|
Antikensammlung
The Antikensammlung Berlin (Berlin antiquities collection) is one of the most important collections of classical art in the world, now held in the Altes Museum and Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany. It contains thousands of ancient archaeological artefacts from the ancient Greek, Roman, Etruscan and Cypriot civilizations. Its main attraction is the Pergamon Altar and Greek and Roman architectural elements from Priene, Magnesia, Baalbek and Falerii. In addition, the collection includes a large number of ancient sculptures, vases, terracottas, bronzes, sarcophagi, engraved gems and metalwork. History of the collection Foundation The collection's foundations were laid in the time of the Brandenburg Elector Friedrich Wilhelm I by ancient sculptures looted in 1656 from the ''Villa Regia'' Palace in Warsaw. The obtained sculptures were purchased in Italy by Polish kings Sigismund III Vasa and Władysław IV Vasa. This core of the collection, originally housed at the Berlin City ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pergamon Altar
The Pergamon Altar () was a monumental construction built during the reign of the Ancient Greek King Eumenes II in the first half of the 2nd century BC on one of the terraces of the acropolis of Pergamon in Anatolia, Asia Minor. The structure was 35.64 metres (116' 31/32") wide and 33.4 metres (109' 6 5/8") deep; the front stairway alone was almost 20 metres (65' 11/16") wide. The base was decorated with a frieze in high relief showing the battle between the Giants (Greek mythology), Giants and the Twelve Olympians, Olympian gods known as the Gigantomachy. There was a second, smaller and less well-preserved high relief frieze on the inner court walls which surrounded the actual fire altar on the upper level of the structure at the top of the stairs. In a set of consecutive scenes, it depicts events from the life of Telephus, legendary founder of the city of Pergamon and son of the hero Heracles and Auge, one of Tegean king Aleus's daughters. In 1878, the German engineer Carl Huma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Altes Museum
The Altes Museum (English: ''Old Museum'') is a listed building on the Museum Island in the Mitte (locality), historic centre of Berlin. Built from 1825 to 1830 by order of King Frederick William III of Prussia according to plans by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it is considered as a major work of German Neoclassical architecture. It is surrounded by the Berlin Cathedral to the east, the Berlin Palace to the south and the Zeughaus to the west. Currently, the Altes Museum is home to the Antikensammlung and parts of the Münzkabinett. As part of the Museum Island complex, the Altes Museum was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, because of its testimony to the development of museums as a social and architectural phenomenon. Planning and location In the early nineteenth century, Germany's bourgeoisie had become increasingly self-aware and self-confident. This growing class began to embrace new ideas regarding the relationship between itself and art, and the concepts that art sho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pergamon Museum
The Pergamon Museum (; ) is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin. It was built from 1910 to 1930 by order of German Emperor Wilhelm II according to plans by Alfred Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann in Stripped Classicism style. Landesdenkmalamt Berlin As part of the Museum Island complex, the Pergamon Museum was inscribed on the in 1999 because of its architecture and testimony to the evolution of museums as architectural and social phenomena.< ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Melchior De Polignac
Melchior Cardinal de Polignac (11 October 1661 – 20 November 1742) was a French diplomat, Cardinal and neo-Latin poet. Second son of Armand XVI, marquis de Polignac and Marquis Chalancon, Governor of Puy; and Jacqueline de Beauvoir -Grimoard-de Roure (his third wife), Melchior de Polignac was born at Chateau de la Ronte, near Puy en Vélay, Lavoûte-sur-Loire, Haute-Loire, Auvergne. Education and early career A precocious child, he was taken by his uncle to Paris, and installed in the Jesuit Collège de Clermont (later named the Collège de Louis le Grand). At the appropriate time, he passed to the Collège de Harcourt, where thanks to the misdirected efforts of a teacher who was an enthusiast for Aristotle, Polignac adopted the opposite view and became a Cartesian. His thesis in Theology at the Sorbonne (1683) discussed the Kings of Judah who had destroyed the "high places". He was either prescient, or aware of discussion around Louis XIV which led in two years to the revoca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sarcophagi
A sarcophagus (plural sarcophagi or sarcophaguses) is a box-like funeral receptacle for a cadaver, corpse, most commonly carved in stone, and usually displayed above ground, though it may also be buried. The word ''sarcophagus'' comes from the Greek language, Greek Wiktionary:σάρξ, σάρξ ' meaning "flesh", and Wiktionary:φαγεῖν, φαγεῖν ' meaning "to eat"; hence ''sarcophagus'' means "flesh-eating", from the phrase ''lithos sarkophagos'' (Wiktionary:λίθος, λίθος Wiktionary:σαρκοφάγος, σαρκοφάγος), "flesh-eating stone". The word also came to refer to a particular kind of limestone that was thought to rapidly facilitate the decomposition of the flesh of corpses contained within it due to the chemical properties of the limestone itself. History of the sarcophagus Sarcophagi were most often designed to remain above ground. The earliest stone sarcophagi were used by Egyptian pharaohs of the 3rd dynasty, which reigned from about ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nile Mosaic Of Palestrina
300px, The Nile Mosaic of Palestrina. The Palestrina Mosaic or Nile mosaic of Palestrina is a late Hellenistic floor mosaic depicting the Nile in its passage from the Blue Nile to the Mediterranean. The mosaic was part of a Classical sanctuary-grotto in Palestrina, a town east of Ancient Rome, in central Italy. It has a width of 5.85 metres and a height of 4.31 metres and provides a glimpse into the Roman fascination with ancient Egyptian exoticism in the 1st century BC, both as an early manifestation of the role of Egypt in the Roman imagination and an example of the genre of "Nilotic landscape", with a long iconographic history in Egypt and the Aegean. Description The mosaic, with an arch-headed framing that identifies its original location as flooring an apse in a grotto, features detailed depictions of Ptolemaic Greeks, Aethiopians in hunting scenes, and various animals of the Nile river. It is the earliest Roman depiction of Nilotic scenes, of which several more were uncov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnesia On The Maeander
Magnesia or Magnesia on the Maeander ( grc, Μαγνησία ἡ πρὸς Μαιάνδρῳ or ; la, Magnesia ad Maeandrum) was an ancient Greek city in Ionia, considerable in size, at an important location commercially and strategically in the triangle of Priene, Ephesus and Tralles. The city was named Magnesia, after the Magnetes from Thessaly who settled the area along with some Cretans. It was later called "on the Meander" to distinguish it from the nearby Lydian city Magnesia ad Sipylum. It was earlier the site of Leucophrys mentioned by several ancient writers. The territory around Magnesia was extremely fertile, and produced excellent wine, figs, and cucumbers. It was built on the slope of Mount Thorax, on the banks of the small river Lethacus, a tributary of the Maeander river upstream from Ephesus. It was 15 miles from the city of Miletus. The ruins of the city are located west of the modern village Tekin in the Germencik district of Aydın Province, Turkey. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerrit Reynst
Gerrit Reynst (1599 – 29 June 1658) (also known as Gerard Reynst) was, like his younger brother Jan (1601–1646), a Dutch merchant and art collector from Amsterdam, with his brother owner of the Reynst Collection. He was an alderman and member of the town council, entering it in 1646. Life Reynst was born in Amsterdam, the son of the merchant Gerard Reynst from the Reynst family, who in the year 1614 became the second Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, and Margrieta Nicquet, whose merchant brother Jacques Nicquet was a fervent art collector. Gerard Jr. lived in a house called De Hoop at Keizersgracht 209 that he later made into an art museum. His brother Jan was a collector of antique statuary and Italian paintings who was able to purchase the collection of the estate Andrea Vendramin in 1629, 230 sculptures and 140 paintings. After Jan's death in 1646 almost all of these were sent to Gerard, who published a selection of 112 items in the collection with the he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Engraved Gems
An engraved gem, frequently referred to as an intaglio, is a small and usually semi-precious gemstone that has been carved, in the Western tradition normally with images or inscriptions only on one face. The engraving of gemstones was a major luxury art form in the Ancient world, and an important one in some later periods. Strictly speaking, ''engraving'' means carving ''in intaglio'' (with the design cut ''into'' the flat background of the stone), but relief carvings (with the design projecting ''out of'' the background as in nearly all cameos) are also covered by the term. This article uses ''cameo'' in its strict sense, to denote a carving exploiting layers of differently coloured stone. The activity is also called ''gem carving'' and the artists ''gem-cutters''. References to antique gems and intaglios in a jewellery context will almost always mean carved gems; when referring to monumental sculpture, counter-relief, meaning the same as ''intaglio'', is more likely to be used. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Antiquities
Antiquities are objects from antiquity, especially the civilizations of the Mediterranean: the Classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, Ancient Egypt and the other Ancient Near Eastern cultures. Artifacts from earlier periods such as the Mesolithic, and other civilizations from Asia and elsewhere may also be covered by the term. The phenomenon of giving a high value to ancient artifacts is found in other cultures, notably China, where Chinese ritual bronzes, three to two thousand years old, have been avidly collected and imitated for centuries, and the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, where in particular the artifacts of the earliest Olmec civilization are found reburied in significant sites of later cultures up to the Spanish Conquest. A person who studies antiquities, as opposed to just collecting them, is often called an antiquarian. Definition The definition of the term is not always precise, and institutional definitions such as museum "Departments of Antiquities ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giovanni Pietro Bellori
Giovanni Pietro Bellori (15 January 1613 – 19 February 1696), also known as Giovan Pietro Bellori or Gian Pietro Bellori, was an Italian painter and antiquarian, but, more famously, a prominent biographer of artists of the 17th century, equivalent to Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century. His ''Lives of the Artists'' (''Vite de' Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni''), published in 1672, was influential in consolidating and promoting the theoretical case for classical idealism in art. «Bellori is the "predecessor of Winckelmann" not only as an antiquarian but also as an art theorist. Winckelmann's theory of the "ideally beautiful" as he expounds it in ''Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums'', IV.2.33 ff., thoroughly agrees—except for the somewhat stronger Neoplatonic impact, which is to be explained perhaps more as an influence of Raphael Mengs than as an influence of Shaftesbury—with the content of Bellori's ''Idea'' (to which Winckelmann also owes his acquaintance with th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick I Of Prussia
Frederick I (german: Friedrich I.; 11 July 1657 – 25 February 1713), of the Hohenzollern dynasty, was (as Frederick III) Elector of Brandenburg (1688–1713) and Duke of Prussia in personal union ( Brandenburg-Prussia). The latter function he upgraded to royalty, becoming the first King in Prussia (1701–1713). From 1707 he was in personal union the sovereign prince of the Principality of Neuchâtel (german: Fürstentum Neuenburg). Biography Family Born in Königsberg, Frederick was the third son of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg by his father's first marriage to Louise Henriette of Orange-Nassau, eldest daughter of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange and Amalia of Solms-Braunfels. His maternal cousin was King William III of England. Upon the death of his father on 29 April 1688, Frederick became Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia. Right after ascending the throne Frederick founded a new city southerly adjacent to Dorotheenstadt and named it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> Antiquities")
