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| Street Sweeper at Chapultepec Park |
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Shades of Grey
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Heroes
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| Heroes of the past crying for the present. |
El Ángel de la Independencia ("The Angel of Independence"), most commonly known by the shortened name El Ángel and officially known as Columna de la Independencia, is a victory column located on a roundabout over Paseo de la Reforma in downtownMexico City.
El Ángel was built to commemorate the centennial of the beginning of Mexico's War of Independence, celebrated in 1910. In later years it was made into a mausoleum for the most important heroes of that war. It is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Mexico City, and it has become a focal point for both celebration or protest. It bears a resemblance to the July Column in Paris and the Victory Column in Berlin.
Construction of El Ángel was ordered in 1902 by President Porfirio Díaz. Architect Antonio Rivas Mercado was in charge of the design of the monument, while the actual construction was supervised by Mexican engineers Gonzalo Garita and Manuel Gorozpe. All the sculptures were made byItalian artist Enrique Alciati. The monument was ready for the festivities to commemorate the first hundred years of Mexican Independence in 1910. The opening ceremony was attended by President Díaz and several foreign dignitaries. The main speaker at the event was Mexican poet Salvador Díaz Mirón.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Helix
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| Effigy of a winged woman standing and holding in her left hand a small bouquet of flowers and in her right a propeller, the Anahuac Helix, invented by Juan Guillermo Villasana. Citadel Square. Historic Center Mexico City. |
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Silence Valley
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| Silence Valley (near Mexico City) |
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in a sprightly dance
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed-and gazed-but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought;
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Farewell Paris
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| Snack |
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| Wrong lens |
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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. |
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| Gallery |
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The Sleep of Endymion. 1791. 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. |
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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. |
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| Art Class (about Les Noces de Cana by Véronèse - 1562-1563) |
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| Inner patio |
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Alessandro FILIPEPI, known as BOTTICELLI. Venus 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. |
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| Cinq Maitres de la Renaissance Florentine. 1450. By Paolo Uccello (L to R: Giotto, P. Uccelllo, Donatello, Manetti & Filipo Brunelleschi) |
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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. |
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| Leonardo da Vinci. Portrait da Femme, La Belle Ferronniere (1495-99) |
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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. |
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| 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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