John Ruskin was born on February 8th, 1819 at 54, Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London. Ruskin is now recognised as the pre-eminent English art critic of the Victorian era. His talents and ...interests were diverse and complex. He was also an art patron, draughtsman, water-colourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. His writing was across subjects from geology, architecture, myth, ornithology and literature to education, botany and political economy. As well Ruskin also wrote essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale. Ruskin's earliest writings were initially elaborate but over the course of his long career he gradually moved to a far plainer form which communicated his ideas in a simpler and more effective way. All his writings have a common core of emphasising the connections between nature, art and society. He first came to widespread attention with the first volume of Modern Painters, published in 1843, an extended essay in defence of the work of the painter J. M. W. Turner in which he argued that the principal role of the artist is truth to nature . (He would later on the death of Turner be an executor of his will). From the 1850s he championed the Pre-Raphaelites who were much influenced by his ideas. As his style developed so did his social concerns and increasingly he voiced and wrote about his social and political issues. Unto This Last (1860, 1862) marked the shift in emphasis. In 1869, Ruskin became the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing. In 1871, he began his monthly letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain , published under the title Fors Clavigera (1871-1884). During the publication of this complex and deeply personal work, he developed the principles underlying his ideal society. As a result, he founded the Guild of St George, an organisation that still endures to this day. John Ruskin died on January 20th, 1900 at age 80 at Brantwood in Coniston, Lancashire. Part of his numerous writings concerned his work on Venice in three volumes: The Stones of Venice. He visited Venice in November 1849 with his wife, Effie, and stayed at the water-fronted Hotel Danieli. Their six-year marriage was never consummated and for Effie, Venice provided an opportunity to socialise, while for Ruskin it was a venue to engage in more solitary studies. In particular, he made a point of drawing the Ca' d'Oro and the Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, fearing they would be destroyed by the occupying Austrian troops. Ruskin made extensive sketches and notes for the three-volume work, which soon developed from a technical history of Venetian architecture, from the Romanesque to the Renaissance, into a broad cultural history. Cleverly Ruskin managed to reflect his own view of contemporary England and to weave in a warning about the moral and spiritual health of society. Ruskin argued that Venice had slowly deteriorated. Its cultural achievements had been compromised, and its society corrupted, by the decline of true Christian faith. Instead of revering the divine, Renaissance artists honoured themselves, arrogantly celebrating human sensuousness. It is a work of immense worth both culturally and artistically.
Wie wird durch eine Dynamisierung der Bewegung auch die Imagination in Bewegung versetzt? Wie lässt eine zunehmende Bewegtheit der Bilder vom Panorama über die Drehbühne bis hin zum frühen Film neue, ...teils immersive Vorstellungswelten entstehen?Ausgehend von den pulsierenden Metropolen des 19. Jahrhunderts widmet sich Dorothea Volz aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive der Rezeptionsgeschichte Venedigs. Ihre Studie verbindet Ansätze der historischen Konsum-, Reise- und Tourismusforschung mit Beispielen einer spielerischen Stadtaneignung und -hervorbringung im Spiel.
An original integrated monitoring method is designed to infer an accurate and reliable figure of regional land displacements in coastal areas where the presence of internal waters, wetlands, ...farmlands, urban and industrial centers usually reduces the efficiency of single ground-based and satellite-based measuring techniques. Five different methods, i.e. spirit leveling, Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS), Continuous GPS (CGPS), Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), and Interferometric Point Target Analysis (IPTA), are integrated into a Subsidence Integrated Monitoring System (SIMS) to overcome the limits characterizing each technique. The SIMS has been used over the past decade to provide a new image of the land displacements in the Venice region. The result exhibits a resolution never obtained before. The central lagoon, including the city of Venice, shows a general stability while the northern and southern lagoon extremities and their related catchment sectors sink with serious rates averaging 3 to 5 mm/year. The sinking rates increase up to 10–15 mm/year in the coastland south of the lagoon. Relatively small uplifts (less than 1 mm/year) are observed at the Alpine foothills and in a wide area comprised between the Euganean Hills and the lagoon. The observed land displacements have been associated to the geological features of the study region, i.e. tectonics, seismicity, differential consolidation of the middle–upper Pleistocene and Holocene deposits, and to anthropogenic activities, such as land reclamation and groundwater withdrawal.
Between 1680 and 1710, the motif of the Carnival of Venice flowed into a vast number of French literary and artistic works – comedies, opera-ballets, letters, treatises and travel-books – that ...established it as a model of its type. This sudden emergence into the cultural landscape of early modern France is a consequence of an Italianist trend that this article considers in the light of a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of the notion of Carnival. During the period spanning from the 1660s ballets to the creation of the bal de l’Opéra in 1716, in a time of change in the festive practices of high society, the Venetian Carnival spread into French literature in a way that fostered the travel imaginary that was beginning to supplant the republican myth of Venice.
Emblematic figure of Venice and of its magnificent complexity, Giacomo Casanova, for his flexible and chameleon-like nature, is often presented, in the twentieth-century narrative that is inspired by ...him, as the embodiment of a sort of “Carnival spirit”: a spirit that induces one to seize the moment, to pretend to be someone else, to change objective and semblance, while, however, under a cloak and a mask, a shadow of melancholy, a subtle tedium, an indelible – to put it with Horace – strenua inertia is hatched. The essay aims to illustrate the persistence of this sparkling or dramatic “Carnival core” in the interpretations of the character offered by Stefan Zweig’s Casanova and by the novels The Return of Casanova by Arthur Schnitzler and Casanova in Bolzano by Sándor Márai.
Drawing upon ethnographic moments recorded at two of the most prominent art world institutions, the Venice Biennale and the auction house Christie's at its New York headquarters, this article ...reflects on what it means to investigate the global art world ethnographically and interrogates some of the current trends within the anthropology of art. In particular, the article shows the potential of re-focusing the attention on the interconnectedness of art-world actors, institutions and objects in time and space in order to produce expansive narratives on the art world which reflect not only how art is produced in the present and in the past but also its circulation and commerce. Moreover, by challenging the anthropology of art's focus on the anthropologist-artist dyad, their practice and collaborations, the article shows how a renewed engagement with the art world as an ethnographic field site brings about possibilities for a renewal of anthropology itself.
This book investigates perceptions, modes, and techniques of Venetian rule in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean (1400-1700) between colonial empire, negotiated and pragmatic rule; between soft ...touch and exploitation; in contexts of former and continuous imperial belongings; and with a focus on representations and modes of rule as well as on colonial daily realities and connectivities.
•A social-ecological viewpoint to analyze ecosystem services (ESS) is proposed.•Two types of ESS flow, direct and mediated, are defined.•A time lag can be identified in the generation of some ...ESS.•The viewpoint proposed can contribute to the management of social-ecological systems.
The assessment of ecosystem services (ESS) requires approaches that are capable to deal with the complexity of social-ecological systems (SES). A new viewpoint is proposed, in which the social-ecological perspective of Ostrom’s SES framework is used to describe the flow of ESS, through the identification of the social and ecological elements involved. Two types of ESS flow emerge from this analysis, depending on the way in which the elements of ESS supply (resource system and resource units) and demand (actors) interact: (i) a “direct flow type” in which the resource units deliver the ESS through some specific ecological functions (e.g. wetlands providing carbon sequestration), and (ii) a “mediated flow type” in which the resource units become themselves the ESS when “used” by means of human activities (e.g. fish harvested through fishing activities). The identification of activities is crucial to understand the interactions between ESS, because of the feedbacks they produce on the ecosystem functioning and thus on the provision of the same or other ESS. In addition, these feedbacks can depend on temporal aspects of ESS provision. On these regards, a hypothesis is proposed according to which a time lag can exist between the ESS supply-side and flow in human-modified SES. Altogether, this social-ecological analysis of ESS can contribute to focus the management strategies on the control of impacting activities and on the maintenance of those processes which underpin ESS’ provision, thus contributing to the implementation of an ecosystem-based management of SES. These aspects are discussed in the light of the Venice lagoon example.
This article examines the relationship between the Japanese delegation sent by the Jesuit Valignano and rival courts in Italy, specifically Mantua and Venice, who competed to receive the four ...Christian princes of Japan. This case study underlines in particular the strong link between politics, religion and theatre. The Serenissima integrated the foreign delegation into its rites and ceremonies, going so far as to include its members in a theatrical performance. Mantua, thanks to its network of diplomats, later surpassed Venice with a splendid firework display and an interest in Japanese dietary habits. The letters written at the time testify that the Japanese were impressed, but this meeting was intercultural only by chance, as it served first and foremost the policy of prestige of each of the two courts.
Following the referendum which took place on January 16, 2022, in which most citizens voted in favor of constitutional amendments; the National Assembly proclaimed the Constitutional Amendments on ...February 9. Although not a generally accepted view, there has been emphasis on these amendments as having improved the constitutional framework of the judiciary. Changes include the elimination of the three-year probationary mandate for judges and the election of all judges and court presidents to be under the exclusive jurisdiction of the High Judicial Council. The election process of the members of the High Judicial Council have also been depoliticized. In addition, the constitutional guarantee of the independence of judges have been improved, by securing the permanency of tenure of judicial office, constitutionalizing the basis for the removal of judges and more precise guaranteeing of their irremovability. Despite this, most scholars remain critical or at least evidently reserved with respect to the effects of the implemented constitutional changes. Aside from a deficit in democratic legitimacy in the convocation of the National Assembly who had decided upon the Constitutional Amendments, there is emphasis on the fact that the guarantees of the independence of the judiciary have only been partially improved with the creation of the new, and best described as hidden channels for political influence. Hence, a contextual analysis of the content of these constitutional amendments show that the implemented constitutional reform cannot have positive effects on the advancement of the rule of law in Serbia.
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