The Magic of the Cities.

Zen promotes the rediscovery of the obvious, which is so often lost in its familiarity and simplicity. It sees the miraculous in the common and magic in our everyday surroundings. When we are not rushed, and our minds are unclouded by conceptualizations, a veil will sometimes drop, introducing the viewer to a world unseen since childhood. ~ John Greer

Showing posts with label Musée du Louvre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Musée du Louvre. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

No Expectations


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Images of 2010 - Cuernavaca,  Louvre, Mexico City, New York, Orsay, Paris, Tulum, Washington


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Thanks for visiting, please be sure that I read each and every one of your kind comments, I appreciate them all. Stay tuned.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Diana The Huntress


Diana Fountain. Mexico City

Diana de Versailles. Musée du Louvre
Diana
 (lt. "heavenly" or "divine") was the goddess of the hunt, being associated with wild animals and woodland, and also of the moon in Roman mythology. In literature she was the equal of the Greek goddess Artemis, though in cult beliefs she was Italic, not Greek, in origin. Diana was worshiped in ancient Roman religion and is currently revered in Roman Neopaganism and Stregheria. Diana was known to be the virgin goddess and looked after virgins and women. She was one of the three maiden goddesses, Diana, Minerva and Vesta, who swore never to marry. [Wiki]
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Thanks for visiting, please be sure that I read each and every one of your kind comments and I appreciate them all / Gracias por su visita.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Farewell Paris

Snack
Wrong lens
Artemis with a Doe
Roman Imperial copy (first-second century AD) after a Greek original.
This work was a gift from Pope Paul IV to the French king Henri II, and one of the first ancient statues to arrive in France. The goddess - Diana to the Romans, Artemis to the Greeks -was Apollo's twin sister. The goddess of chastity, and a tireless hunter whose arrows could punish the misdeeds of men, she is depicted here accompanied by a deer. The statue is based on a fourth-century BC Greek bronze attributed to Leochares. 
Gallery
The Sleep of Endymion1791. Anne Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson
Endymion the shepherd, a man of ideal beauty, is being visited at night by the goddess Diana in the form of a moonbeam. Her passage through the foliage is facilitated by Zephyr. In this early work, painted in Rome in 1791, Girodet, a pupil of David, demarcated himself from his master and foreshadowed romanticism. The idealized nude is antique in inspiration but the moonlight and the mysterious, dreamlike atmosphere are hallmarks of an emerging sensibility.

The Intervention of the Sabine Women By Jacques-Louis David. 1799. Oil on canvas
After the abduction of the Sabine women by the neighboring Romans, the Sabines attempted to get them back - David depicts this episode here. The Sabine women are intervening to stop the bloodshed. Hersilia is throwing herself between her husband, the king of Rome, and her father, the king of the Sabines. David is using the subject to advocate the reconciliation of the French people after the Revolution. His increasingly simple style is inspired by Ancient Greece.

Art Class (about Les Noces de Cana by Véronèse - 1562-1563)
 

Inner patio
Alessandro FILIPEPI, known as BOTTICELLIVenus and the Three Graces Presenting Gifts to a Young Woman
c. 1483-85. This fresco is from the Villa Lemmi, a property near Florence that belonged to the Tornabuoni family, allies of the Medici. This decorative work may have been commissioned from Botticelli to mark the marriage of a member of this influential Florentine Dynasty - could the young woman of the title be Nanna di Niccolò Tornabuoni? Escorted by the Three Graces, Venus is shown placing a gift in the cloth container held out to her by the bride-to-be.
Cinq Maitres de la Renaissance Florentine. 1450. By Paolo Uccello
(L to R: Giotto, P. Uccelllo, Donatello, Manetti & Filipo Brunelleschi) 

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, known as LEONARDO DA VINCI (Vinci, 1452−Amboise, 1519)
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus – three generations, two the fruit of immaculate conception – are portrayed in a landscape. The picture was very probably commissioned as an ex-voto to Saint Anne in gratitude for the birth of Louis XII’s daughter, but Leonardo worked too long on the picture to deliver it. The composition is a fine example of his experimentation with figure composition and greatly inspired artists of the following generation.
Leonardo da Vinci. Portrait da Femme, La Belle Ferronniere (1495-99)
Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. Between 1503 and 1506. Leonardo di ser Pietro DA VINCI, known as Leonardo da Vinci.
This portrait was doubtless painted in Florence between 1503 and 1506. It is thought to be of Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo.
We know nothing about the commissioning of the portrait, its painting and payment. One of the first biographies of Leonardo states that it was painted for Francesco del Giocondo and is the portrait of his wife, Mona Lisa, whose maiden name was Gherardini. The birth of their third child in 1502 and the acquisition of a house would have been ideal pretexts for commissioning the portrait. 
 Paradoxically, little of Leonardo da Vinci's prolific and many-faceted output was devoted to painting, the medium he rated above all the others. Four works stand as landmarks in his career and, in a single painting, the Mona Lisa, he combined his research into the landscape, the portrait, and facial expression. 


"Leonardo undertook to paint for Francesco del Giocondo the portrait of Mona Lisa his wife, but having spent four years on it left it unfinished. This work is now the property of King Francis of France in Fontainebleau. In this head, whoever wished to see how closely art could imitate nature, was able to comprehend it with ease; for in it were counterfeited all the minutenesses that with subtlety are able to be painted, seeing that the eyes had that luster and watery sheen which are always seen in life, and around them were all those rosy and pearly tints, as well as the lashes, which cannot be represented without the greatest subtlety. The eyebrows, through his having shown the manner in which the hairs spring from the flesh, here more close and here more scanty, and curve according to the pores of the skin, could not be more natural. The nose, with its beautiful nostrils, rosy and tender, appeared to be alive. The mouth, with its opening, and with its ends united by the red of the lips to the flesh-tints of the face, seemed, in truth, to be not colors but flesh. In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it.

Stoned Lady

Thank you Paris and Parisians for your endless Culture, Art, Beauty and Joie de Vivre (Joy of Living).
I leave a part of my heart here and forever. 

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Vienna, Eisenstadt, Venice, Firenze and Rome series try to continue in Sketches of Cities. 
 (At least once or twice a week)
Gracias por su visita. / Thanks for visiting, please be sure that I read each and every one of your kind comments and I appreciate them all.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

The Dreamers

Musée du Louvre
The Winged Victory of Samothrace C. 190 BC Provenance: Island of Samothrace (northern Aegean)
Grey Lartos marble (boat); Parian marble (statue)
H. 3.28 m
The ancient Greeks had the delightful idea of representing Victory as a young woman with wings, an image given particularly awe-inspring form in the “Winged Victory of Samothrace”.
 

Aphrodite, known as the "Venus de Milo"This graceful statue of a goddess has intrigued and fascinated since its discovery on the island of Melos in 1820. Is it Aphrodite, who was often portrayed half-naked, or the sea goddess Amphitrite, who was venerated on Milo? The statue reflects sculptural research during the late Hellenistic Period: classical in essence, with innovatory features such as the spiral composition, the positioning in space, and the fall of the drapery over the hips.
Hermaphroditos Asleep
The ambivalence and voluptuous curves of this figure of Hermaphroditos, who lies asleep on a mattress sculpted by Bernini, are still a source of fascination today. His body merged with that of the nymph Salmacis, whose advances he had rejected, Hermaphroditos, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, is represented as a bisexed figure. The original that inspired this figure would have dated from the second century BC, reflecting the late Hellenistic taste for the theatrical.
Bacchus
Roman, Imperial.  2nd Century AD
Portrait d'Antinoüs en Osiris
130 ap. .J.-C.
Potrait of man from the time of Emperor Claude
40-44 ap. J.-C.

Sorry,  just a few more of the Louvre and I'll continue with posts from Mexico City, although I have more than 60 days not to touch a camera for lack of time. And thanks a lot for your kind visits.
Vienna, Eisenstadt, Venice, Firenze and Rome series try to continue in Sketches of Cities. 
 (At least one or two a week)
Gracias por su visita. / Thanks for visiting, please be sure that I read each and every one of your kind comments and I appreciate them all.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Hermes

Hermès tying his sandal. Roman II Century BC
















Musée du Louvre
The work of the bronze sculptor Lysippus, a contemporary of Praxiteles and official portraitist to Alexander the Great, focused above all on the male body. A very large number of works are attributed to his workshop.
The image of Hermes tying his sandal while listening to the orders of his father, Zeus, is characteristic of Lysippus's artistic endeavors. It should be remembered, however, that the head, which comes from another copy of the same work, is too small here, and that the incongruous supporting tree trunk under the thigh was added by the Roman copyist when he transposed the bronze original into marble.
Lysippus reworked Polyclitus's canon by lengthening it. The proportions are freer, the head now an eighth of the total height of the body and the muscle structure more slender - except, of course, in the statue of Heracles to your right. The artist sought in addition to situate the figure in a space that was also that of the observer, with a play of light and shade.
















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New York, Washington, Paris, Vienna, Eisenstadt, Venice, Firenze and Rome series try to continue in Sketches of Cities. (At Least Once A Week)
Gracias por su visita. / Thanks for visiting, please be sure that I read each and every one of your kind comments and I appreciate them all.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Bacchante

Bacchante shadow
(a priestess or female votary of Bacchus)









Musée du Louvre
Bacchante ou Ariane 
Rome 2nd Century BC














music+image
New York, Washington, Paris, Vienna, Eisenstadt, Venice, Firenze and Rome series try to continue in Sketches of Cities. 
 (At Least Once A Week)
Gracias por su visita. / Thanks for visiting, please be sure that I read each and every one of your kind comments and I appreciate them all.