View allAll Photos Tagged polychrome
Masonic Temple, 401 East Ivinson Avenue, Laramie, Wyoming. Built in the Greek Revival style with classic low pitch roof and front pediment, this building was designed in 1911 by Wilbur A. Hitchcock and constructed by W.H. Holliday and Company. The Greek Revival style, which includes such national icons as the U.S. Capitol Building, had largely fallen out of style by the 1850s throughout most of the rest of the world. The yellow coloration and bright highlights of the building are true to the later years of the movement when mimicry of the Greek polychrome decorative style became popular.
Curioso efecto óptico sobre el horizonte al atardecer. Parece un luminoso arcoiris aplanado.
Foto hecha con el móvil.
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Somewhere on the East coast, USA.
Polychrome processing on Foma Retrobrom overexposed 3 stops :
- SE5 40+40+80 OB+1000
- Siena 30+15+15+1000
No toning.
A flash of color from the glazed roof tiles on Lampa's imposing church of Santiago Apóstol, built in the late 17th century.
What an incredible experience, photos do not do justice to the scale of this beautiful majestic national park. Must visit.
'Seated Apostle' polychrome-glazed terracotta spandrel tondo, Luca della Robbia and workshop, c1443
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casavacanze.poderesantapia.com/engels/firenze/cappellapaz...
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UNESCO World Heritage Site
DSCN4497 Anx2 1024h Q90
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovsk_Palace
Pavlovsk Palace is an 18th-century Russian Imperial residence built by Paul I of Russia in Pavlovsk, near Saint Petersburg. After his death, it became the home of his widow, Maria Feodorovna. The palace and the large English garden surrounding it are now a Russian state museum and public park.
Creation
In 1777 The Empress Catherine II of Russia gave a parcel of a thousand hectares of forest along the winding Slavyanka River, four kilometers from her residence at Tsarskoye Selo, to her son and heir Paul I and his wife Maria Feodorovna, to celebrate the birth of their first son, the future Alexander I of Russia.
At the time the land was given to Paul and Maria Feodorovna, there were two rustic log lodges in the called 'Krik' and 'Krak.' Paul and his wife spent the summers of 1777 to 1780 in Krik, while their new homes and the garden were being built.
They began by building two wooden buildings, one kilometer apart. Paul's house, a two-story house in the Dutch style, with small gardens, was called "Marienthal", or the "Valley of Maria." Maria's house was a small wooden house with a cupola, flower beds, named "Paullust", or "Paul's Joy." Paul and Maria Feodorovna began to create picturesque "ruins", a Chinese kiosk, Chinese bridges and classical temples in the English landscape garden style which had spread rapidly across Europe in the second half of the 18th century.
In 1780, Catherine the Great loaned her official architect, the Scotsman Charles Cameron, to design a palace on a hillside overlooking the Slavyanka River, near the site of Marienthal.
Cameron had studied under English architect Isaac Ware, who was close to the architect of Chiswick House, the villa of Lord Burlington one of the earliest and finest Palladian houses in England. Through this connection Cameron became familiar with the original plans of Palladio, which were in the personal collection of Lord Burlington. This style was the major influence on Cameron when he designed Pavlovsk.
Cameron began his project not with the palace itself but with two classical pavilions. The first was the Temple of Friendship, a circular Dorian temple with sixteen columns supporting a low dome, containing a statute of Catherine the Great. It was placed at a bend of the Slavyanka River, below the future palace, and was surrounded by silver poplars and transplanted Siberian pines. The second was the Apollo Colonnade, a double row of columns with an entablature, forming a setting for a reproduction of a reproduction of the Belvedere Apollo. It was placed at the entrance of the park, and it was made of porous limestone with a coarse finish the surfaces to suggest that they had been aged by centuries of weather. At the same time the Slavyanka River was dammed, to create a lake which would mirror the facade of the palace above.
Maria Feodorovna also insisted in having several rustic structures which recalled the palace where she grew up at Étupes, forty miles from Basel, in what was then the Duchy of Württemberg and today is in Alsace. Cameron constructed a small Swiss chalet with a library; a dairy of rough stones with a thatched roof, where milk products were kept and prepared, and an aviary in the form of a small classical temple with metal netting between the Dorian columns, which was filled with nightingale, goldfinch, starling and quail.
For the palace itself, Cameron conceived a country house which seems to have been based on a design of Palladio shown in a woodcut in his book Quattro libri dell'architectura, for the Villa Tressino at Meledo in Italy. This same drawing was later used by Thomas Jefferson in his design for the University of Virginia. The palace he designed had a cube-shaped central block three stories high with a low dome supported by sixty-four columns. On either side of the building were two single story colonnades of curved open winged galleries connected to service buildings one and a half stories high. Each facade of the palace was decorated with molded friezes and reliefs.
In September 1781, as construction of the Pavlovsk Palace began, Paul and Maria set off on a journey to Austria, Italy, France and Germany. They traveled under the incognito of "The Count and Countess of the North". During their travels they saw the palaces and French gardens of Versailles and Chantilly, which strongly influenced the future appearance of Pavlovsk Park. King Louis XVI presented them with four Gobelins tapestries, Marie Antoinette presented Maria Feodorovna with a sixty-piece toilet set of Sèvres porcelain, and they ordered more sets of porcelain and purchased statues, busts, paintings, furniture and paintings, all for Pavlovsk. While they traveled, they kept in contact almost daily with Kuchelbecker, the supervisor of construction at Pavlovsk, sending back and forth drawings, plans and notes on the smallest details.[6]
Paul and Maria Feodorovna returned in November 1782, and they continued to fill Pavlovsk with art objects. A shipment of antique marbles, statues, busts, urns, and pottery discovered and purchased at Pompei, arrived in 1783. Sixteen sets of furniture, over two hundred pieces, were ordered from Paris between 1783 and 1785 for the State Rooms. In 1784, twelve Hubert Robert landscapes were commissioned for Pavlovsk. The couple purchased ninety-six clocks from Europe. The Imperial Glass factory, made special chandeliers for each room.
In the midst of the construction, and tensions grew between her and Cameron; Cameron was used to the unlimited budget for materials given him by Catherine the Great, while Catherine gave very little money to Paul; and Cameron was annoyed by the furniture, tapestries and fireplaces brought back from Europe by Maria Feodorovna without consulting him. Maria Feodorovna in turn was annoyed by the bright polychrome decoration and Pompeian arabesques used by Cameron, and wanted more delicate colors, and Paul did not like anything that resembled the style of his mother's house, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo.
The tensions led to a parting in 1786. Cameron left to build a new palace for Catherine in the Crimea. He had finished entry vestibule and the five rooms of the private apartments. The work of decorating the interior was taken over by an Italian architect, Vincenzio Brenna, from Florence, who had come to Russia in 1783. Brenna designed interiors which reflected Paul's taste for Roman classicism. He created the white and gold Halls of War and Peace, on either side of the Greek Hall by Cameron, which had a colonnade of green false marble columns, resembling a Greek temple. He made the Italian hall into a replica of a Roman temple, and he built the State Bedroom for Maria Feodorovna as an imitation of the state bedroom of the King of France, with a huge gilded bed, and cream silk wallpaper painted in tempura with colorful flowers, fruit, musical instruments and gardening tools.
Catherine the Great died in 1796, and Paul became Emperor. He decided to enlarge Pavlovsk into a palace suitable for a royal residence, adding two new wings on either side of the main building, and a church attached to the south wing. Between 1797 and 1799, he lavished money and the finest materials on Brenna's interiors.
The reign of Emperor Paul did not last long. He alienated the nobles, and became increasingly fearful of conspiracies. His fears were justified; the Emperor Paul was murdered by members of his court in 1801, and his son Alexander became Emperor. Pavlovsk Palace became the residence of the Empress Maria Feodorovna (1759–1828), the mother of both Emperor Alexander I of Russia and Emperor Nicholas I of Russia. She turned the house into a memorial to her murdered husband, filled with his furniture and portraits, and made the house a showcase for finest 18th century French furnishings, paintings, sculpture and porcelain.
Another disaster struck Pavlovsk in 1803; a fire caused by a defective chimney destroyed a major part of the interior of the palace, including all the decor of the State Apartments and living rooms. Most of the furniture was saved, along with some door panels, fireplaces and mirrors, but most of the Palace had to be rebuilt.
Maria Feodorovna brought Cameron and Brenna's young assistant, the Italian architect Carlo Rossi, to help restore the Palace. She also employed a Russian architect, Andrei Voronykhin, who had been born a serf, and was trained in decoration and design, who rose to become the architect of Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Voronykhin was named chief architect of Pavlovsk by Maria Feodorovna. He brought back the architect Quarenghi, who had redecorated five rooms on the main floor, to recreate his work. He remade some of the rooms, such as the Tapestry Room and the State Bedroom, exactly as they had been, but for other rooms he added decoration inspired by Roman models discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum; Roman-style lamps, furniture, Roman couches, and chairs copied after those of Roman senators. Following the French taste of the time for Egyptian art, he added black Egyptian statues in the entry vestibule of the Palace, He also redesigned the Greek and Italian halls, replacing the molding on the walls with false marble, and he added a Russian touch; fireplaces faced with Russian lapis-lazuli and jasper, which had originally been in the Mikhailovsky Palace that Paul had built in St. Petersburg. Voronykhin also made plans for a semi-circular library in one of the wings, which was later built by Carlo Rossi, and he redesigned the private apartments of Maria Feodorovna on the ground floor, which included a library, boudoir and bedroom. He installed French doors and large windows in the apartment, so the flower garden outside seemed to be part of the interior.[7]
In 1805 Voronykhin built the Centaur bridge in the park, and the Visconti bridge, which crossed the Slavyanka at a point it was filled with water lilies. His last construction in the park was the Rose Pavilion, built in 1811, a simple structure surrounded entirely by rosebushes. The Rose Pavilion was the site of a grand fete on July 12, 1814, celebrating the return of Alexander I to St. Petersburg after the defeat of Napoleon. For the occasion the architect Pietro de Gottardo Gonzaga built a ballroom the size of the Rose Pavilion itself in just seventeen days, and surrounded it with huge canvases of Russian villagers celebrating the victory. The ball inside the pavilion opened with a Polonaise led by Alexander and his mother, and ended with a huge display of fireworks.
In her later years Maria Feodorovna had a literary salon at Pavlovsk, which was frequented by the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, the fable writer Ivan Krylov, and the historian Nikolai Karamzin.
The last great St. Petersburg architect to work at Pavlovsk was Carlo Rossi, who in 1824 designed the library, which contained more than twenty thousand books as well as collections of rare coins and butterflies. He also designed the Corner Salon, where Maria Feodorovna received guests such as the first American Ambassador to Russia, John Quincy Adams, and the Lavender Room, whose walls were made of lilac-colored false marble, matching the lilac flowers outside the windows. These rooms were furnished with furniture made of native Russian woods, including Karelian birch, poplar and walnut.
Maria Feodorovna died on October 24, 1828, fourteen days after her sixty-seventh birthday. She left the house to her younger son, Michael, and specified that none of the furniture should be taken away. After Michael's death, it went to the second son of Nicholas I, Constantine Nikolayevich. It then passed to his widow and then their eldest son, Constantine Constantinovich. Her descendants respected the will, and turned the house into a family museum, just as it was when she died.
After the Russian Revolution
At the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the eldest son of Constantine Constantinovich, Prince Jean, along with his wife Helen, the daughter of the King of Serbia, and the sister of Constantine, Queen Olga of Greece, were living in one of the wings of Pavlovsk. As the political situation deteriorated, they left, and the house was left to the care of Alexander Polovotsoff, director of the Art Institute and the Museum of Applied Arts in St. Petersburg, When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, Polovtsoff went to the Winter Palace, found Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment of the new government, and demanded that Pavlovsk be saved as a museum. Lunacharsky agreed and named him Commissar Curator of Pavlovsk. He returned to the Palace and found that a group of revolutionary sailors had searched the Palace for weapons and taken a few sabers, but otherwise everything was in its place. He hired former soldiers to guard the house, put all the furniture into the main building, made an inventory of all the treasures in the Palace, and successfully resisted demands from various revolutionary committees for dishes, chairs, tables, and all the books from the library. He was able to persuade Lunacharsky himself to come to Pavlovsk, After Lunacharsky's visit, Pavlovsk was officially confiscated, but turned into a museum, open to the public two or three days a week. Having succeeded in saving the Palace, Polovtsoff took family and belongings and slipped across the border to Finland and moved to Paris.
World War II
The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the swiftness of the German advance took the Soviet government by surprise. The morning after the attack, the curators of Pavlovsk, under the direction of museum curator Anatoliy Kuchumov, began to pack as many of art objects as possible, starting with the Sèvres porcelain toilet set given by Louis XVI to Maria Feodorovna and Paul in 1780. Ninety-six hours after the announcement of the beginning of the war, the first thirty-four crates were being carried from the palace by horse-drawn cart. Boards were put over the windows, and sand on the floor of the Palace. The thirty curators often worked by candlelight, and by July there were air raids. The paintings, chandeliers, crystal, porcelain, rare furniture, and works of ivory and amber were packed and sent first. They worked with great care – each piece of furniture had to be carefully dismantled, porcelain vases had to be separated from the bases, and delicate clocks had to have their casing and mechanisms separated and packed separately, with diagrams on how to put them back together. One piece of each set of furniture was saved, and the others left behind. The Roman and Greek antiquities were too heavy and delicate to move, so they were taken to the basements, placed as close together as possible, and then hidden by a brick wall.
By the third week of August thirteen thousand objects, plus all the documentation, had been packed and sent away. Some crates were sent to Gorky, others to Sarapul, and the last group, on August 20, 1941, went to Leningrad, where the crates were stored in the basement of St. Isaac's Cathedral. The last shipment included the chandelier from the Italian Hall and the jasper vases from the Greek Hall. On August 30, the last rail link from Leningrad to Moscow was cut, and the city was under blockade. By August 28 the Germans were fifty kilometers from Pavlovsk. A Soviet division headquarters was located in one wing of the palace,
As the Germans came closer, the park and Palace came under bombardment. The museum staff began to bury the statues which were too heavy to evacuate. They calculated that the Germans would not dig deeper than one meter eighty centimeters, so they buried all the statues as deep as three meters. The statues of the Three Graces were buried three meters beneath the private garden of Maria Feodorovna. Their calculations were correct; the statues were still there after the war. On September 16, the last soldiers left, and the Germans occupied Pavlovsk Palace, which was still occupied by a group of elderly women guardians.
The Germans occupied Pavlovsk palace for two and a half years. Officers were quartered in the salons on the first floor, and the ballroom was made into a garage for cars and motorcycles. Barracks were located in the north wing and a hospital in the south wing. German soldiers, Dutch soldiers and Spanish soldiers in special units of the German army occupied the buildings in the Park. The sculpture and furniture that remained in the house and all the books of the Rossi Library were taken to Germany. The statue of Emperor Paul in the courtyard was used as a telephone pole. Fortunately the Germans did not discover the antiquities hidden behind the brick wall in the basement.
Pavlovsk was liberated on January 24, 1944. When the Soviet troops arrived, the Palace had already been burning for three days. The main building of the Palace was a hollow shell, without a roof or floors. The north wall had fallen. Most of the parquet floors of the palace had been used as firewood; a few pieces were found in unburned portions of the palace near the stoves. Of the over one hundred thousand trees that had been in the park before the War, seventy thousand had been cut down or destroyed by the shelling. All the decorative bridges in the park had been blown up. Eight hundred bunkers had been dug in the park. The Rose Pavilion was gone; the Germans had used the materials to construct a fortified dugout.
Restoration
On February 18, 1944, a meeting was held at the House of Architects in Leningrad to discuss the fate of the ruined Palaces. The academician and architect Aleksei Shchusev, who had designed the Lenin Mausoleum, called for the immediate reconstruction of the Palaces. "If we do not do this", he said, "we who know and remember these palaces in all their glory as they were, then the next generation will never be able to reconstruct them." [11] Even before the war had ended, the Soviet government decided to restore Pavlovsk and the other ruined palaces around Leningrad.
First the mines had to be cleared from the ruins and palace and the park. Then the remaining walls were supported with scaffolding, and casts were made of the remaining molding. Fragments of plaster molding were collected, sorting, and casts made. The color of paint still on the remaining walls was carefully noted for later copying. Photographs and early plans of the palace were brought together to help with the restoration.
As soon as the war ended, a search began for treasures stolen from the Palace. Curators collected pieces of furniture, fabric, the legs of tables and pieces of doors and gilded cornices from the German fortifications around the Palace. In the buildings which had been German headquarters, they found chairs, marble statues and rolled-up paintings from the Palace. They found other furniture and objects as far away as Riga, Tallinn, and in Konigsberg, in Germany.
Some precious objects from Pavlovsk left Russia even before the war. Four Gobelins tapestries from Pavlovsk were sold by the Soviet Government to J. Paul Getty, and are now on display in the Getty Museum in Malibu, California.[12]
The restorers used only the original variants of the architectural decoration; those created by Cameron, Brenna, Voronykhin, and Rossi. The only changes permitted were to use modern materials. Columns made of wood were replaced by poured concrete or bricks, and the ceilings of the Italian and Greek Halls were made of steel and concrete so they would be fireproof.
A special school, the Mukhina Leningrad Higher Artistic Industry School, was created in Leningrad to teach the arts of restoring architectural details, furniture, and art objects. This school produced a corps of restoration experts who worked on all the palaces around Leningrad.
The work was meticulous and difficult, and proceeded very slowly. In 1950, after six years of planting new trees, parts of the Park opened to the public. In 1955, the restoration of the facade of the Palace was completed, and restoration of the interiors began.
Fortunately for the restorers, the original plans by Cameron, Brenna, Voronykhin and Rossi still existed. Also, fragments of the original interior molding, cornices, friezes and the frames for the carvings, bas-reliefs, medallions and paintings still remained, and could be copied. In addition, there were twenty-five hundred photographic negatives taken in the early century by Benois, and another eleven thousand photographs taken just before the war.[12]
The chief of the restoration, Feodor Oleinik, was insistent that all the restoration be faithful to the original work: "Pay attention and do not use later details", he demanded. "Only the original variant, only that done by Cameron, Brenna, Vornykhin, or Rossi." Old techniques of artisans of the 18th century, such as painting false marble and gilding furniture, had to be relearned and applied. A silk workshop was opened in Moscow to recreate the original woven fabrics for wall coverings and upholstery, copying the texture, color and thread counts of the originals. In forty rooms of the Palace, painted decoration on the walls and ceilings had to be precisely recreated in the original colors and designs. A Master painter and six helpers recreated the original trompe l'oeil ceilings and wall paintings.[13]
Once the interior walls and decoration had been exactly recreated, the next step was the furnishings. The twelve thousand pieces of furniture and art objects removed from their original places, from paintings and tapestries to water pitchers and glasses, had to be put back where they belonged. Furniture, doors, and parquet floors of many different colors of wood which had been burned or stolen were remade exactly like the originals. The crystal chandeliers of the 18th century were exactly copied.
In 1957, thirteen years after the Palace had been burned, the first seven rooms were opened to the public. In 1958, four more rooms were opened, and eleven more in 1960. The Egyptian Vestibule was finished in 1963, and the Italian Room opened in 1965. Eleven more rooms were ready by 1967. By 1977, on the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the Palace, fifty rooms were finished, and the Palace looked again as it had in the time of Maria Feodorovna.
The fishtank was refracting the sun (not the rarity you might expact north of Glasgow) onto the sheepskin rug. Cute. Not photoshopped or processed other than crop & frame.
XVIIième Siècle
Eglise de Béthisy-Saint-Pierre
Musée de l'archerie de Crépy-en-Valois
Kr_08-05-19 15-28-51
Hellenistic period, 2nd c. BCE
From Centuripe (see on Pleiades)
In the collection of, and photographed on display at, the Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, California, USA
Museum purchase, Salinger Bequest Fund
Inv. 78.4
*Update to an earlier photo - now with a better camera*
A nuptial banquet takes place on a lavishly decorated and furnished couch (kline) - note the details on the bottom of the legs. The man reclining at the far right raises a wine jug, while the female, seated at the front edge of the couch, once played a lyre (now missing). Two child Erotes join the young couple and all participants are crowned with ivy leaves and wreaths, a Dionysian touch. Exceptional for its three-dimensionality, ornate style and preservation of polychromy, this group visualizes the semantic overlap in Greek thought and art between the bridal and the death kline and the role of lyre music as expression of marital love.
Greek, Hellenistic, ca. 3rd-2nd century BCE.
9 in. (22.9 cm)
Met Museum, New York (2016.253)
The original polychrome marble floor incorporates the outline of the eight-part dome with its design.
Terracotta group depicting the goddess of love Aphrodite and her son, the child Eros. Aphrodite is standing, her left elbow leaning on a pillar to her left, her right hand lying by her side, both hands grasping folds of her himation (cloak) which has been pulled up over her head as a veil. She's wearing a low polos (hat) on her head, and her centrally parted wavy hair falls loose to her shoulders. The diminutive winged Eros is standing with crossed legs on top of the pillar, leaning against his mother's shoulder, naked apart from a low polos (hat). Composed of coarse light brown clay with a white slip coating; pigments include red on the hair of Aphrodite and Eros, rose-madder on Aphrodite's himation, blue on her right shoe and Eros' wings, and yellow on Aphrodite's polos.
Said to be from Tanagra, but suggested as possibly manufactured in Asia Minor on stylistic grounds in Burn, L and Higgins, R Catalogue of Greek Terracottas in the British Museum, Vol. III (2001).
Hellenistic, possibly Boeotian, from Tanagra, but in East Greek style, about 300-100 BCE.
British Museum, London (1982,1002.2)
The former Alexander, Fergusson & Company Glasgow Lead & Colour Works of 1874 sits beside the Forth & Clyde Canal where it is crossed by the new road bridge at Ruchill Street.
please support:
www.indiegogo.com/projects/white-elephant—2/x/5573976
and get a fine art pigment print on archival quality cotton paper as reward
photographer: Simon+Kim
from a nice bear sighting on Polychrome Pass. The bear was digging roots against the road embankment. But as is common this time of year they rarely look up from their primary job of eating. His head was up for at least 2 seconds for this shot.
Near Oropa, Italy.
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Camera: 500c
Lens: Sonnar 250mm f5.6
Film: FP4 @ 100 asa
Dev.: Moersch Tanol
Paper: Fomatone MG
Dev.: Polychrome (Easylith + Sienna)
La villa de Sahagún (León), cuna y panteón de Reyes y Santos, alcanza su máximo esplendor con el Rey de Castilla y León Alfonso VI, que decidió ser enterrado en Sahagún en el siglo XII.
La iglesia de San Lorenzo en Sahagún (León) – Spain; es una iglesia totalmente construida en ladrillo y conserva estilos mezclados, como el románico-mudéjar, gótico e islámico.
Este edificio consta de tres naves, tres ábsides, además de torre, arcos apuntados en su interior y techos originalmente de madera, en las paredes podemos contemplar restos de yesería policromada con esbelta decoración.
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The town of Sahagún (León), cradle and pantheon of Kings and Saints, reaches its maximum splendor with the King of Castile and Leon Alfonso VI, who decided to be buried in Sahagún in the 12th century.
The church of San Lorenzo in Sahagún (León) - Spain; itt is a church entirely built in brick and retains mixed styles, such as Romanesque-Mudejar, Gothic and Islamic.
This building consists of three naves, three apses, as well as a tower, pointed arches inside and originally wood ceilings, on the walls we can see remains of polychrome plasterwork with slender decoration.
Scanned Polychrome IR Lith print.
Rolleiflex T w/ Tessar 75 mm/f3.5 + Rollei original IR filter.
Rollei IR 400 in Rodinal 1+100, semistand 1 h.
Lith printed on Orwo BS 118 FB and developed in:
1. Moersch Easy Lith (25A+25B+650H2O @ 30°C).
Toned in Se 1+9, 20-30 sec.
A bromide paper, not as colourful as a chloride/chlorobromide ones when lith printed.
Polychrome bowl signed by Ethel Youvella, a Hopi Tewa from Polacca, Arizona (a village on the Hopi First Mesa). The Hopi Tewa are descended from the Tewa speaking Pueblo peoples along the banks of the Rio Grande river near Santa Fe, New Mexico, who fled the area during the second Pueblo revolt in 1696. For 2016: One photo each day (142/366)
** New image with a better camera **
Painted terracotta cinerary urn with a figure of a young man reclining on the lid and a molded panel on the chest. He wears a white tunic (chiton) with a purple stripe, a mantle with a purple border, and a gold finger-ring, and holds a yellow libation bowl (phiale) meant to look like gold. Oddly, the name of a woman, Thana Ancarui Thelesa, is painted on the chest of the urn above a scene of five embattled warriors. As a result, we’ll never know the young man’s name. Were the lid and urn mixed up in antiquity or in the modern age? If in antiquity, would it have been an accident or intentional - if the latter, why?
Etruscan, ca. 150-100 BCE, Chiusi, Italy.
British Museum (1926,0324.124, Terracotta D 795)
Everyone goes to Denali NP to see Denali, but for my money I think Polychrome Pass-Plains of Murie is the prettiest area of the park.
Painted terracotta statuette of the goddess Artemis seated on a throne. She holds a phiale (offering dish) in her outstretched right hand, and a fawn cradled in her left arm. Quite a few of the pigments remain, with yellow on the phiale, the palmettes at the top of the throne, and on the crown; red is used for her hair and her footstool; blue can be seen on the throne.
Greek, made in Boeotia about 350 BCE.
Height: 20 cm (7.87 in.)
British Museum, London (1879,0306.1)
UPDATE to an earlier photo, this one using a new camera.
Terracotta group of two female figures sitting on a couch with elaborately turned legs, thick cushions, and draped with brightly painted textiles. They lean towards one another as if to share a secret, and the older woman on the right, with her himation pulled over her head, places a hand over her bared breast. The younger woman on the left raises her right hand over her breast under her own himation, mirroring her companion; on her left hand, we can see a large ring with a circular bezel. Each woman wears thick-soled sandals, and the older woman's sole is painted dark red.
We see remains of the white slip - the base coat over which pigments would have been applied - as well as the bright remains of blue on the couch's drapery, and vibrant rose madder pigment on the younger woman's himation (cloak) and the cushions of the couch, red on the sole of the older woman's sandal and the younger woman's chiton (tunic), and a pale pink on the flesh of both women.
NOTE: There's a visible thumbprint from the potter on the bare clay knee of the older woman, probably from it being carried to the oven while freshly molded. One of two that I had spotted a few years ago via high res photography and reported to the museum, now part of the item's record.
The interpretation of this scene is varied, but it's most often thought to be a tender moment between Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Perhaps as Persephone emerges from the darkness of Hades, or right before she must return.
Hellenistic, circa 100 BCE. Made in Myrina (Turkey), Asia Minor, where it was said to be found. Terracotta with pigments.
British Museum (1885,0316.1)