A bit of innocent fun, for the art lovers among my readers. I’m teaching Italian Renaissance to my A-Level class at present and dragged these images off various sites to make a slide talk presentation. Thought i\d post them here too, for your pleasure and interest. It’s not a Dublin Decoded competition, there… Read More Italian Renassaince Art, a picture quiz.
The castle at Bentheim: an essay of random thoughts on landscape, history and money, modernity and nostalgia in the Dutch Golden Age. Look at this. Don’t by the way try reading this piece on a phone. Wait until you have access to a proper screen. Then look at this. It’s a detail of a work… Read More Landscape, modernity and nostalgia in the Dutch Golden Age.
Great Victorians, our new Dublin Decoded walking tour, is now open for bookings via email. (see blow) Our theme is Great Victorians. On this tour we explore the rich legacy of beautiful, often spectacular buildings, with their applied arts, architectural detail and decor, all from the second half of the 19th century, the Victorian era.… Read More Great Victorians, Dublin walking tour.
Special Evening-time Tours of National Gallery of Ireland, in central Dublin the unique How to Read a Painting tour, is a highly accessible, fascinating introduction, revealing some of the “mysteries” of reading ideas and symbols in old master paintings. As the tour title suggests, we make aspects of paintings art historians are trained to think… Read More special Art tours of National Gallery of Ireland, Thursday evenings 6-8pm, available for pre-booked groups
Taken from my piece, from a year ago, December 2012… If you are reading this on laptop/desktop & it’s split into 3 columns, just hit the title bar above. Deep in the heart of the 5th, among the buildings of the Sorbonne, is the wonderful Musée de Cluny, also called the Musée national du Moyen… Read More Musée Cluny – Musée du Moyen Age, & revisiting received ideas on Medievel v Renassiance.
Look at this. I thought you’d enjoy these wonderful mural paintings. For those who do not know them they’re in a tiny chapel called the Oratory, which is the last remaining survivor of the old Dominican Convent in Dun Laoghaire, (the town just south of Dublin where I grew up). Most of the convent… Read More The Oratory Chapel by Sister Concepta Lynch, old Domincan Convent, Dun Laoghaire (Co Dublin)
Had to show you this. It’s what is known as a diorama of course, showing the vast sweep of the Grand Canyon. I spotted it recently in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, (where they really go in for large, highly detailed model-making in a big way. You’ll see that the clever artists who made… Read More Panoramas; Dioramas and Tableau. Munich to Moscow, Dublin to the USA.
Look at this. Many of you will already know it. Its full title is either Descent of the Dammed into Hell, more simply The Fall of the Dammed; or even the Fall of the Rebel Angels. Regardless of what you choose to call it, it was painted around by 1620, by Flemish artist Peter Paul… Read More Falling into Hell. Peter Paul Rubens at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
As an addendum to that last post on the old Library and scrumptious Long Room of Trinity College: a quick respectful nod today, to these lovely sculptural Busts that line the Long Room. Oh, these photos are my own, so if you “borrow” them, no problem for non-commercial purposes but please provide a photo credit, and a… Read More The Pantheon in the Library- the Sculpture Busts of Long Room Trinity College, Dublin
Recently, we asked readers to identify what this drawing below was, and why it was never built. Many of you wrote in to say, very correctly it was Edwin Luytens’ design (one of at least two he did) in the 1900s, for the art collector and gallerist Hugh Lane. (Above: Hugh Lane, painted by John… Read More The Bridge, the Poet, the Aesthete, and his aunt.
Arran Q Henderson 