To define Gothic art is a complex undertaking, so diverse is the geographical and chronological reality that it covers, from the mid 12th c. to the Renaissance. It was precisely at the Renaissance that the term appeared, to express the disdain felt in those times for forms considered as barbarous as the Goths to whom their imaginary paternity was attributed.
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So called in the 19th c. by analogy with the Romance language (in French, both roman), Romanesque art lasted for about two centuries, from the year 1000 to the end of the 12th c., reaching its apogee around the turn of the 1100s. Its advent was rooted in favourable economic, social, demographic and political conditions, in particular the stabilization of the Normans, the christianization of the Hungarians, peace restored in England, the consolidation of the Capetian and Ottonian dynasties, the rise of the feudal system and the adventure of the crusades. The rise of monasticism, which made itself felt in the power of Cluny, and the spirituality of pilgrimages to the relics of Christ and the saints, ensured the investment of wealth in liturgical objects, the circulation of techniques, messages and men and the creation of specific architectural forms. Patronage, often dependent on reigning dynasties and great prelates in Carolingian and Ottonian art, diversified and hence multiplied.
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Titian or (Italian) Tiziano Vecellio (c.1489–1576), Italian painter, born in Pieve di Cadore (Veneto); he trained in the Venetian studio of Giovanni Bellini and subsequently worked on the external decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi as an assistant to Giorgione, whose style he emulated so exactly that some paintings (e.g. Concert champêtre, Louvre) could be by either artist.
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Brunelleschi, Filippo, or Filippo di Ser Brunellesco (1377–1446), Italian architect and engineer, born in Florence, the son of a notary. He trained as a goldsmith and sculptor, and in 1401 he entered the competition for the bronze baptistery doors, which Ghiberti won. Brunelleschi came to architecture as a builder and construction engineer with an acute sense of practical issues and of the mathematics of natural optics; he was less interested than his successors (e.g. Alberti) in the revival of ancient Roman architecture. In or shortly before 1413, Brunelleschi invented a method of giving a naturalistic impression of depth in flat pictures and made two paintings of city views (the first showed the baptistery and the second the Palazzo Vecchio) to demonstrate how well the method worked; it is not known what the method was. See perspective.
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Abu Simbel, site south of Aswan, on the western bank of the Nile River in what was Nubia (now near Egypt’s border with Sudan). It has two rock-cut temples from the nineteenth dynasty reign of Ramesses II. First noted in European literature by Johann Burckhardt in 1819, Abu Simbel has since become one of the most famous of monuments in the Nile Valley. Following the decision to build a new High Dam at Aswan in the early 1960s, the temples were dismantled and relocated in 1968 on the desert plateau 64 meters (about 200 feet) above and 180 meters (600 feet) west of their original site.
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During Winckelmann’s time in Rome another sculpture came to rival
—or even to surpass—the Laocoön in his esteem; indeed, he frequently
mentions the Apollo Belvedere alongside the Laocoön as contrasting
but equally compelling examples of beauty. While the Laocoön has
retained its high reputation, the Apollo has fallen from favour. In The
Nude (1956), one of the most widely read books on art of the twentieth
century, the art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–83) confessed himself
mystified that so learned a connoisseur as Winckelmann could admire
the Apollo, which for Clark displayed ‘weak structure and slack surfaces
which, to the aesthetic of pure sensibility, annul its other qualities’; in
no other famous work, Clark thought, ‘are idea and execution more
distressingly divorced’.
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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 the Lateran facade as early as 1722 and participated in the
Trevi competition as well. His fortunes brightened when the
Florentine pope Clement XII made him architect of the papal
palaces.
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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 it was eminently in keeping with a
tradition of formal portraiture of the spouse of a monarch. The portrait
was executed for the queen’s brother, Emperor Joseph II, and Marie-
Antoinette was so pleased with it that she ordered two copies: one for
Catherine II, Empress of all Russias, and the other for her own apartments
at Versailles.
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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 episcopal palace attached to its south side. Burned down by the supporters of John Chrysostom in 404, it was rebuilt, once again as a basilica, by Theodosios II and completed in 415. The only extant part of the Theodosian basilica is a colonnaded porch, probably the façade of the atrium rather than of the church itself .
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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 as residences, vandalized or destroyed as pagan reminders, or exploited as quarries. However, the razing of temples for the last reason was already common in pharaonic times—to make room for a new building, to remodel a temple facility, or merely to reuse the materials on another site. Thus, out of the thousands of temples that once existed, only a fraction have been preserved for us.
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