Iconoclasm a religious movement of the 8th and 9th C. that denied the holiness of Icons and rejected icon veneration. Clerical opposition to the artistic depiction of sacred personages had its roots in late antiquity. In the 4th C. Eusebios of Caesarea, evidently drawing on the christology of Origen, denied the possibility of artistically delineating Christ’s image. There was also an Iconoclast movement in 7th-C. Armenia . In the early 8th C. several bishops in Asia Minor, notably Constantine of Nakoleia and Thomas of Claudiopolis, condemned the veneration of images, citing traditional biblical prohibitions against idolatry. Their views became a movement when Emp. Leo III began to support their position publicly in 726. His order to remove an icon of Christ from the Chalke gate caused a riot. In 730 Leo summoned a silention that forced Patr. Germanos I to resign and issued an edict commanding the destruction of icons of the saints. Persecutions under Leo appear to have been limited to instances of destroying church decorations, portable icons, and altar furnishings; there is no solid evidence of martyrdom.

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The Medici family had a suite of fourteen villas near Florence, of which the most important were situated in Careggi, Castello, Fiesole, and Poggio a Caiano; in the sixteenth century the family also acquired a villa in Rome.

The Villa Careggi, in what is now a northern suburb of Florence, is the creation of Cosimo de’Medici the Elder, who in 1457 commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolomeo to convert an old manor house that Cosimo’s brother Giovanni de’Bicci had bought in 1417. In rebuilding the fortified manor house as a contemporary villa, Michelozzo chose to leave much of the original exterior intact, but added a graceful double loggia which overlooked a garden. The garden was intended to revive the ancient Roman villa garden, and so was planted with bay, box, cypress, myrtle, pomegranates, quince, lavender, and scented herbs and flowers; the only post-classical plants were carnations from the Levant and orange and lemon trees from North Africa. One of the fountains added to the garden by Lorenzo de’Medici contained Verrocchio’s bronze Boy with a Dolphin (c.1480), which is now in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
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Fêtes and Triumphs, elaborate festivals organized by or for royalty, incorporated many forms of entertainment, including dance. The triumphs, named for the triumphal arches erected for the occasion by townspeople, welcomed the monarch to their city as the royal entourage traveled the realm to assert the monarch’s authority; the festivities were organized at court to demonstrate royal power, some were directed at impressing both rebellious lords and foreign rivals.
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I have  just found one great database where you can find all letters that Van Gogh have written… Hope  you will enjoy it…

http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters.html

Chora Monastery (Turk. Kariye Camii), located in the northwestern region of Constantinople near Edirne Kapi. The early history of Chora (Ξώρα, lit. “dwelling place”) is obscure. A legendary tradition attributes the foundation to the 6th-C. saint Theodore (BHG 1743), supposed uncle of Justinian I’s wife Theodora; a more reliable source identifies the founder as Krispos, son-in-law of the 7th-C. emperor Phokas. In the 9th C. Chora was a center of resistance to Iconoclasm; the iconodule saints Theophanes Graptos and Michael Synkellos were associated with the monastery and buried there. Restored in the 11th C. by Maria Doukaina, mother-in-law of Alexios I, Chora was again renovated in the 12th C. by her grandson, Isaac Komnenos the sebastokrator. Like its predecessor, Isaac’s church was a domed basilica built of recessed-brick masonry on a cross-in-square plan with, however, a larger, single apse. Traces of its mosaic decoration remain in the south window of the nave.

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In the eighteenth century, the pamphlet was ubiquitous in western Europe and in the British colonies of North America. As brief, topical publications, pamphlets ranged in length from a few pages to well over one hundred; their print runs were as low as a few hundred copies or as high as several thousand. Once printed and published, they were sold at modest prices or distributed free (gratis). This favored form of publication offered authors a means of expressing themselves openly, anonymously, and relatively inexpensively. In countries with severe publication restrictions, individuals were able to produce illegal brochures and usually avoided detection or arrest because neither the authors nor the printers were readily identifiable. Even in locales like England, with no overt government censorship, the anonymous pamphlet allowed its author to speak boldly, with little fear of running afoul of the libel laws.

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The topic of the Reformation and art can claim a long history. The Protestant movement had scarcely got under way before observers noted implications for painting and sculpture. The Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer in 1525 uttered warnings concerning the futility of image destruction and the difficulty of reviving the arts once they were lost. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus also alluded to some of these problems. In a 1526 letter of introduction provided for Hans Holbein the Younger to take with him to the Netherlands, Erasmus explained the painter’s departure from Reformation Basel by stating that “here the arts are cold.” The Wittenberg reformer Martin Luther seems to have felt sensitive to accusations of responsibility for causing this frigid atmosphere. He once protested that he was not “of the opinion that the gospel should destroy and blight all the arts.”

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The historical phenomenon that began on 8 June 793 with the sack of Lindisfarne abbey in Northumberland and ended around 1050 left a lasting trace in the memory of the frightened West. The Viking myth of the barbarian brute, standing in horned helmet at the prow of his drakkar, is still vivid today. And yet its causes are known: the Scandinavian pirates attacked rich and defenceless places, abbeys, collegiate churches, cathedrals and so on because they were not numerous enough to form true armies or fleets capable of confronting an enemy face to face. Their chosen victims, the clerics, were also the only ones capable of writing, particularly of writing down the chronicles or annals that are our usual starting-point for grasping the phenomenon. It is they who made the Viking an instrument of Satan or the arm of God come to chastise the West for its sins. Later on, the Viking became the model of the cavalier (18th c.), then of the Nietzschean Uebermensch.

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Experts say the collection of gold and silver pieces, completely reshape our understanding of the Dark Ages. The find containing almost fifteen hundred gold and silver items thought to date from the 7th or 8th century, staggering archeologists with it’s unparalleled in size and may be worth millions. It has been declared treasure by South Staffordshire meaning it belongs to the Crown. A hoard of this historical importance is a national treasure and therefore will be destined to go into a museum for the benefit of the nation.

The hoard was found on farmland using a metal detector by Terry Herbert, as he searched land belonging to a farmer friend over five days in July. The Staffordshire hoard contains about 5kg of gold and 2.5kg of silver, making it far bigger than the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939 when 1.5kg of Anglo-Saxon gold was found near Woodbridge in Suffolk.

Scientist are saying this could alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries, and is seen by some to be the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells.

The Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels are intricately illuminated manuscripts of the four New Testament Gospels dating from the 9th and 8th Centuries. So little is known about the period that the artifacts have already led historians to question some of their fundamental beliefs — such as whether Christianity had been embraced by the pagan Saxons much earlier than previously thought. This is possibly evidences by a war cross potentially found at the site.

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