Architecture of the italian enlightenment, 1750–1800- part 3
Fernando Fuga and the Albergo dei Poveri While Vanvitelli developed the worldly Caserta, to Ferdinando Fuga fell a more mundane but no less instrumental element of Bourbon rule: the Albergo dei Poveri in Naples. Born a Florentine, Fuga came to Rome to study at the Accademia di San Luca. He had proposed a project for [...]
Marie-Antoinette’s Portraitist- VIGÉE LE BRUN
VIGÉE LE BRUN painted her first portrait of Marie-Antoinette in 1778, Marie-Antoinette “en robe à paniers”. This is a full-length, formal representation of the queen in court regalia, wearing a splendidly decorated white satin hoopskirt. While the portrait brilliantly demonstrates Vigée Le Brun’s virtuosity as a court painter, it reveals little of its subject. But [...]
Hagia Sophia in Constantinople- short introduction
The first church on the site, of basilical form, was built near the Milion, that is, in the neighborhood of the Great Palace and Hippodrome, by Constantius II (not Constantine as often stated) and inaugurated in 360. It was known as the Great Church (Megale Ekklesia)—the name Hagia Sophia is first attested ca.430—and had the [...]
Egyptian temples
Egyptian temples existed from the middle of the fourth millennium bce at the latest. According to tradition, the earliest were in the shape of reed huts. The last Egyptian temple built was a complex of buildings on Philae which ceased to be used in the mid-sixth century ce. After this, the existing structures were used [...]
Academies during the renaissance
The learned societies of Renaissance Europe adopted the term ‘academy’ in imitation of the Academy established by Plato, whose school was named after Academus, the mythical hero who was sacred to the grove on the outskirts of Athens where Plato taught. The first Renaissance academies were established in Florence and Naples.
Architecture of the italian enlightenment, 1750–1800- part 2
Nicola Salvi and the Trevi Fountain Alongside serious official architectural works on major ecclesiastical sites, eighteenth-century Rome also sustained a flourishing activity in more lighthearted but no less meaningful works.The Trevi Fountain ranks perhaps as the most joyous site in Rome. Built from 1732 to 1762 under the patronage of popes Clement XII, Benedict XIV, [...]
Architecture of the Italian enlightenment, 1750–1800- part 1
The pantheon revisited The Pantheon is one of the most celebrated and most carefully studied buildings of Western architecture. In the modern age, as it had been in the Renaissance, the Pantheon is a crucible of critical thinking. Preservation of the Pantheon had been undertaken in the seventeenth century and continued in the eighteenth during [...]
Roman city Pompeii-PUBLIC BUILDING AND URBAN IDENTITY- part 1
The public buildings in a Roman city were the most prominent features that would have been noted by a visitor to the city. For example, when Pausanias described Panopeus, he did not wish to describe the settlement as a polls, because it lacked public buildings. Therefore, public buildings were considered to be important: more than [...]
Portraits of rulers
To the ruling elite, portraiture has always had an important function. These individuals were fallible human beings with bodies that aged and died like any others. But they also held highly visible public roles, and, according to ancient ideas of rule, the physical body of the ruler was symbolically overwhelmed by the powerful nature of [...]
The Material of Roman Portraits- Gold, gilding, silver and ivory
The brilliance of gold, its intrinsic value and connotations of immortality, made gold, and to a certain extent silver a treasured material for portraiture. Literary sources inform us that different emperors rejected the erection of their images in gold because it implied divine honours. In his Res Gestae Augustus records that he had 80 statues [...]
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