Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Francis Danby Paintings


Francis Danby (16 November 1793 – 9 February 1861) was an Irish painter of the Romantic era. His imaginative, dramatic landscapes were comparable to those of John Martin. Danby initially developed his creative style while he was the central figure in a group of artists who have come to be known as the Bristol School. His period of greatest success was in London in the 1820s.

Early life:

Born in the south of Ireland, he was one of a set of twins; his father, James Danby, farmed small assets he owned near Wexford, but his death, in 1807, caused the family to move to Dublin, while Francis was still a schoolboy. He began to practice drawing at the Royal Dublin Society's schools; and under an erratic young artist named James Arthur O'Connor he began painting landscapes. Danby also made acquaintance with George Petrie.

In 1813 Danby left for London together with O'Connor and Petrie.This journey, undertaken with very inadequate funds, quickly came to an end, and they had to get home again by walking. At Bristol they made a pause, and Danby, finding he could get trifling sums for water-color drawings, remained there working diligently and sending to the London exhibitions pictures of importance. There his large oil paintings quickly attracted attention.

Latest Years:

Danby exhibited his large (15 feet wide) and powerful The Deluge that year; the success of that painting, "the largest and most dramatic of all his Martinique visions," revitalized his reputation and career. Other pictures by him were The Golden Age (c. 1827, exhibited 1831), Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore (1837), and The Evening Gun (1848).

Some of Danby's later paintings, like The Wood nymph’s Hymn to the Rising Sun (1845), tended toward a calmer, more restrained, more cheerful manner than those in his earlier style; but he returned to his early mode for The Shipwreck (1859). He lived his final years at Exmouth in Devon, where he died in 1861. Along with John Martin and J. M. W. Turner, Danby is considered among the leading British artists of the Romantic period.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Vele's God


Vele's is also called Volos, is a major Slavic supernatural force of earth, waters and the underworld associated with dragons, cattle, magic etc. He is one of the opponents of the Supreme thunder god Perun, and battle between two of them constitutes one of the most important myths of Slavic Mythology.

No direct accounts survive, but reconstructions speculate that he may directly continue aspects of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon and that he might have been imagined as serpentine, with horns and a long beard.Vels is one of few Slavic gods for which evidence of offerings will be found in all Slavic nations.

Volos is mentioned as god of cattle and pleasants, who will punish oath-breakers with diseases, the opposite of Perun who is described as a decision god of war who punishes by death in battle.

In the latter half of 10th century, Volos was one of seven gods whose statues Vladimir I, Prince of Kiev had erected in his city. It is very interesting that vele’s statue it seems that did not stand next others, but it also shows that worship of perun and veles had to be kept separate, while it was proper for Perun's shrines to be built high, on the top of the hill, Vele’s place was down, in the lowlands.


The reason of enmity between the two god’s is Vele’s theft of Perun's son, wife or, usually, cattle. It is also an act of challenge: Vele’s, in the form of an enormous serpent, slithers from the caves of the Underworld and coils upwards the Slavic world tree towards Perun's heavenly domain.

Perun retaliates and attacks Vele’s with his lightning bolts. Vele’s flees hiding or transforming himself into trees, animals or people. In the end he is killed by Perun, and in this ritual death, whatever Vele’s stole is released from his battered body in form of rain falling from the skies. 

This Storm myth, as it is usually referred to by scholars today, explained to ancient Slavs the changing of seasons through the year. The dry periods were interpreted as chaotic results of Vele’s thievery. Storms and lightning were seen as divine battles. The following rain was the victory of Perun over Vele’s and re-establishment of world order.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

The Peterhof Palace


The Peterhof Palace is actually a series of palaces and gardens located in Saint Petersburg, Russia laid out on the orders of Peter the Great. The most dominant natural feature of Peterhof is a sixteen-meter-high bluff lying less than a hundred meters from the shore.

The majority of Peterhof's fountains are contained here, as are several small palaces and outbuildings. East of the Lower Gardens lies the Alexandria Park with 19th-century Gothic Revival structures such as the Kapella.

The Grand Cascade is modeled on one constructed for Louis XIV at his Château de Marly, which is likewise memorialized in one of the park's outbuildings.

At the centre of the cascade is an artificial grotto with two stories, faced inside and out with hewn brown stone. It currently contains a modest museum of the fountains' history. One of the exhibits is a table carrying a bowl of (artificial) fruit, a replica of a similar table built under Peter's direction. The table is rigged with jets of water that soak visitors when they reach for the fruit, a feature from Mannerist gardens that remained popular in Germany. The grotto is connected to the palace above and behind by a hidden corridor.

The fountains of the Grand Cascade are located below the grotto and on either side of it. Their waters flow into a semicircular pool, the terminus of the fountain-lined Sea Channel. In the 1730s, the large Samson Fountain was placed in this pool. 

It depicts the moment when Samson tears open the jaws of a lion, representing Russia's victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War, and is doubly symbolic. The lion is an element of the Swedish coat of arms, and one of the great victories of the war was won on St Samson's Day. 

From the lion's mouth shoots a 20-metre-high vertical jet of water, the highest in all of Peterhof. This masterpiece by Mikhail Kozlovsky was looted by the invading Germans during the Second World War; see History below. A replica of the statue was installed in 1947.

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