Imagine, if you will, a writer coarse and crass, bitingly satirical, outrageous, and, when the letters weren’t paying the bills, he’d dabble in a little (okay a lot) of blackmail. Even better, imagine if he was the son of an … Read More
So… in Florence, pre 1860 (when all of Italy went metric), the length of stuff and things was tricky to measure consistently. Not that people just lived out their lives happy and free of the tyranny of meters…
Villa Basilica LigaDue, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Galileo’s mum, Giulia di Cosimo Ammannati, was born in January 1538, in a tiny mountain village called Villa Basilica, in the province of Lucca, in the Tuscan region of Italy. … Read More
So most of us have heard of Galileo… the father of modern science (well according to Einstein and Hawkins… and really they’d know, right?). Galileo is known as … well… Galileo. Like Michelangelo, Napoleon and Jesus, he doesn’t need a … Read More
Basically yes. In France a convent was considered a viable alternative to prison. St Catherine with the Lily by Sister Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588) While its safe to assume that Jesus and God featured in the lives of the hundreds of … Read More
The bubonic plague is still a thing. It occurs naturally on all continents except Australia, and there have been 50,000 human cases during the last 20 years, causing the World Health Organization to classify it as a re-emerging disease. Lucky … Read More
Back in Baroque days there was a lot of bowing, and it wasn’t even called bowing, it was called ‘a reverence.’ How to Reverence http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/caroso/images.html In “Rules for Dancing” (or Nobilta di Dame) written by Fabritio Caroso in 1600, we … Read More
ARCHDUCHESS ELEONORE (1582-1620) AT THE AGE OF 5, HALF FIGURE Dated 1587, attributed to: Ottavio Zanuoli (?) https://www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/2370/?offset=0&lv=list Eleanor of Austria was born today in 1582… she had FOURTEEN brothers and sisters, and her parents were uncle and niece. There … Read More
What is The Baroque? Well its a period, in history… a cultural period. By Johannes VermeerPublic Domain, Link Simply put, it comes after the Renaissance. Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer were a thing in the art world, as was Vivaldi in … Read More