Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise
Jacob and Esau
Dante Symphony
Giotto’s bell tower
Baptistry of San Giovanni ceiling
At Jesus’ right hand, the righteous received the reward of everlasting life.
On His left hand, however, the sinful were stoned, roasted on spikes, and eaten by all manner of creatures.Overseeing the torture was a colossal mosaic of Satan portrayed as an infernal, man-eating beast
Slithering from the ears of Satan were two massive, writhing snakes, also in the process of consuming sinners, giving the impression that Satan had three heads, exactly as Dante described him in the final canto of his Inferno. Langdon searched his memory and recalled fragments of Dante’s imagery.
On his head he had three faces … his three chins gushing a bloody froth … his three mouths used as grinders … gnashing sinners three at once.
That Satan’s evil was threefold, Langdon knew, was fraught with symbolic meaning: it placed him in perfect balance with the threefold glory of the Holy Trinity
Tomb of Antipope John XXIII
Baptistry of San Giovanni floor and baptismal font
Domenico Di Michelino's Dante
...pointed to the star-filled sky that arched above Dante’s head. “As you see, the heavens are constructed in a series of nine concentric spheres around the earth. This nine-tiered structure of paradise is intended to reflect and balance the nine rings of the underworld. As you’ve probably noticed, the number nine is a recurring theme for Dante.”
On the horizon, behind Dante, a single cone-shaped mountain rising into the heavens. Spiraling up the mountain, a pathway circled the cone repeatedly—nine times—ascending in ever-tightening terraces toward the top. Along the pathway, naked figures trudged upward in misery, enduring various penances on the way.
A winged angel sits on a throne at the foot of the Mount of Purgatory. At the angel’s feet, a line of penitent sinners awaited admittance to the upward path.
There the angel writes seven P's This P signifies peccatum—the Latin word for ‘sin.’ And the fact that it is written seven times is symbolic of the Septem Peccata Mortalia, also known as The Seven Deadly Sins. And so, only by ascending through each level of purgatory can you atone for your sins. With each new level that you ascend, an angel cleanses one of the Ps from your forehead until you reach the top, arriving with your brow cleansed of the seven Ps.
Santa Maria Novella train station.
Grand Hotel Baglioni
\
Botticelli Springtime
Vatican Biblioteca Apostolica
Caduceus Rod of Asclepius More on at this blog post
Doge’s Palace
St. Mark’s Basilica
Venice’s Santa Lucia Train Station
Venice’s Santa Lucia Train Station is an elegant, low-slung structure made of gray stone and concrete. It was designed in a modern, minimalist style, with a facade that is gracefully devoid of all signage except for one symbol—the winged letters FS—the icon of the state railway system, the Ferrovie dello Stato.
Because the station is located at the westernmost end of the Grand Canal, passengers arriving in Venice need take only a single step out of the station to find themselves fully immersed in the distinctive sights, smells, and sounds of Venice.
San Simeone Piccolo
The church was one of the most architecturally eclectic in all of Europe. Its unusually steep dome and circular sanctuary were Byzantine in style, while its columned marble pronaos was clearly modeled on the classical Greek entryway to Rome’s Pantheon. The main entrance was topped by a spectacular pediment of intricate marble relief portraying a host of martyred saints.
Grand Canal Venice
Ponte degli Scalzi
Within seconds, Maurizio had pulled away from the congestion at Santa Lucia Station and was skimming eastward along the Grand Canal. As they accelerated beneath the graceful expanse of the Ponte degli Scalzi, Langdon smelled the distinctively sweet aroma of the local delicacy seppie al nero—squid in its own ink—which was wafting out of the canopied restaurants along the bank nearby. As they rounded a bend in the canal, the massive, domed Church of San Geremia came into view.
Church of San Geremia
Saint Lucia is buried there
While there were numerous versions of the Saint Lucia tale, they all involved Lucia cutting out her lust-inducing eyes and placing them on a platter for her ardent suitor and defiantly declaring: “Here hast thou, what thou so much desired … and, for the rest, I beseech thee, leave me now in peace!” Eerily, it had been Holy Scripture that had inspired Lucia’s self-mutilation, forever linking her to Christ’s famous admonition “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.”
Allegedly, when the beautiful Lucia refused the advances of an influential suitor, the man denounced her and had her burned at the stake, where, according to legend, her body refused to burn. Because her flesh had been resistant to fire, her relics were believed to have special powers, and whoever possessed them would enjoy an unusually long life.
CASINÒ DI VENEZIA: AN INFINITE EMOTION
While Langdon had never quite understood the words on the casino’s banner, the spectacular Renaissance-style palace had been part of the Venetian landscape since the sixteenth century. Once a private mansion, it was now a black-tie gaming hall that was famous for being the site at which, in 1883, composer Richard Wagner had collapsed dead of a heart attack shortly after composing his opera Parsifal.
CA’ PESARO: GALLERIA INTERNAZIONALE D’ARTE MODERNA
Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece The Kiss
Rialto Bridge
St. Mark’s Square
Dogana da Mar
the Maritime Customs Office—whose watch-tower once guarded Venice against foreign invasion. Nowadays, the tower has been replaced by a massive golden globe and a weather vane depicting the goddess of fortune, whose shifting directions on the breeze serve as a reminder to ocean-bound sailors of the unpredictability of fate.
Harry’s Bar
ferro di prua
Maurizio explained that the scythelike decoration that protruded from the bow of every gondola in Venice had a symbolic meaning. The ferro’s curved shape represented the Grand Canal, its six teeth reflected the six sestieri or districts of Venice, and its oblong blade was the stylized headpiece of the Venetian doge
Above the trees, silhouetted against a cloudless sky, rose the redbrick spire of St. Mark’s bell tower, atop which a golden Archangel Gabriel peered down from a dizzying three hundred feet.
In a city where high-rises were nonexistent as a result of their tendency to sink, the towering Campanile di San Marco served as a navigational beacon to all who ventured into Venice’s maze of canals and passageways; a lost traveler, with a single glance skyward, would see the way back to St. Mark’s Square
Riva degli Schiavoni. The wide stone promenade that sat along the water’s edge had been built in the ninth century from dredged silt and ran from the old Arsenal all the way to St. Mark’s Square.
Lined with fine cafés, elegant hotels, and even the home church of Antonio Vivaldi, the Riva began its course at the Arsenal—Venice’s ancient shipbuilding yards—where the piney scent of boiling tree sap had once filled the air as boatbuilders smeared hot pitch on their unsound vessels to plug the holes. Allegedly it had been a visit to these very shipyards that had inspired Dante Alighieri to include rivers of boiling pitch as a torture device in his Inferno
Il Ponte dei Sospiri The Bridge of Sighs
Movie - A Little Romance, which was based on the legend that if two young lovers kissed beneath this bridge at sunset while the bells of St. Mark’s were ringing, they would love each other forever
Bridge of Sighs drew its name not from sighs of passion … but instead from sighs of misery. As it turned out, the enclosed walkway served as the connector between the Doge’s Palace and the doge’s prison, where the incarcerated languished and died, their groans of anguish echoing out of the grated windows along the narrow canal.
Hotel Danieli
Murano Glass Museum (Sinskey)
statue of St. Theodore and winged lion columns - St Mark's Square
Throughout the city, the winged lion could be seen with his paw resting proudly on an open book bearing the Latin inscription Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus (May Peace Be with You, Mark, My Evangelist). According to legend, these words were spoken by an angel upon St. Mark’s arrival in Venice, along with the prediction that his body would one day rest here. This apocryphal legend was later used by Venetians to justify plundering St. Mark’s bones from Alexandria for reburial in St. Mark’s Basilica. To this day, the winged lion endures as the city’s symbol and is visible at nearly every turn.
St. Mark’s Clock Tower
The same astronomical clock through which James Bond had thrown a villain in the film Moonraker
St. Mark’s statue
The Horses of St. Mark’s.
The four copper horses had been cast in the fourth century by an unknown Greek sculptor on the island of Chios
Poised as if prepared to leap down at any moment into the square, these four priceless stallions—like so many treasures here in Venice—had been pillaged from Constantinople during the Crusades
According to the Web site, the Horses of St. Mark’s were so beautiful that they had become “history’s most frequently stolen pieces of art.”
Langdon had always believed that this dubious honor belonged to the Ghent Altarpiece and paid a quick visit to the ARCA Web site to confirm his theory
Ghent Altarpiece
Another similarly looted work of art was on display beneath the horses at the southwest corner of the church—a purple porphyry carving known as The Tetrarchs. The statue was well known for its missing foot, broken off while it was being plundered from Constantinople in the thirteenth century. Miraculously, in the 1960s, the foot was unearthed in Istanbul. Venice petitioned for the missing piece of statue, but the Turkish authorities replied with a simple message: You stole the statue—we’re keeping our foot.
The Tetrarchs.
volto intero mask
St Mark's interior
Pala d’Oro
An expansive backdrop of gilded silver, this “golden cloth” was a fabric only in the sense that it was a fused tapestry of previous works—primarily Byzantine enamel—all interwoven into a single Gothic frame. Adorned with some thirteen hundred pearls, four hundred garnets, three hundred sapphires, as well as emeralds, amethysts, and rubies, the Pala d’Oro was considered, along with the Horses of St. Mark’s, to be one of the finest treasures in Venice.
Gustave Doré Dandolo Preaching the Crusade.
Paper Door connecting St Mark's to Doge Palace
The crypt of St. Mark’s
The crypt of St. Mark’s was different from many other such places in that it was also a working chapel, where regular services were held in the presence of the bones of St. Mark.
The Bosporus waterway. Turkey
The mouseion of holy wisdom. Hagia Sophia.
Originally built in A.D. 360, Hagia Sophia had served as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral until 1204, when Enrico Dandolo and the Fourth Crusade conquered the city and turned it into a Catholic church. Later, in the fifteenth century, following the conquest of Constantinople by Fatih Sultan Mehmed, it had become a mosque, remaining an Islamic house of worship until 1935, when the building was secularized and became a museum.
http://www.beneaththehagiasophia.com/sergi/
Gülensoy’s film: SCUBA DIVING BENEATH HAGIA SOPHIA
Topkapi Palace
High above the city, rose the Ottoman stronghold of Topkapi Palace. With its strategic view of the Bosporus waterway, the palace was a favorite among tourists, who visited to admire both the vistas and the staggering collection of Ottoman treasure that included the cloak and sword said to have belonged to the Prophet Muhammad himself.
Bruegel’s Triumph of Death a hideous panorama of pestilence, misery, and torture laying ruin to a seaside city.
The Blue Mosque
spotting the building’s six fluted, pencil-shaped minarets, which had multiple şerefe balconies and climbed skyward to end in piercing spires. Langdon had once read that the exotic, fairy-tale quality of the Blue Mosque’s balconied minarets had inspired the design for Cinderella’s iconic castle at Disney World. The Blue Mosque drew its name from the dazzling sea of blue tiles that adorned its interior walls.
Sultanahmet Park offered a bit of cover from the worsening weather as the group hurried along its canopied paths. The walkways were dotted with signage directing visitors to the park’s many attractions—an Egyptian obelisk from Luxor, the Serpent Column from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and the Milion Column that once served as the “point zero” from which all distances were measured in the Byzantine Empire.
The Fountain of Ablutions
The Imperial Doorway at Hagia Sophia
In Byzantine times, this door was reserved for sole use of the emperor.
Pantocrator Christ
The iconic image of Christ holding the New Testament in his left hand while making a blessing with his rig
The Dome at Hagia Sophia
As with all great shrines, Hagia Sophia’s prodigious size served two purposes. First, it was proof to God of the great lengths to which Man would go to pay tribute to Him. And second, it served as a kind of shock treatment for worshippers—a physical space so imposing that those who entered felt dwarfed, their egos erased, their physical being and cosmic importance shrinking to the size of a mere speck in the face of God … an atom in the hands of the Creator. Martin Luther had spoken those words in the sixteenth century, but the concept had been part of the mind-set of builders since the earliest examples of religious architecture.
Until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.
...Recalling that all of the Christian iconography had been covered in whitewash when the building became a mosque. The restoration of the Christian symbols next to the Muslim symbols had created a mesmerizing effect, particularly because the styles and sensibilities of the two iconographies are polar opposites.
While Christian tradition favored literal images of its gods and saints, Islam focused on calligraphy and geometric patterns to represent the beauty of God’s universe. Islamic tradition held that only God could create life, and therefore man has no place creating images of life—not gods, not people, not even animals.
Langdon recalled once trying to explain this concept to his students: “A Muslim Michelangelo, for example, would never have painted God’s face on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; he would have inscribed the name of God. Depicting God’s face would be considered blasphemy.”
John Singer Sargent - Hagia Sophia
Not surprisingly, in creating his famous painting of Hagia Sophia, the American artist had limited his palette only to multiple shades of a single color. Gold.
Deesis Mosaic
Hagia Sophia urns
A 330-gallon behemoth carved out of a single piece of marble during the Hellenistic period.
Dandolo’s tomb
Yerebatan Sarayi the sunken palace
Nearly two football fields in length—with a ceiling spanning more than a hundred thousand square feet and supported by a forest of 336 marble columns.
No comments:
Post a Comment