ALEKSANDRA JANISZEWSKA-CARDONE
This year we celebrate the centenary of the creation of Bauhaus – an art and craft school that has revolutionized thinking about how to create architecture. Its priority was to provide good living conditions. On this occasion, I would like to recall the “prototype” of functional thinking in planning, maybe a bit controversially, from the…
I have recently focused here on describing images of monstrous human races in order to understand the mechanism of creating an image of other in European culture. In previous entries, I summarized how the ancient Greeks and Romans perceived the inhabitants of distant lands and how this influenced knowledge developed in the Middle Ages. Today’s…
Holbein was one of the finest portrait painters of the sixteenth century. He came from Augsburg, one of the richest German cities with strong artistic traditions. However, he worked mainly in Basel and London. His are the portraits of Henry VIII or Erasmus of Rotterdam, reproduced countless times as illustrations for texts describing these characters….
After a short overview of ancient texts describing the inhabitants of inaccessible lands, it is time for medieval authors. The knowledge of the world developed in antiquity penetrated the imagination of Christian writers. On the one hand, they rejected everything that was associated with pagan practices, but they remained faithful to the belief that monstrous…
What do you see when you look at this painting? I first see the vastness of the blue and the background escaping with the perspective, and soon afterwards a monumental figure of a young man grows up in front of me. I watch him with attention – he certainly feels pain, because in his body…
In times when there was no television and cinema, the paintings had the power of visual storytelling. Their overtones could be diverse – they could be moralizing, instructive, playful or even grotesque. One thing was unchangeable – one glance was to make the viewer be drawn into the story. Ilja Riepin was undoubtedly one of…
I always visit this statue every time I am at the Rijksmuseum. No other work I seek to see that often and I can not explain why. I am attracted to everything in it – harmony, the balance of the body shown in the dance and the aura difficult to explain. I imagine it being…
I often wonder how the stereotypes arise. By them I mean those beliefs imprinted into our consciousness, which we mistakenly take for the truth about the world around us. And what makes it so difficult to remove, replace them? They are often used to describe something that escapes cognition. Where there is no direct experience,…
In the eighties of the nineteenth century, photography was still a new medium. The people photographed at the time have a peculiar facial expression – they do not smile, they look at the lens in concentration, they do not correct the facial expressions. It is as if they were not aware that someone is watching…
Today is the March equinox. From now on, the day will be longer than the night. This moment was worshiped by many cultures, in Babylon it marked the beginning of the new year. Twelve-day celebrations began with a procession that set off through the northern gate of the city, dedicated to the goddess of love…