Petra | La Geologia della città rosa del Medio Oriente

Presso la cittadina araba di Ma’an, nel sud della Giordania, sorge Petra, nota anche come la Città delle Tombe o la Città Rosa, l’antica capitale del regno dei Nabatei, dichiarata dall’UNESCO Patrimonio Culturale dell’Umanità.

Petra fu l'imponente capitale del regno nabateo dal VI secolo a.C. circa.

Il regno fu assorbito dall'Impero romano nel 106 d.C. ed i Romani continuarono a espandere la città.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: "La mia Italia" | Le lettere..

Italia, autunno 1881.

Alla signora Charpentier,

Dovevo pranzare un mattino con voi, e mi avrebbe fatto infinitamente piacere, perché è già passato tanto tempo.

Ma sono diventato improvvisamente viaggiatore e mi ha preso la febbre di vedere Raffaello .

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Un jardin à Sorrente, 1881 | Sotheby's

Fantastic Art

Fantastic Art is a broad and loosely defined art genre.

It is not restricted to a specific school of artists, geographical location or historical period.

It can be characterised by subject matter - which portrays non-realistic, mystical, mythical or folkloric subjects or events - and style, which is representational and naturalistic, rather than abstract - or in the case of magazine illustrations and similar, in the style of graphic novel art such as manga.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo | Summer

Ancient Jordanian site of Petra | Roman period

Petra is a historical and archaeological city in the Jordanian governorate of Ma'an that is known for its rock cut architecture and water conduits system.

Established sometime around the 6th century BC as the capital city of the Nabataeans, it is a symbol of Jordan as well as its most visited tourism attraction.

It lies on the slope of Mount Hor in a basin among the mountains which form the eastern flank of Arabah (Wadi Araba), the large valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Il Valzer | La danza proibita

Avvicinati al tuo partner, conta "Uno, due, tre, Uno, due, tre" nella tua testa e vai!

Anche se nel XVII e XVIII secolo, il valzer era considerato la radice di tutti i mali, si è fatto strada tra le élite ed è oggi il più popolare di tutti i balli da sala.

A causa della sua presa ravvicinata e delle rotazioni veloci, un tempo il valzer veniva chiamato la "danza proibita".

Camille Claudel | La Valse, 1891

150 years of the First Impressionist Exhibition, 1874-2024

150 years ago, on April 15, 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism.

Its founding members included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, among others.

Thirty-one artists had gathered to hold their own art fair, outside the official Salon, in a declaration of independence that marked the birth of a groundbreaking art movement.

Claude Monet | Impression, Sunrise, 1872 | Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet

Bloomsbury Group

Roger Fry | A london garden

Bloomsbury is the name commonly used to identify a circle of intellectuals and artists who lived in Bloomsbury, near central London, in the period 1904-1940.

In 1905, a group of writers and intellectuals began to meet at the London home of the artist Vanessa Bell and her writer sister Virginia Woolf to share ideas and support each other’s creative activities… their meetings continued for the next three decades.

They were in revolt against everything Victorian and played a key role in introducing many modern ideas into Britain.

Post-Impressionism | Art History and Sitemap

Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism.

Through the use of simplified colors and definitive forms, their art was characterized by a renewed aesthetic sense as well as abstract tendencies.

Vincent van Gogh | The Starry Night, 1889 | MoMA, Museum of Modern Art

La Belle Époque

La Belle Époque is a period of French and European history, usually considered to begin around 1871-1880 and to end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Occurring during the era of the Third French Republic, it was a period characterised by optimism, regional peace, economic prosperity, colonial expansion, and technological, scientific, and cultural innovations.

In this era of France's cultural and artistic climate (particularly within Paris), the arts markedly flourished, with numerous masterpieces of literature, music, theatre, and visual art gaining extensive recognition.

Jean Béraud | Seaside Café, 1884 | The Clark Art Institute

La Grotta di Altamira | Patrimonio della Umanità

"Dopo Altamira, tutto è decadenza", esclamò Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973, incantato dinanzi allo spettacolo delle pitture rupestri nella grotta spagnola di Altamira.

Molti pittori sono stati influenzati dalle opere delle grotte di Altamira.

Le Grotte di Altamira sono delle caverne spagnole famose per le pitture rupestri del Paleolitico superiore raffiguranti mammiferi selvatici e mani umane. Si trovano nei pressi di Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, 30 chilometri ad ovest di Santander. Queste grotte sono state incluse tra i Patrimoni dell'umanità dell'UNESCO nel 1985.

Nel 2008 il nome del patrimonio è stato modificato da "Grotte di Altamira" in "Arte rupestre paleolitica della Spagna settentrionale" in seguito all'aggiunta di 17 altre grotte.

Grecia antica

Antica Grecia (o Grecia antica) è il termine utilizzato per descrivere la civiltà sviluppatasi nella Grecia continentale, in Albania, nelle isole del Mar Egeo, sulle coste del Mar Nero e quelle occidentali della Turchia, in Sicilia, nell'Italia Meridionale (poi chiamata Magna Grecia), nelle isole del Mediterraneo occidentale di Corsica e Sardegna, nonché sulle coste di Spagna e Francia e, successivamente, dell'Africa settentrionale.

La cultura Greca, nonostante la conformazione geografica del continente favorisse l'insorgere di molteplici unità politiche a sé stanti, fu un fenomeno omogeneo, che interessò tutte le genti elleniche, accomunate dalla stessa lingua e dalla stessa religione.

Età arcaica

Le prime civiltà di cui si ha notizia per la Grecia antica sono la civiltà egea, quella cicladica e quella micenea, influenzata dalla civiltà minoica, che sorse a Creta nell'età del bronzo.

Salon des Refusés (May 15, 1863)

Salon des Refusés is generally known as an exhibition of works rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon, but the term is most famously used to refer to the Salon des Refusés of 1863.

Today by extension, salon des refusés refers to any exhibition of works rejected from a juried art show.

Among the exhibitors were Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Armand Guillaumin, Johan Jongkind, Henri Fantin-Latour, James Whistler and Édouard Manet, who exhibited his famous painting "Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe", officially regarded as a scandalous affront to taste.

Édouard Manet | Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863 | Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Ten American Painters, 1897-1918

The Ten American Painters (also known as The Ten) was an artists' group formed in 1898 to exhibit their work as a unified group.

John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir and Childe Hassam were the driving forces behind the organization. Dissatisfied with the conservatism of the American art establishment, the three artists recruited seven others from Boston, New York City, and elsewhere on the East Coast, with the intention of creating an exhibition society that valued their view of originality, imagination, and exhibition quality.

The Ten achieved popular and critical success, and lasted two decades before dissolving.

Foundation

In America, popular painting styles usually originated on the east coast in cities like New York and Boston.

The Ten continued a tradition of artists forming new groups in reaction to a lack of support from existing artists' groups. Thus, the National Academy of Design (founded in 1825 by students dissatisfied by the conservatism of the older American Academy of the Fine Arts) eventually became too conservative to suit the artists who in 1877 initiated the Society of American Artists so they could meet and exhibit their work as a collective.

Frank W. Benson | Summer, 1909

Wassily Kandinsky | VI - Il linguaggio delle forme e dei colori

Lo spirituale nell'arte, 1910

L'uomo che non ha musica in se stesso

che l`armonia dei suoni non commuove

sa il tradimento, e la perfida frode.

Le sue emozioni sono una notte cupa

i suoi pensieri un Erebo nero.

Alla musica credi, non a lui.

Shakespeare

Il suono musicale giunge direttamente all'anima. E vi trova subito un'eco, perché l'uomo "ha la musica in sé".

"Si sa che il giallo, l'arancione e il rosso ispirano e rappresentano un'idea di gioia, di ricchezza" (Delacroix).

The Giverny Art Colony, 1885-1915

Between 1885 and 1915, the village of Giverny attracted more than 350 artists (Americans accounted for the majority) from at least eighteen countries around the world (including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Great Britain and Poland) - transforming from a sleepy community to a vibrant and important Artists' Colony.

The presence of master Claude Monet (known to the American artists through both Parisian and American exhibitions), who settled in the village in 1883, attracted a small band of artists, including Theodore Robinson, Willard Metcalf, Louis Ritter, Theodore Wendel and John Leslie Breck.

John Leslie Breck | Garden at Giverny, 1887-91

Cloisonnisme (1888-1894)

Introduction and History

In French painting, the term "cloisonnism" (after the French for "partition") describes a style of expressionism associated, in particular, with Emile Bernard (1868-1941), Louis Anquetin (1861-1932) and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903).

Based on a two-dimensional pattern, featuring large patches of bright colour enclosed within thick black outlines, in the manner of medieval cloisonné enamelling or stained glass, the word Cloisonnism was first coined in 1888 by the art critic Edouard Dujardin.

One of the lesser known modern art movements, albeit an influential style of Post-Impressionist painting, the distinctive characteristics of Cloisonnism were its areas of pure colour (devoid of most shading or 3-D modelling effects) which gave it a strong two-dimensional appearance.

Émile Bernard

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

The Blue Rider was a German Expressionist movement that was established in December 1911 by Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter.

Painters Kandinsky and Marc worked on an almanac in which they showed their artistic conceptions. The title of the almanac, which then became the name of the group, Der Blaue Reiter - The Blue Rider, came from the painting by Kandinsky.

His Blaue Reiter Blue Rider was an adventure in the simplification and stylization of forms and the connection between music and painting.

Wassily Kandinsky | The Blue Rider

Wassily Kandinsky | VII - Teoria della Pittura

Lo spirituale nell'arte, 1910

Seconda parte: La Pittura

Dalla natura della nostra armonia si deduce che oggi non si può costruire una teoria compiuta, creare un basso continuo in pittura. Questi tentativi condurrebbero in pratica allo stesso risultato dei cucchiaini di Leonardo, che citavamo prima. Ma sarebbe imprudente affermare che in pittura non esisteranno mai regole fisse, princìpi paragonabili al basso continuo, e che qualsiasi regola condurrebbe inevitabilmente all'accademismo.

Anche la musica ha una sua grammatica: una grammatica che si modifica nel tempo, come ogni cosa vivente, ma che è sempre stata utile, come una specie di vocabolario.

Wassily Kandinsky | Pond in the park

Wassily Kandinsky | VIII - L'Opera d'Arte e l'Artista, 1910

Lo spirituale nell'arte, 1910

Seconda parte: La Pittura

La vera opera d'arte nasce "dall'artista" in modo misterioso, enigmatico, mistico.

Staccandosi da lui assume una sua personalità, e diviene un soggetto indipendente con un suo respiro spirituale e una sua vita concreta.

Diventa un aspetto dell'essere. Non è dunque un fenomeno casuale, una presenza anche spiritualmente indifferente, ma ha come ogni essere energie creative, attive.

Wassily Kandinsky | Delicate tension, 1923

Wassily Kandinsky | VIII - Art and Artists

Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910

Part II: About painting

In an obscure and puzzling way, the artist develops a work of art. As it gains a life of its own, it becomes an entity, an independent spiritual life, which as a being, leads the life of material realism.

It is, therefore, not simply a phenomenon created casually and Inconsequentially indifferent to spiritual life.

Instead as a living being, it possesses creative active forces. It lives, has power, and actively forms the above-mentioned spiritual atmosphere.

From an innermost point of view, the question finally should be answered as to whether creation is strong or weak. If too weak in its form, it is impotent to cause any kind of spiritual vibration.

Wassily Kandinsky | Succession, 1935