A major account of Renaissance portraiture by one of the
twentieth century's most eminent art historians In this
book, John Pope-Hennessy provides an unprecedented look at two
centuries of experiment ...in portraiture during the Renaissance.
Pope-Hennessy shows how the Renaissance cult of individuality
brought with it a demand that the features of the individual be
perpetuated, a concept first manifested in the portraits that fill
the great Florentine fresco cycles and led, later in the fifteenth
century, to the creation of the independent portrait by such
artists as Sandro Botticelli, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Giovanni
Bellini, and Antonello da Messina. Pope-Hennessy goes on to
describe the process by which Titian and the great artists of the
High Renaissance transformed the portrait from a record of
appearance into an analysis of character.
Zewnętrzny narteks monastyru św. Jana Teologa na Patmos został ozdobiony różnymi freskami z Pisma Świętego i tradycji prawosławnej. Wśród nich znajduje się 10 fresków ukazujących życie Jana zgodnie z ...tekstem Dzieje Jana pióra Prochora. Freski powstały w XVIII w. Artykuł opisuje trzy freski ukazujące pobyt Jana na wyspie. Podkreślono ich zgodność ze sposobem ilustrowania stosowanym w kościele prawosławnym. Zwrócono uwagę na oddziaływanie tekstu apokryfu jako swoistego źródła do ich powstania. Główną ideą, którą mają ukazywać, jest zaznaczenie ciągłości obecności chrześcijaństwa na wyspie poprzez monastyr i szczególne, wybrane sposoby życia na wzór św. Jana poprzez życie mnisze. Mają być one również zachętą dla mnichów, że warto iść drogą powołania monastycznego.
In the Late Bronze Age, in Second Millennium B. C., very important civilizations had flourished in the Aegean Islands and shores, such as the one of Akrotiri, Thera, of the Minoan Crete and of the ...Mycenean Boeotia. One of the main characteristics of these civilizations was the widespread Art of Wall Painting. In the present work, the method of drawing of a number of celebrated wall-paintings belonging to the three (3) aforementioned civilizations is studied. The authors have demonstrated that the entire set of the borderlines of all figures appearing in the studied frescoes, have been drawn by six (6) geometric stencils-guides, namely four (4) hyperbolae and two (2) Archimedes (linear) spirals, the conception and construction of which was impressively and extraordinarily advanced for the specific era. The conception and construction of these mathematical curves was, so far, believed that it took place at least one thousand four hundred (1400) years later by “giants of thought, Geometry and Mathematics” in the Classical Era.
This paper presents the latest data obtained from the analyses of fragments of Russian-Byzantine wall paintings recovered from the architectural excavations carried out in the church of St. George in ...the Yuriev Princely Monastery built in 1119 at Veliky Novgorod, one of the oldest cities in Russia and UNESCO World site. In the last 7 years the archaeologists of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow excavated the 12th century layers and extracted a large number of wall-paintings fragments, which are extremely important for the reconstruction of the history of Novgorod and for the study of Russian-Byzantine art in general. The pigments employed for the paintings and the painting techniques, together with color layers, substrates and mortars, have been studied and analyzed in the last two years in the Laboratory of the Architectural Archaeology and Multidisciplinary Methods for Architectural Research, Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The employed analytical methods were optical microscopy (OM), X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF) and Scanning Electron Microscope with Energy Dispersive Spectrometry (SEM-EDS). OM permits to distinguish the superficial painting method, the inclusions in the mortars, the intonaco and intonachino layers and the various substrates. XRF was applied for a first screening of the fragments and for the first pigment identification. The samples of painted mortar were then mounted in epoxy resin and polished for the analysis with SEM-EDS. The analytical data we possessed up to now indicate a very classical Byzantine technique with the use of expensive pigments such as lazurite and cinnabar, but also green earth, various types of ochres and mixtures of pigments. Special care was taken for the identification of the substrates.
The paper presents a concept of color trajectories as used to characterize fresco pigments and their color changes with increasing temperature. Color trajectories have shapes characteristic of ...certain colors or individual pigments. For 15 pigments, the minimum temperatures at which changes in their color coordinates become significant are determined. For several samples, heating can significantly change the color coordinates, but the integral color changes can be insignificant. The integral effect under heating of most samples to 740 °C is that the a* and b* color coordinates tend to zero and the lightness decreases. The exceptions are volkonskoite, the color of which becomes brighter after heating, and red lead, the lightness of which becomes greater due to the transformation of orange into light yellow. The results of this work can be used to construct an evolutionary line of real images under an increase in temperature.
•Frescoes with different pigments have different minimum temperatures of color changes.•Temperature increase of some samples first leads to color changes, then almost original color is restored.•Integral color changes under heating from room temperature to 740 °C are characterized by the tendency of the a* and b* color coordinates to zero and a decrease in the L* coordinate.•For most samples with different pigments and close original colors, the color trajectories projected onto the (a*b*) plane are qualitatively similar.•At 740 °C the color of red lead (minium) becomes almost indistinguishable from the color of light ocher under normal conditions.
This contribution aims to analyse a cycle of frescoes at villa Spinola di San Pietro in Genoa. The paintings are attributed to some of the greatest artists who worked in the city in the 1620s and ...show a continuity of compositional, stylistic and thematic features that were typical of the sixteenth century. This article will also show the importance of Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara’s vernacular translation of the Metamorphoses by Ovid to the iconographic programme of the cycle.
This paper presents the first analytical data obtained from the examination of fragments of stunning Russian–Byzantine frescoes recovered from an archaeological excavation at Veliky Novgorod, one of ...the oldest cities in Russia and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The archaeologists of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have been working on architectural excavations at Novgorod for more than 20 years. In the last seven years, they have unearthed fragments of frescoes in the layers of the twelfth century AD during excavation under the floor of the Cathedral of St. George in the Yuriev Princely Monastery (built in 1119).
As a first step of this complex research, we decided to concentrate on blue and green pigments. A selection of 30 samples and around 30 parts of wall paintings still in situ, subdivided by technique and color nuance, were first autoptically examined and, where possible, studied by optical microscopy. In this way typical details, such as the use of additives to the mortars, different ways of treating and mixing the colors, and pigment layers, were recognized. For the first screening, the analytical data were collected using a portable X-ray fluorescence device. They indicated the use of a variety of pigments and mixtures to obtain different nuances of color. The samples were then analyzed by scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometry. All phases of the study were recorded and documented by photos and micrographs of the most significant details. The data are discussed in the text and help explain the working habits of the painters of the time.
Saffron crocus (
) is a male-sterile, triploid flower crop, and source of the spice and colorant saffron. For over three millennia, it was cultivated across the Mediterranean, including ancient ...Greece, Persia, and other cultures, later spreading all over the world. Despite saffron crocus' early omnipresence, its origin has been the matter of a century-old debate, in terms of area and time as well as parental species contribution. While remnants of the ancient arts, crafts, and texts still provide hints on its origin, modern genetics has the potential to efficiently follow these leads, thus shedding light on new possible lines of descent. In this review, we follow ancient arts and recent genetics to trace the evolutionary origin of saffron crocus. We focus on the place and time of saffron domestication and cultivation, and address its presumed autopolyploid origin involving cytotypes of wild
. Both ancient arts from Greece, Iran, and Mesopotamia as well as recent cytogenetic and comparative next-generation sequencing approaches point to saffron's emergence and domestication in ancient Greece, showing how both disciplines converge in tracing its origin.
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