (undated, 1960s): 9.
•1962—Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. Treasures from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1962: 128, color repro.
•1962—Masterpieces of Art, Exh. cat. Seattle World’s Fair, 1962: no. 10.
•1963—Four Centuries of American Art, Exh. cat. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1963-1964: unnumbered.
•1963—Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 320, repro.
•1965—John Singleton Copley, Exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington; Metropolitan Musuem of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1965-1966: no. 14.
•1966—Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. A Pageant of Painting from the National Gallery of Art. 2 vols. New York, 1966: 2:392, color repro.
•1966—Prown, Jules David. John Singleton Copley, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, pp. 33-34, 42, 77, 84, 156-157, 180-181, 190-191, 227-228, fig. 89, no. 275.
•1966—Prown, Jules David. “The Art Historian and the Computer; An Analysis of Copley’s Patronage 1753-1774.” The Smithsonian Journal of History 1, no. 4 (1966): 27, 30.
•1970—American Paintings and Sculpture: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1970: 46, repro.
•1975—Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. New York, 1975: 390, fig. 562, color repro.
•1976—American Art: 1750-1800, Towards Independence, Exh. cat. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1976: no. 11.
•1976—The Classical Spirit in American Portraiture, Exh. cat. Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, 1976: no. 3.
•1976—Wilmerding, John. American Art. Hammondsworth, England, and New York, 1976: 36-37, pl. 34.
•1980—American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1980: 138, repro.
•1980—Perkins and Gavin 1980, 40.
•1980—Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980: 13, 44, repro.
•1981—Quick, Michael. “Princely Images in the Wilderness: 1720-1775.” American Portraiture in the Grand Manner: 1720-1920 Exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1981: 19.
•1981—Williams, William James. A Heritage of American Paintings from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1981: repro. 13 (detail), 21, color repro. 42.
•1984—Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 387, no. 547, color repro.
•1986—Yarnall and Gerdts 1986, 1:825, nos. 19962 and 19963.
•1988—Fleischer, Roland E. “Emblems and Colonial American Painting.” The American Art Journal 20, no. 3 (1988): 31-32, repro.
•1988—Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. Rev. ed. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988: 52, repro.
•1992—American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 147, repro.
•1992—National Gallery of Art, Washington. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 208, repro.
•1995—Miles, Ellen G. American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1995: 24-28, color repro. 26.
•2004—Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 290, no. 234, color repro.
From American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century:
1959.4.1 (1533)
Epes Sargent
•c. 1760
•Oil on Canvas, 126.6 × 101.7 (49⅞ × 40)
•Gift of the Avalon Foundation
Technical Notes
The painting is on a fine, tightly woven, plain-weave fabric. The grayish white ground is of medium thickness. It is toned with a transparent greenish brown imprimatura, which is visible around the contours of the hand. The paint is applied thickly without much blending in the flesh areas, where the uneven surface of the paint corresponds to the wrinkles of the sitter’s skin. The background and coat are more thinly painted. A few stains in the upper right corner, perhaps from past mildew damage, have been retouched. There are other minor, scattered retouches, but no major losses. The varnish was removed and the painting lined in 1959.
Provenance
The sitter’s great-great-grandson John James Dixwell [1806-1876], Boston;1 his daughter Caroline Dixwell Clements [Mrs. George Henry Clements, 1856-1931], New York;2 her daughter Anna Clements Knauth [Mrs. Oswald Whitman Knauth, 1890-1965], New York;3 her son Arnold Whitman Knauth II [b. 1918], Rockport, Massachusetts; (Milch Galleries, New York), 1958; (Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York), 1958-1959;4 by whom sold to the Avalon Foundation.
Exhibited
Pictures lent to the Sanitary Fair for Exhibition, Boston Athenaeum, 1863, no. 140.5 Paintings and Statuary exhibited for the Benefit of the National Sailors’ Fair, at the Athenaeum Gallery, Boston, 1864, no. 338.6 Forty-Seventh Exhibition of Paintings at the Athenaeum Gallery, Boston, 1871, no. 238.7 MFA, on long-term loan, 1888-1892.8 Retrospective Exhibit of American Painting, World’s Columbian Exposition, Department of Fine Arts, Chicago, 1893, no. 203. The Hudson-Fulton Celebration; American Paintings, Furniture, Silver and Other Objects of Art, MM A, 1909, no. 8. An Exhibition of Colonial Portraits, MMA, 1911, no. 16. An Exhibition of Early American Paintings, Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, New York, 1917, no. 18. An Exhibition of Paintings by John Singleton Copley, MMA, 1936-1937, no. 5. Survey of American Painting, Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 1940, no. 62.9 The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, on long-term loan, 1942-1945.10 NGA, on long-term loan, 1945-1958.” From Colony to Nation: An Exhibition of American Painting, Silver and Architecture From 1650 to the War of 1812, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1949, no. 29. Masterpieces of Art, Seattle World’s Fair, Fine Arts Pavilion, 1962, no. 10. Four Centuries of American Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1963-1964, unnumbered. Copley, 1965-1966, no. 14. Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1968, no cat. The Classical Spirit in American Portraiture, Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, no. 3. American Art: 1750-1800, Towards Independence, YUAG; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1976, no. 11.
Copley’s portrait of Epes Sargent of Salem, Massachusetts, has long been considered a masterpiece of colonial American painting. A.T. Perkins in 1873 described Sargent as a “vigorous old gentleman…in an attitude of repose” and noted that “the late Gilbert Stuart said of the hand represented in this picture, that art could go no further, — ‘Prick that hand and blood will spirt out.’”12 Samuel Isham in 1904 called the painting a “remarkably fine example of Copley’s style at a period prior to his departure for England, when some of his most vigorous and characteristic work was produced.”13 Twenty years later Royal Cortissoz proclaimed the “celebrated” painting as a “monumental design painted with power.”14 In 1927 Frank Jewett Mather thought it a “powerful effigy” and “an extraordinary performance.”15 In 1950 Virgil Barker termed it “monumental.”10 Most recently, Jules Prown has described its “spare composition” as “particularly effective.”17 The painting frequently has been included in books and catalogues of American art.
The portrait embodies the characteristics for which Copley’s colonial portraits are known: individualistic faces, imaginative compositions, unusual color combinations, and varied brushwork. The portrait shows a man about seventy years old with a thoughtful expression, his face, hands, and wig painted in a heavy impasto to convey wrinkles and rough textures. Even the hairs of his eyebrows are roughened with age. His coat is buttoned tightly across his large chest, giving the impression of solidity and mass. The coat has little texture; its weight is implied in the folds of cloth on the shoulder and sleeves. Its slate gray tonality contrasts with the warm colors of his calloused right hand as it rests against his midriff. The column to the left is painted with ochre, red, and green, all blended with gray. The blue sky is tinted with pink at the horizon. The image is more sympathetic and believable than the earlier Jane Browne [1942.8.2].
Copley probably borrowed Sargent’s pose from English mezzotints, which reproduced similar portraits by mid-century English painters Thomas Hudson, Joseph Highmore, and Allan Ramsay. He used a similar pose in his contemporary portraits Thaddeus Burr (1758-1760, The Saint Louis Art Museum) and Unknown Subject, Boy called Master Hancock (1758-1759, Bayou Bend Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston).18 John Hill Morgan, the first author to comment on this particular portrait in relation to Copley’s practice of borrowing compositional features from engravings, noted that the pillar base was an accessory normally found in “paintings of the classic school.”19 Oskar Hagen suggested that the pose was “closely related to Joseph Highmore’s Gentleman in a Silk Vest of about 1745” (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California) and that “Highmore’s painting…helped Copley to a more advanced idea of voluminosity.”20 No evidence shows, however, that Copley knew this portrait. Michael Quick has suggested there may be a source in the work of Thomas Hudson, but none of the portraits by Hudson that were engraved are identical in pose to this painting.21 Copley could also have found the pose in an engraving of a classical statue, perhaps Praxiteles’ Leaning Satyr, which stood in a similar position, resting his arm on a tree stump.22 Another influence may have been an image of Fortitude, depicted in emblem books with a partial column as its attribute.23 However, the minute details of the portrait, including the shadow made by Sargent’s right thumb against his coat and the powder that has fallen from his wig onto his shoulder, make it likely that Copley was imitating a mezzotint. The painting indicates that Copley had begun to combine elements from different sources in one painting, giving his sitters a characterization appropriate to their ages and presumably their personalities.
Epes Sargent (1690-1762), an ancestor of painters John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Henry Sargent (1770-1845), was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts.24 He attended Harvard College and was, like many of Copley’s sitters, a merchant and a Congregationalist. In 1720 he married Esther Maccarty (1701-1743) and was appointed justice of the peace of Essex County, a commission he held six times. After the death of his wife he married Katherine Winthrop Browne in 1744. By 1750 he and his sons owned much of the land in Gloucester. In 1761 he was elected to the Great and General Court, the legislative body of colonial Massachusetts. This portrait may have been painted as a pendant to that of his second wife, who had been portrayed by John Smibert in 1734.25 Copley also made portraits of several of Sargent’s children: Epes Sargent II and his wife; Sarah Sargent and her husband Nathaniel Allen; and Mrs. Daniel Sargent, his daughter-in-law.
EGM
Notes
1.Dixwell, lender to the 1863 Boston Athenaeum exhibition, is the earliest recorded owner of the portrait. It probably descended from the sitter to his son Epes (1721-1779), to his son Epes (1748-1822), to his daughter Esther (Mrs. John Dixwell, 1776-1865), mother of John James Dixwell; see Sargent and Sargent 1923, 10-13.
2.Sargent and Sargent 1923, 14; Social Register 1932, 153.
3.Sargent and Sargent 1923, 15; obituary, New York Times, 12 April 1965, 35.
4.Information from M.P. Naud, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, in conversation with Mary Ellen Fraser, NGA, 26 July 1988; conservation report from Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 30 March 1959 (NGA).
5.Sanitary Fair 1863, 13, cited in Perkins and Gavin 1980, 40, and Yarnall and Gerdts 1986, 1:825.
6.Sailors’ Fair 1864, 117, cited in Perkins and Gavin 1980, 40, and Yarnall and Gerdts 1986, 1:825.
7.Forty-Seventh Exhibition 1871, 10; Perkins and Gavin 1980, 40.
8.A label from the MFA on the reverse of the painting gives October 1888 as the date for Mrs. Clements’ loan of the portrait; the loan is confirmed by a letter from the MFA, 28 March 1975 (NGA).
9.Lane 1940, 12, repro. 8.
10.The loan is confirmed by records of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; see also “Reunion” 1942, 15.
11.This loan, confirmed by NGA records, is referred to by Walker 1951, 15, 42, pl. 2.
12.Perkins 1873, 102.
13.Isham 1904,39.
14.Gortissoz 1924, no.
15.Mather 1927,10.
16.Barker 1950, 83.
17.Prown 1966, 1:33.
18.Prown 1966, 1: figs. 88, 91.
19.Morgan 1937,117.
20.Hagen 1940,101.
21.Quick 1981,19; on Hudson see Miles 1976.
22.Classical Spirit 1976, 27.
23.Fleischer 1988, 31.
24.Sargent and Sargent 1923, 6-8; Shipton 1937, 645-646.
25.She was the widow of Samuel Browne, Jr., of Salem, who was the son of the legendary Salem merchant Samuel Browne. The family commissioned twelve portraits from Smibert, the largest group of family portraits by that artist; Saunders 1979, 1: 180-181. Her portrait and that of her first husband are owned by the Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence.
References
•1867—Tuckerman: 73.
•1873—Perkins: 16, 101-102,105.
•1892—MFA: 15, no. 144.
•1904—Isham: 5:39 and pl. VII.
•1915—Bayley: 214-215.
•1924—Sargent and Sargent: 6-8, and frontispiece.
•1924—Gortissoz: no.
•1927—Mather: 10, repro.
•1930—Bolton and Binsse, “Copley”: 118.
•1937—Shipton: 645-646, repro. opp. 645.
•1937—Morgan: 117.
•1938—Parker and Wheeler: 11, 171-172, pl. 21.
•1939—Morgan, Copley: 12.
•1940—Hagen: 101.
•1950—Barker: 83.
•1966—Prown: 1:33-34, 42, 77, 84, 156-157, 180-181, 190-191, 227-228, and fig. 89.
•1967—Prown, “Computer”: 27, 30.
•1976—Wilmerding: 36-37, pl. 34.
•1976—Classical Spirit: 27, no. 3.
•1981—Quick: 19.
•1981—Williams: repro. 13 (detail of face), 21, color repro. 42.
•1984—Walker: 386, no. 547, color repro.
•1988—Fleischer: 31-32, repro.
some of the traditional stone-block tenement flats you find in Edinburgh, Glasgow and many other Scottish towns and cities. My flat is a bit more humble but still stone built - something I like about the old buildings (mine is Victorian) in Scotland, big blocks of native stone, not brick, very pleasing to the eye and gives you a very nice feeling of solidity! Built to last.
Transition #3
Transition #3 is more focused on the digital processes to explore my use of light than the more hands on approach I’ve employed in previous work, the result of this being a more linear form, seeming at once more controlled than the fluid forms of previous work. In order to give the work more tangibility than is often obtained in digital projection however, I have chosen to project onto both sides of a large-scale screen, giving the work a presence in the space; a solidity perhaps not attained through wall based projection.
Within Transition #3 the time-based component has become a key factor to reading the work, taking inspiration from work such as Douglas Gordon’s seminal piece 24-Hour Psycho, I have made the subtle transitions almost imperceptible at times, requiring the viewer to revisit the piece multiple times to explore the gentle shifts in colour and form that occur throughout it’s runtime.
Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.
St Edmund, Southwold, Suffolk
I kept meaning to come back to Southwold - the church, I mean, for I found myself in the little town from time to time. I finally kept my promise to myself in the summer of 2017, tipping up on a beautiful sunny day only to find the church closed for extensive repairs. The days got shorter, and by the time the church reopened it was too late in the year for me to try again. In fact, it was not until late October 2018 that I made it back there, on another beautiful day.
Southwold is well-known to people who have never even been there I suppose, signifying one side of Suffolk to which Ipswich is perhaps the counter in the popular imagination. Some thirty years ago, the comedian Michael Palin made a film for television called East of Ipswich. It was a memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, and the basic comic premise behind the film was that in those days families would go on holiday to seaside resorts on the East Anglian coast. In the child Palin's case, it was Southwold.
The amusement came from the idea that people in those days would sit in deckchairs beside the grey north sea, or shelter from the drizzle in genteel teashops or the amusement arcade on the pier. In the Costa Brava package tour days of the 1980s, the quaintness of this image made it seem like something from a different world.
I remember Southwold in the 1980s. It was one of those agreeable little towns distant enough from anywhere bigger to maintain a life of its own. It still had its genteel tea shops, its dusty grocers, its quaint hotels and pubs all owned by Adnams, the old-fashioned and unfashionable local brewery. In the white heat of the Thatcherite cultural revolution, it seemed a place that would soon die on its feet quietly and peaceably.
And then, in the 1990s, the colour supplements discovered the East Anglian coast, and fell in love with it. The new fashions for antique-collecting, cooking with local produce and general country living, coupled with a snobbishness about how vulgar foreign package trips had become, conspired to make places like Southwold very sought after. Before Nigel Lawson's boom became a bust, the inflated house prices of London and the home counties gave people money to burn. And in their hoards, they came out of the big city to buy holiday homes in East Anglia.
Although they are often lumped together, the coasts of Norfolk and Suffolk are very different to each other (Cambridgeshire and North Essex are also culturally part of East Anglia, but the North Essex coast is too close to London to have ever stopped being cheap and cheerful, and Cambridgeshire has no coastline). Norfolk's beaches are wide and sandy, with dunes and cliffs and rock pools to explore. Towns like Cromer and Hunstanton seem to have stepped out of the pages of the Ladybird Book of the Seaside. Tiny villages along the Norfolk coast have secret little beaches of their own.
Suffolk's coast is wilder. Beaches are mainly pebbles rather than sand, and the marshes stretch inland, cutting the coast off from the rest of the county. Unlike Norfolk, Suffolk has no coast road, and so the settlements on the coast are isolated from each other, stuck at the ends of narrow lanes which snake away from the A12 and peter out in the heathland above the sea. There are fewer of them too. It is still quicker to get from Walberswick to Southwold by water than by land. Because they are isolated from each other, they take on individual personalities and characteristics. Because they are isolated from the land, they become bastions of polite civilisation.
Between Felixstowe in the south, which no outsiders like (and consequently is the favourite of many Suffolk people) and Lowestoft in the north, which is basically an industrial town-on-sea (but which still has the county's best beaches - shhh, don't tell a soul) are half a dozen small towns that vie with each other for trendiness. Southwold is the biggest, and today it is also the most expensive place to live in all East Anglia. Genteel tea shops survive, but are increasingly shouldered by shops that specialise in ski-wear and Barbour jackets, delicatessens that stock radicchio and seventeen different kinds of olive, jewellery shops and kitchen gadget shops and antique furniture shops where prices are exquisitely painful. Worst of all, the homely, shabby, smoke-filled Sole Bay Inn under the lighthouse has been converted by the now-trendy Adnams Brewery into a chrome and glass filled wine bar.
If you see someone in Norfolk driving a truck, they are probably wearing a baseball cap and carrying a shotgun. in Suffolk, they've more likely just bought a Victorian pine dresser from an antique shop, and they're taking it back to Islington. Does this matter? The fishing industry was dying anyway. The tourist industry was also dying. If places like Southwold, Aldeburgh and Orford become outposts of north London, at least they will still provide jobs for local people. But the local people won't be able to afford to live there, of course. They'll be bussed in from Reydon, Leiston and Melton to provide services for people in holiday cottages which are the former homes they grew up in, but can no longer afford to buy. Does this seriously annoy me? Not as much as it does them, I'll bet.
So, lets go to Southwold, turning off the A12 at the great ship of Blythburgh church, the wide marshes of the River Blyth spreading aimlessly beyond the road. We climb and fall over ancient dunes, and then the road opens out into the flat marshes, the town spreads out beyond. We enter through Reydon (now actually bigger than Southwold, with houses at half the price) and over the bridge into the town of Southwold itself.
Having been so critical, I need to say here that Southwold is beautiful. It is quite the loveliest small town in all East Anglia. None of the half-timbered houses here that you find in places like Long Melford and Lavenham. Here, the town was completely destroyed by fire in the 17th century, and so we have fine 18th and 19th century municipal buildings. One of the legacies of the fire was the creation of wide open spaces just off of the high street, called greens. The best one of all is Gun Hill Green, overlooking the bay where the last major naval battle in British waters was fought. The cannons still point out to sea. The houses here are stunning, gobsmacking, jaw-droppingly wonderful. If I could afford to buy one of them as a weekend retreat, then you bet your life I would, and to hell with the people who moaned about it.
At the western end of the High Street is St Bartholomew's Green, and beyond it sits what is, for my money, Suffolk's single most impressive building. This is the great church of St Edmund, a vast edifice built all in one go in the second half of the 15th century. Only Lavenham can compete with it for scale and presence. Unlike the massing at St Peter and St Paul at Lavenham, St Edmund is defined by a long unbroken clerestory and aisles beneath - where St Peter and St Paul looks full of tension, ready to spring, St Edmund is languid and floating, a ship at ease.
Southwold church was just one of several vast late medieval rebuildings in this area. Across the river at Walberswick and a few miles upriver at Blythburgh the same thing happened. Blythburgh still survives, but Walberswick was derelicted to make a smaller church, as were Covehithe and Kessingland. Dunwich All Saints was lost to the sea. But Southwold was the biggest. Everything about it breathes massive permanence, from the solidity of the tower to the turreted porch, from the wide windows to the jaunty sanctus bell fleche.
Along the top of the aisles, grimacing faces look down. All of them are different. The pedestals atop the clerestory were intended for statues as at Blythburgh, but were probably never filled before the Reformation intervened. At the west end, above the great west window, you can see the vast inscription SAncT EDMUND ORA P: NOBIS ('Saint Edmund, pray for us') as bold a record of the mindset of late medieval East Anglian Catholicism as you'll find.
As at Lavenham and Long Melford, the interior has been extensively restored, but not in as heavy or blunt a manner as at those two churches. St Edmund has, it must be said, benefited from the attentions of German bombers who put out all the dull Victorian glass with blast damage during World War II. Here, the interior is vast, light and airy, and much of the restoration is 20th century work, not 19th century.
Perhaps because of this, more medieval interior features have survived. Unlike Long Melford, Southwold does not have surviving medieval glass (Mr Dowsing saw to that in 1644), but it does have what is the finest screen in the county.
It stretches right the way across the church, and is effectively three separate screens. There is a rood screen across the chancel arch, and parclose screens across the north and south chancel aisles. All retain their original dado figures. There are 36 of them, more than anywhere else in Suffolk. They have been restored, particularly in the central range, but are fascinating because they retain a lot of original gesso work, where plaster of Paris is applied to wood and allowed to dry. It is then carved to produce intricate details.
The central screen shows the eleven remaining disciples and St Paul. They are, from left to right, Philip, Bartholomew, James the Less, Thomas, Andrew, Peter, Paul, John, James, Simon, Jude and Matthew.
The south chancel chapel is light and open. The bosses above are said to represent Mary Tudor and her second husband Charles, Duke of Brandon. The screen here is painted with twelve Old Testament prophets, and Mortlock suggests that they are by a different hand to the images on the other two screens. Here on the south screen, some of the figures have surviving naming inscriptions, and Mortlock surmises that the complete sequence, from left to right, is Baruch, Hosea, Nahum, Jeremiah, Elias, Moses, David, Isaiah, Amos, Jonah and Ezekiel. Further, he observes that the subject is a usual one for the English Midlands, but rare for East Anglia, and that perhaps this part of the screen came from elsewhere. The same may be true of the other two parts - it is hard to think that the central screen was deliberately made too wide for the two arcades.
The north aisle chapel is reserved as the blessed sacrament chapel. The screen is harder to explore, because the northern side is curtailed by a large chest, but it features angels. Unlike the screens at Hitcham and Blundeston, which show angels holding instruments of the passion, these are the nine orders of angels, with Gabriel at their head, and flanked by angels holding symbols of the Trinity and the Eucharist. Mortlock says that they are so similar to the ones at Barton Turf in Norfolk that they may be by the same hand, in which case the central screen is also by that person. They are, from left to right, the Holy Trinity, Gabriel, Archangels, Powers, Dominions, Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Principalities, Virtues, Messengers, and finally the Eucharist. The Holy Trinity angel still has part of the original dedicatory inscription beneath his feet.
If part or all of this screen came from elsewhere, where did it come from? Possibly either Walberswick, Covehithe or Kessingland, the three downsized churches mentioned earlier. More excitingly, it might have come from one of the churches along this coast that was lost to the sea, perhaps neighbouring St Nicholas at Easton Bavents, or, just to the south, St Peter or St John the Baptist, the two Dunwich churches lost in the 16th and 17th centuries. We'll never know.
If you turn back at the screen and face westwards, your eyes are automatically drawn to the towering font cover, part of the extensive 1930s redecoration of the building. The clerestory is almost like a glass atrium intended to house it. Also the work of the period is the repainting and regilding of the 15th century pulpit (a lot of people blanch at this, but I think it is gorgeous) and the lectern. Beneath the font cover, the font is clearly one of the rare seven sacraments series, and part of the same group as Westhall, Blythburgh and Wenhaston. As at Blythburgh and Wenhaston, the panels are completely erased, probably in the 19th century, an act of barbarous vandalism. Given that Westhall is probably the best of all in the county, we must assume that three major medieval art treasures were wiped out. Astonishingly, vague shadows survive of the former reliefs; you can easily make out the Mass panel, facing east as at Westhall, the Penance panel and even what may be the Baptism of Christ.
Stepping through the screen, the reredos ahead is by Benedict Williamson and the glass above by Ninian Comper, familiar names in the Anglo-catholic pantheon, and evidence of an enthusiasm here that still survives in High Church form. There is a good engraved glass image of St Edmund to the north of the sanctuary, very much in the 1960s fashion, but curiously placed. On the wall of the chancel to the west of it, the high organ case is also painted and gilded enthusiastically.
As well as the screen, Southwold's other great medieval survival is the set of return stalls either side of the eastern face of the chancel screen. They have misericord seats, but the best feature are the handrests between the seats. On the south side, carvings include a man with a horn-shaped hat and sinners being drawn into the mouth of hell. On the north side are a man playing two pipes, a monkey preaching and a beaver biting its own genitals, a tale from the medieval bestiary, apparently.
What else is there to see? Well, the church is full of delights, and rewards further visits which always seem to turn up something previously unnoticed. St George rides full tilt at a dragon on an old chest at the west end of the north aisle. There is good 19th century glass in the porch and at the west end of the nave. A clock jack stands, axe and bell in hand, at the west end, a twin to the one upriver at Blythburgh. This one has a name, he's called Southwold Jack, and he is one of the symbols of the Adnams brewery.
As Mortlock notes, there are very few surviving memorials. This is partly because St Edmund was not in the patronage of a great landed family, but it may also suggest that they were largely removed at the time of the 19th century restoration, as at Brandon. One moving one is for the child of a vicar, and there are some interesting pre-Oxford Movement 19th century brasses in the south aisle.
High, high above all this, the roofs are models of Anglo-Catholic melodrama, the canopy of honour to the rood and the chancel ceilure in particular. But there is a warmth about it all that is missing from, say, Eye, which underwent a similar makeover. This church feels full of life, and not a museum piece at all. I remember attending evensong here late one winter Saturday afternoon, and it was magical. On another visit, I came on one of the first days of spring that was truly warm and bright, with not a cloud in the sky. As we drove into town, a cold fret off of the sea was condensing the steam of the brewery, sending it in swirls and skeins around the tower of St Edmund like low cloud. It was so atmospheric that I almost forgave them for what they have done to the Sole Bay Inn.
From The New Gresham Encyclopedia 1922:
Canute (Knut), who espoused the widow of Ethelred, that he might reconcile his new subjects, obtained the name of Great, not only on account of his personal qualities, but from the extent of his dominions, being master of Denmark and Norway as well as England. In 1035 he died, and was followed in England by two other Danish kings, Harold and Hardicanute, whose joint reigns lasted till 1042, after which the English line was again restored in the person of Edward the Confessor. Edward was a weak prince, and in the latter years of his reign had far less real power than his brother-in-law Harold, son of the great Earl Godwin. On Edward's death in 1066 Harold accordingly obtained the crown. He found, however, a formidable opponent in the second-cousin of Edward, William of Normandy, who instigated [246]the Danes to invade the northern counties, while he, with 60,000 men, landed in the south. Harold vanquished the Danes, and hastening southwards met the Normans near Hastings, at Senlac, afterwards called Battle. Harold and his two brothers fell (14th Oct., 1066), and William (1066-87) immediately claimed the government as lawful King of England, being subsequently known as William I, the Conqueror. For some time he conducted the government with great moderation; but being obliged to reward those who had assisted him, he bestowed the chief offices of government upon Normans, and divided among them a great part of the country. The revolts of the native English which followed were quickly crushed, Continental feudalism in a modified form was established, and the English Church reorganized under Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury.
At his death, in 1087, William II, commonly known by the name of Rufus, the Conqueror's second son, obtained the crown, Robert, the eldest son, receiving the duchy of Normandy. In 1100, when William II was accidentally killed in the New Forest, Robert was again cheated of his throne by his younger brother Henry (Henry I), who in 1106 even wrested from him the duchy of Normandy. Henry's power being secured, he entered into a dispute with Anselm the Primate, and with the Pope, concerning the right of granting investure to the clergy. He supported his quarrel with firmness, and brought it to a not unfavourable issue. His reign was also marked by the suppression of the greater Norman nobles in England, whose power (like that of many Continental feudatories) threatened to overshadow that of the king, and by the substitution of a class of lesser nobles. In 1135 he died in Normandy, leaving behind him only a daughter, Matilda.
By the will of Henry I his daughter Maud or Matilda, wife of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and frequently styled the Empress Matilda, because she had first been married to Henry V, Emperor of Germany, was declared his successor. But Stephen, son of the Count of Blois, and of Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, raised an army in Normandy, landed in England, and declared himself king. After years of civil war and bloodshed an amicable arrangement was brought about, by which it was agreed that Stephen should continue to reign during the remainder of his life, but that he should be succeeded by Henry, son of Matilda and the Count of Anjou. Stephen died in 1154, and Henry Plantagenet ascended the throne with the title of Henry II, being the first of the Plantagenet or Angevin kings. A larger dominion was united under his sway than had been held by any previous sovereign of England, for at the time when he became King of England he was already in the possession of Anjou, Normandy, and Aquitaine.
Henry II found far less difficulty in restraining the licence of his barons than in abridging the exorbitant privileges of the clergy, who claimed exemption not only from the taxes of the State, but also from its penal enactments, and who were supported in their demands by the Primate Becket. The king's wishes were formulated in the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), which were at first accepted and then repudiated by the Primate. The assassination of Becket, however, placed the king at a disadvantage in the struggle, and after his conquest of Ireland (1171) he submitted to the Church, and did penance at Becket's tomb. Henry was the first who placed the common people of England in a situation which led to their having a share in the Government. The system of frank-pledge was revived, trial by jury was instituted by the Assize of Clarendon, and the Eyre courts were made permanent by the Assize of Nottingham. To curb the power of the nobles he granted charters to towns, freeing them from all subjection to any but himself, thus laying the foundation of a new order in society.
Richard I, called Cœur de Lion, who in 1189 succeeded to his father, Henry II, spent most of his reign away from England. Having gone to Palestine to join in the third crusade, he proved himself an intrepid soldier. Returning homewards in disguise through Germany, he was made prisoner by Leopold, Duke of Austria, but was ransomed by his subjects. In the meantime John, his brother, had aspired to the crown, and hoped, by the assistance of the French, to exclude Richard from his right. Richard's presence for a time restored matters to some appearance of order; but having undertaken an expedition against France, he received a mortal wound at the siege of Châlons, in 1199.
John was at once recognized as King of England, and secured possession of Normandy; but Anjou, Maine, and Touraine acknowledged the claim of Arthur, son of Geoffrey, second son of Henry II. On the death of Arthur, while in John's power, these four French provinces were at once lost to England. John's opposition to the Pope in electing a successor to the see of Canterbury in 1205 led to the kingdom being placed under an Interdict; and, the nation being in a disturbed condition, he was at last compelled to receive Stephen Langton as archbishop, and to accept his kingdom as a fief of the papacy (1213). His exactions and misgovernment had equally embroiled him with the nobles. In 1213 they refused to follow him to France, and, on his return defeated, they at once took measures to secure their own privileges and abridge [247]the perogatives of the Crown. King and barons met at Runnymede, and on 15th June, 1215, the Great Charter (Magna Charta) was signed. It was speedily declared null and void by the Pope and war broke out between John and the barons, who were aided by the French king. In 1216, however, John died, and his turbulent reign was succeeded by the almost equally turbulent reign of his son Henry III.
During the first years of the reign of Henry III the abilities of the Earl of Pembroke, who was regent until 1219, retained the kingdom in tranquillity; but when, in 1227, Henry assumed the reins of government he showed himself incapable of managing them. The Charter was three times reissued in a modified form, and new privileges were added to it, but the king took no pains to observe its provisions. The struggle, long maintained in the Great Council (henceforward called Parliament) over money grants and other grievances, reached an acute stage in 1263, when civil war broke out. Simon de Montfort, who had laid the foundations of the House of Commons by summoning representatives of the shire communities to the Mad Parliament of 1258, had by this time engrossed the sole power. He defeated the king and his son Edward at Lewes in 1264, and in his famous Parliament of 1265 still further widened the privileges of the people by summoning to it burgesses as well as knights of the shire. The escape of Prince Edward, however, was followed by the battle of Evesham (1265), at which Earl Simon was defeated and slain, and the rest of the reign was undisturbed.
On the death of Henry III, in 1272, Edward I succeeded without opposition. From 1276 to 1284 he was largely occupied in the conquest and annexation of Wales, which had become practically independent during the barons' wars. In 1292 Baliol, whom Edward had decided to be rightful heir to the Scottish throne, did homage for the fief to the English king; but when, in 1294, war broke out with France, Scotland also declared war. The Scots were defeated at Dunbar (1296), and the country placed under an English regent; but the revolt under Wallace (1297) was followed by that of Bruce (1306), and the Scots remained unsubdued. The reign of Edward was distinguished by many legal and legislative reforms, such as the separation of the old king's court into the Court of Exchequer, Court of King's Bench, and Court of Common Pleas, and the passage of the Statute of Mortmain. In 1295 the first perfect Parliament was summoned, the clergy and barons by special writ, the commons by writ to the sheriffs directing the election of two knights from each shire, two citizens from each city, two burghers from each borough. Two years later the imposition of taxation without consent of Parliament was forbidden by a special Act (De Tallagio non Concedendo). The great aim of Edward, however, to include England, Scotland, and Wales in one kingdom proved a failure, and he died in 1307 marching against Robert Bruce.
The reign of his son Edward II was unfortunate to himself and to his kingdom. He made a feeble attempt to carry out his father's last and earnest request to prosecute the war with Scotland, but the English were almost constantly unfortunate; and at length, at Bannockburn (1314), they were defeated by Robert Bruce, which ensured the independence of Scotland. The king soon proved incapable of regulating the lawless conduct of his barons; and his wife, a woman of a bold, intriguing disposition, joined in the confederacy against him, which resulted in his imprisonment and death in 1327.
The reign of Edward III was as brilliant as that of his father had been the reverse. The main projects of the third Edward were directed against France, the crown of which he claimed in 1328 in virtue of his mother, the daughter of King Philip. The victory won by the Black Prince at Crécy (1346), the capture of Calais (1347), and the victory of Poitiers (1356), ultimately led to the Peace of Brétigny in 1360, by which Edward III received all the west of France on condition of renouncing his claim to the French throne. (See Brétigny.) Before the close of his reign, however, these advantages were all lost again, save a few principal towns on the coast.
Edward III was succeeded in 1377 by his grandson Richard II, son of Edward the Black Prince. The people of England now began to show, though in a turbulent manner, that they had acquired just notions of government. In 1380 an unjust and oppressive poll-tax brought their grievances to a head, and 100,000 men, under Wat Tyler, marched towards London (1381). Wat Tyler was killed while conferring with the king, and the prudence and courage of Richard appeased the insurgents. Despite his conduct on this occasion, Richard was deficient in the vigour necessary to curb the lawlessness of the nobles. In 1398 he banished his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke; and on the death of the latter's father, the Duke of Lancaster, unjustly appropriated his cousin's patrimony. To avenge the injustice Bolingbroke landed in England during the king's absence in Ireland, and at the head of 60,000 malcontents compelled Richard to surrender. He was confined in the Tower, and despite the superior claims of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, Henry was appointed king (1399), the first of the House of Lancaster. Richard was, in all probability, murdered early in 1400.
The manner in which the Duke of Lancaster, [248]now Henry IV, acquired the crown rendered his reign extremely turbulent, but the vigour of his administration quelled every insurrection. The most important—that of the Percies of Northumberland, Owen Glendower, and Douglas of Scotland—was crushed by the battle of Shrewsbury (1403). During the reign of Henry IV the clergy of England first began the practice of burning heretics under the Act de haeretico comburendo, passed in the second year of his reign. The Act was chiefly directed against the Lollards, as the followers of Wycliffe now came to be called. Henry died in 1413, leaving his crown to his son, Henry V, who revived the claim of Edward III to the throne of France in 1415, and invaded that country at the head of 30,000 men. The disjointed councils of the French rendered their country an easy prey; the victory of Agincourt was gained in 1415; and after a second campaign a peace was concluded at Troyes in 1420, by which Henry received the hand of Katherine, daughter of Charles VI, was appointed regent of France during the reign of his father-in-law, and declared heir to the throne on his death. The two kings, however, died within a few weeks of each other in 1422, and the infant son of Henry thus became King of England (as Henry VI) and France at the age of nine months.
England, during the reign of Henry VI, was subjected, in the first place, to all the confusion incident to a long minority, and afterwards to all the misery of a civil war. Henry allowed himself to be managed by anyone who had the courage to assume the conduct of his affairs, and the influence of his wife, Margaret of Anjou, a woman of uncommon capacity, was of no advantage either to himself or the realm. In France (1422-53) the English forces lost ground, and were finally expelled by the celebrated Joan of Arc, Calais alone being retained. The rebellion of Jack Cade in 1450 was suppressed, only to be succeeded by more serious trouble. In that year Richard, Duke of York, the father of Edward, afterwards Edward IV, began to advance his pretensions to the throne, which had been so long usurped by the House of Lancaster. His claim was founded on his descent from the third son of Edward III, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, who was his great-great-grandfather on the mother's side, while Henry was the great-grandson on the father's side of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son of Edward III. Richard of York was also grandson on the father's side of Edmund, fifth son of Edward III. The wars which resulted, called the Wars of the Roses, from the fact that a red rose was the badge of the House of Lancaster and a white one that of the House of York, lasted for thirty years, from the first battle of St. Albans, 22nd May, 1455, to the battle of Bosworth, 22nd Aug., 1485. Henry VI was twice driven from the throne (in 1461 and 1471) by Edward of York, whose father had previously been killed in battle in 1460. Edward of York reigned as Edward IV from 1461 till his death in 1483, with a brief interval in 1471; and was succeeded by two other sovereigns of the House of York, first his son Edward V, who reigned for eleven weeks in 1483; and then by his brother Richard III, who reigned from 1483 till 1485, when he was defeated and slain on Bosworth field by Henry Tudor, of the House of Lancaster, who then became Henry VII.
Henry VII was at this time the representative of the House of Lancaster, and in order at once to strengthen his own title, and to put an end to the rivalry between the Houses of York and Lancaster, he married, in 1486, Elizabeth, the sister of Edward V and heiress of the House of York. His reign was disturbed by insurrections attending the impostures of Lambert Simnel (1487), who pretended to be a son of the Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV, and of Perkin Warbeck (1488), who affirmed that he was the Duke of York, younger brother of Edward V; but neither of these attained any magnitude. The king's worst fault was the avarice which led him to employ in schemes of extortion such instruments as Empson and Dudley. His administration throughout did much to increase the royal power and to establish order and prosperity. He died in 1509.
The authority of the English Crown, which had been so much extended by Henry VII, was by his son Henry VIII exerted in a tyrannical and capricious manner. The most important event of the reign was undoubtedly the Reformation; though it had its origin rather in Henry's caprice and in the casual situation of his private affairs than in his conviction of the necessity of a reformation in religion, or in the solidity of reasoning employed by the reformers. Henry had been espoused to Catherine of Spain, who was first married to his elder brother Arthur, a prince who died young. Henry became disgusted with his queen, and enamoured of one of her maids of honour, Anne Boleyn. He had recourse, therefore, to the Pope to dissolve a marriage which had at first been rendered legal only by a dispensation from the Pontiff; but, failing in his desires, he broke away entirely from the Holy See, and in 1534 got himself recognized by Act of Parliament as the head of the English Church. He died in 1547. He was married six times, and left three children, each of whom reigned in turn. These were: Mary, by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon; Elizabeth, by his second wife, Anne Boleyn; and Edward, by his third wife, Jane Seymour. [249]
Edward, who reigned first, with the title of Edward VI, was nine years of age at the time of his succession, and died in 1553, when he was only sixteen. His short reign, or rather the reign of the Earl of Hertford, afterwards Duke of Somerset, who was appointed regent, was distinguished chiefly by the success which attended the measures of the reformers, who acquired great part of the power formerly engrossed by the Catholics. The intrigues of Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, during the reign of Edward, caused Lady Jane Grey to be declared his successor; but her reign, if it could be called such, lasted only a few days. Mary, daughter of Henry VIII, was placed upon the throne, and Lady Jane Grey and her husband were both executed. Mary, a bigoted Catholic, seems to have wished for the crown only for the purpose of re-establishing the Roman Catholic faith. Political motives had induced Philip of Spain to accept of her as a spouse; but she could never prevail on her subjects to allow him any share of power. She died in 1558.
Elizabeth, who succeeded her sister Mary, was attached to the Protestant faith, and found little difficulty in establishing it in England. Having concluded peace with France (1559), Elizabeth set herself to promote the confusion which prevailed in Scotland, to which her cousin Mary had returned from France as queen in 1561. In this she was so far successful that Mary placed herself in her power (1568), and after many years imprisonment was sent to the scaffold (1587). As the most powerful Protestant nation, and as a rival to Spain in the New World, it was natural that England should become involved in difficulties with that country. The dispersion of the Armada by the English fleet under Howard, Drake, and Hawkins was the most brilliant event of a struggle which abounded in minor feats of valour. In Elizabeth's reign London became the centre of the world's trade, the extension of British commercial enterprise being coincident with the ruin of Antwerp in 1585. The Parliament was increased by the creation of sixty-two new boroughs, and its members were exempted from arrest. In literature not less than in politics and in commerce the same full life displayed itself, and England began definitely to assume the characteristics which distinguish her from the other European nations of to-day.
To Elizabeth succeeded (in 1603) James VI of Scotland and I of England, son of Mary Queen of Scots and Darnley. His accession to the crown of England in addition to that of Scotland did much to unite the two nations, though a certain smouldering animosity still lingered. His dissimulation, however, ended in his satisfying neither of the contending ecclesiastical parties—the Puritans or the Catholics; and his absurd insistence on his divine right made his reign a continuous struggle between the prerogative of the Crown and the freedom of the people. His extravagance kept him in constant disputes with the Parliament, who would not grant him the sums he demanded, and compelled him to resort to monopolies, loans, benevolences, and other illegal methods. The nation at large, however, continued to prosper through the whole of his reign. His son Charles I, who succeeded him in 1625, inherited the same exalted ideas of royal prerogative, and his marriage with a Catholic, his arbitrary rule, and illegal methods of raising money provoked bitter hostility. Under the guidance of Laud and Strafford things went from bad to worse. Civil war broke out in 1642 between the king's party and that of the Parliament, and the latter proving victorious, in 1649 the king was beheaded.
A Commonwealth or republican government was now established, in which the most prominent figure was Oliver Cromwell. Mutinies in the army among Fifth-monarchists and Levellers were subdued by Cromwell and Fairfax, and Cromwell, in a series of masterly movements, subjugated Ireland and gained the important victories of Dunbar and Worcester. At sea Blake had destroyed the Royalist fleet under Rupert, and was engaged in an honourable struggle with the Dutch under van Tromp. But within the governing body matters had come to a deadlock. A dissolution was necessary, yet Parliament shrank from dissolving itself, and in the meantime the reform of the law, a settlement with regard to the Church, and other important matters remained untouched. In April, 1653, Cromwell cut the knot by forcibly ejecting the members and putting the keys of the House in his pocket. From this time he was practically head of the Government, which was vested in a council of thirteen. A Parliament—the Little or Barebones Parliament—was summoned, and in the December of the same year Cromwell was installed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland. With more than the power of a king, he succeeded in dominating the confusion at home, and made the country feared throughout the whole of Europe. Cromwell died in 1658, and the brief and feeble protectorate of his son Richard followed.
There was now a widespread feeling that the country would be better under the old form of government, and Charles II, son of Charles I, was called to the throne by the Restoration of 1660. He took complete advantage of the popular reaction from the narrowness and intolerance of Puritanism, and even endeavoured to carry it to the extreme of establishing the Catholic religion. The promises of religious freedom made [250]by him before the Restoration in the Declaration Breda were broken by the Test and Corporation Acts, and by the Act of Uniformity, which drove two thousand clergymen from the Church and created the great dissenting movement of modern times. The Conventicle and Five-mile Acts followed, and the 'Drunken Parliament' restored Episcopacy in Scotland. At one time even civil war seemed again imminent. The abolition of the censorship of the press (1679) and the reaffirmation of the Habeas Corpus principle are the most praiseworthy incidents of the reign.
I recently returned to a university student housing project where I lived as a young boy. This tower was part of the complex. It has ambivalent memories for me. I was always impressed by its size and solidity, but it was also the site of the demise of my beloved scooter. A bully threw it off the second floor terrace into the parking garage three stories below. It was also the place I first encountered the infamous Playgirl centerfold of Burt Reynolds, which a janitor had posted on the wall of his office space in the basement. We wandered in one day when he left the door open.
If there's one place in London that merits an Art Deco Fair, it's Eltham Palace,
with its Art Deco entrance hall, created by the textile magnates the Courtaulds in 1936. The much-loved weekend fair is held twice a year - once in the summer and a second time in September - giving visitors the chance to buy original 1930s objects, from furniture and collectables to hats, handbags and jewellery. Browse the original 1930s objects, from jewellery to furniture while you take in the magnificent Art Deco surroundings of the Palace. Ticket price includes entry to Eltham Palace and gardens and you can see the house by guided tour.
About Eltham Palace
Restored by English Heritage, this fantastic house boasts Britain's finest Art Deco interior and offers visitors the chance to indulge in the opulence of 1930s Britain whilst at the same time experiencing the solidity and symbolism of medieval London. Eltham Palace began to evolve during the 15th century when Edward IV commissioned the Great Hall, which survives today as a testament to the craftsmanship of the period. More about Eltham Palace
Blythe size stand made of painted acrylic resin.
Inspired by 1986 fantasy film "Labyrinth" starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, this stand shows a little corner of the world created by Jim Henson, Terry Jones and Brian Froud. You can clearly see a pair of cheating goblin hands on the point of (or they did it already?!) rotate one of the flagstones over which Sarah has being drawing marks trying not to get lost. I almost hear her crying "It's not fair!" :(
Because of the nature of the material used, it has a nice strong and compact presence and a stone-like solidity.
The pole is removable and it's crossed by a tin wire that can be bent to grab the doll.
The Cathedral of Saint Anthony in Detroit, originally founded in 1857 to serve the city’s burgeoning German Catholic population, began as a modest mission before outgrowing its first structure. In 1901, the distinguished architectural firm of Donaldson & Meier laid the cornerstone of the present Romanesque Revival red-brick edifice, and by October 1902, its twin-jerkinhead towers and rose-windowed façade were complete. The lofty arches and robust masonry embody the solidity and cohesion prized by early 20th-century Catholic communities, while the imported artistry signals international connections and devotion to sacred beauty . Though the parish declined in the mid-2000s and was closed by the archdiocese in 2006, it found new life in 2010 as the seat of the Ecumenical Catholic Church of Christ under Dr. Karl Rodig, preserving both its architectural legacy and its role as a beacon of faith in a changing neighborhood.
The numerous glassy skyscrapers of Vancouver, BC, rise above the lowland plain like a small mountain range. There is a certain kind of beauty to skylines such as this. The huge structures suggests permanence, solidity, the gift of Homo sapiens to modify and perhaps even control the landscape. But is is also difficult to see any level of humility before nature when construction is done on such a massive scale.
Just a few centuries ago, the city of Vancouver did not exist. Modern civiliation—that powered by fossil fuel and electricity—did not exist. And several thousand years before that, a sheet of ice over a thousand meters thick occupied this location. At that distant point in time, it is difficult to find evidence of agriculturally-based civilization anywhere in the world. Looking backward over millions of years, the entire region transforms geolocially: Shorelines move, mountains rise and erode. What do these geological and historical realities suggest about the permanence of today's cities, of western civilization?
The American Radiator Building (since renamed to the American Standard Building) is a landmark skyscraper located at 40 West 40th Street, in midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was conceived by the architects John Howells and Raymond Hood in 1924 and built for the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Company. The structural form is based on Eliel Saarinen's unbuilt competition entry for Chicago Tribune building. The architects combined Gothic and modern styles in the design of the building. Black brick on the frontage of the building (symbolizing coal) was selected to give an idea of solidity and to give the building a solid mass. Other parts of the facade were covered in gold bricks (symbolizing fire), and the entry was decorated with marble and black mirrors. Once again, the talents of Rene Paul Chambellan were employed by Hood and Howells for the ornamentation and sculptures.
In 1998, the building was sold to Philip Pilevsky for $150 million. Three years afterwards, the American Radiator Building was converted into The Bryant Park Hotel with 130 rooms and a theatre in the basement.
The landmark status of the exterior required the conversion pay special attention to the renovation of the facade decor, and prohibited proposed changes such as bigger guestroom windows. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was also the subject of Georgia O'Keeffe in 1927 in her noted painting Radiator Building - Night, New York.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Radiator_Building
The Empire State Building is a 102-story skyscraper located in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet (381 meters), and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft (443.2 m) high.[6] Its name is derived from the nickname for New York, the Empire State. It stood as the world's tallest building for 40 years, from its completion in 1931 until construction of the World Trade Center's North Tower was completed in 1972. Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Empire State Building was again the tallest building in New York (although it was no longer the tallest in the world). The Empire State Building was once again demoted to second tallest building in New York on April 30, 2012, when the new One World Trade Center reached a greater height. The Empire State Building is currently the third tallest completed skyscraper in the United States (after the Willis Tower and Trump International Hotel and Tower, both in Chicago), and the 15th tallest in the world (The tallest now is Burj Khalifa, located in Dubai). It is also the fourth-tallest freestanding structure in the Americas.
The Empire State Building is generally thought of as an American cultural icon. It is designed in the distinctive Art Deco style and has been named as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The building and its street floor interior are designated landmarks of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and confirmed by the New York City Board of Estimate. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1986. In 2007, it was ranked number one on the List of America's Favorite Architecture according to the AIA.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_State_Building
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_...
Ferstel
(Pictures you can see by clicking on the link at the end of page!)
Ferstel and Café Central, by Rudolf von Alt, left the men's alley (Herrengasse - Street of the Lords), right Strauchgasse
Danube mermaid fountain in a courtyard of the Palais Ferstel
Shopping arcade of the Freyung to Herrengasse
Entrance to Ferstel of the Freyung, right the Palais Harrach, left the palace Hardegg
The Ferstel is a building in the first district of Vienna, Inner City, with the addresses Strauchgasse 2-4, 14 Lord Street (Herrengasse) and Freyung 2. It was established as a national bank and stock exchange building, the denomination Palais is unhistoric.
History
In 1855, the entire estate between Freyung, Strauchgasse and Herrengasse was by Franz Xaver Imperial Count von Abensperg and Traun to the k.k. Privileged Austrian National Bank sold. This banking institution was previously domiciled in the Herrengasse 17/ Bankgasse. The progressive industrialization and the with it associated economic expansion also implied a rapid development of monetary transactions and banking, so that the current premises soon no longer have been sufficient. This problem could only be solved by a new building, in which also should be housed a stock exchange hall.
According to the desire of the then Governor of the National Bank, Franz von Pipitz, the new building was supposed to be carried out with strict observance of the economy and avoiding a worthless luxury with solidity and artistic as well as technical completion. The building should offer room for the National Bank, the stock market, a cafe and - a novel idea for Vienna - a bazaar.
The commissioned architect, Heinrich von Ferstel, demonstrated in the coping with the irregular surface area with highest conceivable effective use of space his state-of-the art talent. The practical requirements combine themselves with the actually artistic to a masterful composition. Ferstel has been able to lay out the rooms of the issuing bank, the two trading floors, the passage with the bazar and the coffee house in accordance with their intended purpose and at the same time to maintain a consistent style.
He was an advocate of the "Materialbaues" (material building) as it clearly is reflected in the ashlar building of the banking institution. Base, pillars and stairs were fashioned of Wöllersdorfer stone, façade elements such as balconies, cornices, structurings as well as stone banisters of the hard white stone of Emperor Kaiser quarry (Kaisersteinbruch), while the walls were made of -Sankt Margarethen limestone. The inner rooms have been luxuriously formed, with wood paneling, leather wallpaper, Stuccolustro and rich ornamental painting.
The facade of the corner front Strauchgasse/Herrengasse received twelve sculptures by Hanns Gasser as decoration, they symbolized the peoples of the monarchy. The mighty round arch at the exit Freyung were closed with wrought-iron bare gates, because the first used locksmith could not meet the demands of Ferstel, the work was transferred to a silversmith.
1860 the National Bank and the stock exchange could move into the in 1859 completed construction. The following year was placed in the glass-covered passage the Danube mermaid fountain, whose design stems also of Ferstel. Anton von Fernkorn has created the sculptural decoration with an artistic sensitivity. Above the marble fountain basin rises a column crowned by a bronze statue, the Danube female with flowing hair, holding a fish in its hand. Below are arranged around the column three also in bronze cast figures: merchant, fisherman and shipbuilder, so those professions that have to do with the water. The total cost of the building, the interior included, amounted to the enormous sum of 1.897.600 guilders.
The originally planned use of the building remained only a few years preserved. The Stock Exchange with the premises no longer had sufficient space: in 1872 it moved to a provisional solution, 1877 at Schottenring a new Stock Exchange building opened. The National Bank moved 1925 into a yet 1913 planned, spacious new building.
The building was in Second World War battered gravely particularly on the main facade. In the 1960s was located in the former Stock Exchange a basketball training hall, the entire building appeared neglected.
1971 dealt the President of the Federal Monuments Office, Walter Frodl, with the severely war damaged banking and stock exchange building in Vienna. The Office for Technical Geology of Otto Casensky furnished an opinion on the stone facade. On the facade Freyung 2 a balcony was originally attached over the entire 15.4 m long front of hard Kaiserstein.
(Usage of Leith lime: Dependent from the consistence and structure of the Leitha lime the usage differed from „Reibsand“ till building material. The Leitha lime stone is a natural stone which can be formed easily and was desired als beautiful stone for buildings in Roman times. The usage of lime stone from Eggenburg in the Bronze age already was verified. This special attribute is the reason why the Leitha lime was taken from sculptors and masons.
The source of lime stone in the Leitha Mountains was important for Austria and especially for Vienna from the cultur historical point of view during the Renaissance and Baroque. At the 19th century the up to 150 stone quarries of the Leitha mountains got many orders form the construction work of the Vienna „Ring road“.
At many buildings of Graz, such as the castle at the Grazer castle hill, the old Joanneum and the Cottage, the Leitha lime stone was used.
Due to the fact that Leitha lime is bond on carbonate in the texture, the alteration through the actual sour rain is heavy. www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC2HKZ9_leithagebirge-leithak...)
This balcony was no longer present and only close to the facade were remnants of the tread plates and the supporting brackets recognizable. In July 1975, followed the reconstruction of the balcony and master stonemason Friedrich Opferkuh received the order to restore the old state am Leithagebirge received the order the old state - of Mannersdorfer stone, armoured concrete or artificial stone.
1975-1982, the building was renovated and re-opened the Café Central. Since then, the privately owned building is called Palais Ferstel. In the former stock exchange halls now meetings and presentations take place; the Café Central is utilizing one of the courtyards.