Art and Architetucre

British Art and Architecture

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

All of the museums in London are free to enter, and the National Gallery is one among many worth spending some time in. (Another favorite of mine is the Natural History Museum.) Recently the museum put several forgeries on display (“National Gallery to reveal its fakes in exhibition”) that included works attributed to Hans [...]

Italian Art and Architecture

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

You’ll recognize the fresco below from T-12, but little can prepare you for the sight of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment itself at the Vatican. You might take the virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel to give you some perspective. (Be sure to pan up to see the ceiling, too, where you might be able to [...]

Souvenirs

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

I came across a neat slideshow at TIME.com with photos of one of the biggest museums in the world, one Team AZ will be seeing in 2009:  “The Louvre: France’s Iconic Museum”. If you have some knowledge of art history, you’ll know that the Louvre houses one the world’s most famous paintings, La Giaconda, [...]

The Sistine Chapel

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

People enjoy mysteries and codes and secrets. Witness the mania in delving behind the esoteric veils of such institutions of the Vatican, Opus Dei, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, et cetera, engendered by Dan Brown’s entertaining (but wildly inaccurate) novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. Witness too the millenarian zeal to find contemporary [...]

In Living Color

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Although we’re used to seeing it in its history-stained, marbled whiteness, we’ve known for some time that ancient Greek architecture such as the Parthenon was painted in bright, some might say garish colors. Here’s more on color in classical art from the Harvard Gazette: “Scholars give us antiquity–the colorized version”. And if you happen [...]