Lalibela, Ethiopia
The small town of Lalibela in Ethiopia is home to one of the world’s most astounding sacred sites: 11 rock-hewn churches, each carved entirely out of a single block of granite with its roof at ground level.
Were it not for these extraordinary churches, Lalibela would almost certainly be well off the tourist radar. A dusty rural town nestled into rolling countryside, Lalibela only recently got electricity. It has few motorized vehicles, no gas stations and no paved streets. Isolated from the modern world, the town goes about its business much as it has for several hundred years.
Of Lalibela’s 8-10,000 people, over 1,000 are priests. Religious ritual is central to the life of the town, with regular processions, extensive fasts, crowds of singing and dancing priests. This, combined with its extraordinary religious architecture and simplicity of life, gives the city of Lalibela a distinctively timeless, almost biblical atmosphere.
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas depicted the actress Ellen Andrée as a prostitute of the Parisian streets with a lost look, sitting absolutely still before a glass of absinthe, absorbed in thought. At her side, a pipe clenched between his teeth and hat pushed back into his neck, one of the café regulars is seated. He seems to be looking into the distance, not aware of the woman seated just beside him. Squeezed into the corner behind little empty tables, they are almost touching one another, but each is in their own world. Again, Degas succeeded in setting down on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: the bitter solitude of a human being in the merriest, liveliest city in the world. (1000 Painting of Genius, 2006)
Altamira
Altamira is a cave in Spain famous for its Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings featuring drawings and polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals and human hands. It is located near the town of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain, 30 km west of the city of Santander. The cave with its paintings has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The cave is 296 meters long, and consists of a series of twisting passages and chambers. The main passage varies from two to six meters high.
Joan Miró
Joan Miró Ferra (1893-1983) was born in Barcelona, Spain, into the family of a goldsmith and watchmaker.
Joan Miró studied under Franciso Gali, originally painting in Fauvist and Cubist style. After poor reviews of his first solo exhibition, Miró travelled to Paris to seek out Pablo Picasso, who introduced Miró to the Surrealist, whom he joined in 1924.
Interested by the relationship of art and the subconscious mind and slightly skeptical of Surrealism, Miró began to create his own biomorphic and semi-abstract forms in the late 1920’s. During the Spanish Civil War, he moved to France, but returned home when Nazis invaded France during World War II.
Porgy and Bess
Porgy and Bess is an opera, first performed in 1935, with music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward.
It was based on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy and the play of the same name as the opera which he co-wrote with his wife Dorothy Heyward.
All three works deal with African American life in the fictitious Catfish Row (based on the real-life Cabbage Row) in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s.
Golden Gate Bridge
This bridge in San Francisco is one of the architectural marvels of the Twentieth Century and a testament to human strife, as it was constructed during the years of the Great Depression. For years, the Golden Gate Bridge held the title as the longest suspension bridge in the world.
Before its completion in 1937, the bridge was considered impossible to build, due to persistently foggy weather, 60-mile-per-hour winds, and strong ocean currents, which whipped through a deep canyon below. In fact, the bridge is commonly known as the “Bridge that couldn’t be built.”
Peter Pan
Peter Pan (1904) is the title of Scottish playwright and novelist James M. Barrie’s (1860–1937) most famous play, and Peter and Wendy is the title of Barrie’s 1911 novelization of it.
Both tell the story of Peter Pan, a mischievous little boy who can fly and magically refuses to grow up, and his adventures on the island of Neverland with Wendy Darling and her brothers, the fairy Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, the Indian princess Tiger Lily, and the pirate Captain Hook. From time to time they also meet ordinary children from the world outside.
Barrie created Peter Pan in stories he told to the sons of his friend Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, with whom he had forged a special relationship. Mrs. Llewelyn Davies’ death from cancer came within a few years after the death of her husband.
Barrie was named as co-guardian of the boys and unofficially adopted them.
Claude Monet
(Paris, 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) Monet was a founder of French Impressionism, a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s.
He lived in Giverny (1883 – 1926) where he painted his famous Water Lilies (or Nympheas), a series of approximately 250 oil paintings. They were the main focus of Monet’s artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.
Casablanca
Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is a bitter, cynical American expatriate in Casablanca. He owns and runs “Rick’s Café Américain”, an upscale nightclub and gambling den that attracts a mixed clientèle of Vichy French and Nazi officials, refugees and thieves.
Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, it is later revealed that he had run guns to Ethiopia to combat the 1935 Italian invasion, and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco’s Nationalists.
Ugarte (Peter Lorre), a petty criminal, arrives in Rick’s club with “letters of transit” obtained through the murder of two German couriers. The papers allow the bearer to travel freely around German-controlled Europe and to neutral Portugal, and from there to America. The letters are almost priceless to any of the continual stream of refugees who end up stranded in Casablanca.
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is surely Britain’s greatest national icon, symbolizing mystery, power and endurance. Its original purpose is unclear to us, but some have speculated that it was a temple made for the worship of ancient earth deities.
It has been called an astronomical observatory for marking significant events on the prehistoric calendar. Others claim that it was a sacred site for the burial of high-ranking citizens from the societies of long ago.
Nabucco
Giuseppe Verdi
Nabucco (1842)
Listen here Va pensiero sull’ali dorate
Nabucco, King of Babylon rises to power in 605 BC. He is determined to restore Babylon, making it one of the seven wonders of the world. And he wages war against the Jews who are put to work as slaves on the famous hanging gardens.
The opera follows the plight of the Jews as they are assaulted and subsequently exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian King Nabucco (in English, Nebuchadnezzar) after the loss of the First Temple in Jerusalem.
Its first performance took place on 9 March 1842 at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan.
John Newton – Amazing Grace
Listen here Amazing Grace
John Newton, the author of the lyrics to Amazing Grace, was born in 1725 in London, United Kingdom.
Despite the powerful message of “Amazing Grace”, Newton’s religious beliefs initially lacked conviction; his youth was marked by religious confusion and a lack of moral self-control and discipline.
After a brief time in the Royal Navy, Newton began his career in slave trading.
The turning point in Newton’s spiritual life was a violent storm that occurred one night while at sea. Moments after he left the deck, the crewman who had taken his place was swept overboard. Although he manned the vessel for the remainder of the tempest, he later commented that, throughout the tumult, he realized his helplessness and concluded that only the grace of God could save him.
Mr and Mrs Andrews
Thomas Gainsborough
Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750)
A Suitable Arrangement -
Him: The twenty-two-year-old Robert Andrews, Gentleman, and childhood friend of the artist Thomas Gainsborough. Family in possession of one half of the Auberies estate in Suffolk.
Her: The sixteen-year-old Mrs Robert Andrews, formerly known as Miss Frances Carter. Family in possession of the other half of the Auberies estate.
Swan Lake
The early history of Swan Lake is as steeped in myth as the story itself.
The first ever performance was in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre on 20 February 1877, and popular legend says that it was a disaster. The choreographer Julius Reisinger apparently had no sympathy for the music, butchered the score and invited dancers to add their own routines, to tunes of their choice. The press reviews from the time said that the music was baffling, the story confused and the lead dancer, Pelagia Karpakova, was hopeless.
But even then Swan Lake must have worked its magic on the general audience…
Timbuktu
Timbuktu (Mali, West Africa) was established by the nomadic Tuareg perhaps as early as the 10th century.
According to the legend its name is made up of: tin which means “place” and buktu, the name of an old Malian woman known for her honesty and who once upon a time lived in the region. Tuareg and other travellers would entrust this woman with any belongings for which they had no use on their return trip to the north.
Thus, when a Tuareg, upon returning to his home, was asked where he had left his belongings, he would answer: “I left them at Tin Buktu “, meaning the place where dame Buktu lived. The two terms ended up fusing into one word, thus giving the city the name of Tinbuktu which later became Timbuktu.
Las Meninas
Diego Velázquez
Las Meninas (1656)
Las Meninas presents several figures from the Spanish court in a large room in the Madrid palace of King Philip IV of Spain.
The young Infanta Margarita is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog.
Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas.
Some figures are interacting among themselves, others are looking out at the viewer.
Velázquez also looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand.
The Tower Of London
The Tower of London is the oldest royal fortress-palace in the world and was built around the White Tower (the massive keep at its heart) by William “the Conqueror” in 1078.
Successive monarchs enlarged its defences and added more buildings. In its long history, the Tower of London has been a fortress, palace and prison, royal treasury and the kingdom’s main arsenal.
In 1100 the White Tower was host to the first of many hundreds of prisoners.
The “Rocket”
George Stephenson, a coal mine engineer and his son Robert, entered the annals of locomotion with their “Locomotion”.
In 1826 they moved to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, where father and son soon built the “Rocket,” a locomotive that ran on rails and not on the roads as Trevithick’s had.
In 1829 the Rocket was able to do a speed of 45 kilometres an hour with 30 people on board, winning the 500 pounds prize for the best locomotive.
This credited George Stevenson with being the inventor of the locomotive for railways, and the age of steam locomotion was well and truly on its way. (Wikipedia, BBC)
Edouard Leon Cortes
The enchantment Edouard Leon Cortès (1882-1969) felt for Paris, the “City of Lights” is the inspiration for his Paris paintings.
White and sometimes dark horses drawing a carriage or an omnibus, a soldier in his blue uniform, a kitchen boy or a butcher whose white overalls provide a source of light, a pedestrian reading his paper and, often in the foreground, you will find the artist’s daughter and wife.
Cortès makes the architecture of Paris vibrate with luminous patches, the bright clothes of a passer-by, the reflection of a car’s headlights, shop window lights, a bouquet of flowers or a trail of sunlight shimmering on the façades of buildings or the road. (Wikipedia, Rehs Galleries)
The Girl with the Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer
The Girl with the Pearl Earring (1665)
Who is this girl?
Why is she looking over her shoulder, as though hoping to see who is standing behind her.
What has made her turn her head?
She gazes at us, wide-eyed, making an uninhibited, expectant impression that cannot help exciting our interest, even though we have no idea who she is. (Wikipedia, Mauritshuis Netherlands)
