Home » March, 2010
You are currently browsing entries posted in: March, 2010
”They held in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony:they read, they praised, they compiled. but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action. In the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity [...]
Dragon ladies and water fairies. Fish Maidens, rain mothers and other hybrid critters. Now you see them, now you don’t. These powerful shimmering phenomena of the Chinese imagination reveal themselves but briefly through mist and clouds.Watery nymphs beloved by mortal men have also figured in occidental art and literature. Your Buoyant troops on dimpling ocean [...]
The achievement of the Byzantines was to keep barbarians at bay, create a new art, preserve Western culture for a thousand years, and push a little further the limits of piety and depravity. It is only recently that the word ”Byzantium” has been freed from the contumely attached to it by generations of uncomprehending, humanist [...]
Whether they were the plagues on the Egyptians or whether it related to ensuing gifts on tablets of stone in the sinai desert immortalized in the ten commandments is not entirely clear. Somehow, perhaps through the ”miracle” of compound interest those plagues seemed to expand exponentially to attain over two hundred, or as many as [...]
A razzle-dazzle worth its weight in gold. A bracelet on a pretty Spanish arm once led archaeologists to an ancient trove of gold; a three thousand year old treasure which altered the entire concept of prehistoric civilization in western Europe. The treasure consists of bracelets, bowls and flagons, all of intricately worked pure gold; and [...]
”In Neolithic culture the houses of villages in Anatolia (Catal Huyuk) and other places had neither windows nor doors; the only entrance was through the wide, horizontal roof. The house was entered by a ladder, which was then withdrawn in a defensive action. The Befana arrived in the homes through the chimney, an act that [...]
The Barberini vase or Portland Vase as it became known as, is the most famous cameo-glass vessel from antiquity. it has been studied for centuries by scholars trying to determine its original utilitarian purpose and the perplexing meaning of its idyllic scenes. Yet these events are all part of the extraordinary heritage of the so-called [...]
Genie out of the vase. It is an enigmatic urn. During the artistic rape of Europe in the eighteenth century, the ransack that is now known as the Grand Tour, England was flooded with spoils of her wandering noblemen. Paintings, porcelain and pottery, sculpture, jewelry, and tapestry poured into the country in an ill sorted, [...]
As long as the many war campaigns of the twelfth century were conducted on a reasonably friendly footing they brought no intolerable hardship to the people who dwelled in the shadow of the castles. But early in the thirteenth century the full disasters of war overtook the land of the troubadours, and poets learned to [...]
The troubadour epoch was the twelfth century and they both extolled existing values and created new ones in song and verse. For a lady’s husband to become actively jealous was considered both doltish and dishonorable, a breach of the spirit of courtesy. Yet the record suggests that this was a fairly common occurrence and one [...]
