web analytics

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: The Bay of Naples

Alexander Ivanov, The Bay of Naples near Castellmare (1846)

 

Alexander Ivanov, On the Shore of the Bay of Naples (1850s)

The Bay of Naples has traditionally been a favourite with painters. Peter Breugel the Elder’s view was rather “flat”, but in the 19th c. artists showed the Bay from many angles and in many weathers. The Russian painters particularly liked it, especially Alexander Ivanov. The Bay of Naples, as seen in Ivanov’s works, is an epitome of serenity and the heat of Southern Italy, even when Vesuvius lurks in the background. Another artist of Armenian origin, who became a well-known Russian marine painter, Ivan Aivazovsky, shows this area in the moonlight, when it acquires a purely Romanticist feel.

Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Bay of Naples (1556)

 

Alexander Ivanov, Torre del Greco near Pompeii and Naples (1846)
Alexander Ivanov, View of Naples from the Road in Pozilippe

 

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Bay of Naples by Moonlight (1842)

Sheffield Hallam University: Andrew Motion “What If…?”

Via Flickr:
What If..? by Andrew Motion

O travellers from somewhere else to here
Rising from Sheffield Station and Sheaf Square
To wander through the labyrinths of air,

Pause now, and let the sight of this sheer cliff
Become a priming-place which lifts you off
To speculate
What if..?
What if..?
What if..?

Cloud shadows drag their hands across the white;
Rain prints the sudden darkness of its weight;
Sun falls and leaves the bleaching evidence of light.

Your thoughts are like this too: as fixed as words
Set down to decorate a blank facade
And yet, as words are too, all soon transferred

To greet and understand what lies ahead –
The city where your dreamling is re-paid,
The lives which wait unseen as yet, unread.

A poem “What If…?” by Andrew Motion went on the side of the Sheffield Hallam University building in 2007.

Listen to Andrew Motion reading his poem

When Diego Velazquez Made It to York

One of world’s best-known painting, Diego Velazquez’s Venus at her mirror (1644-48), hangs at the National Gallery in London, UK. In 2009 several of the National Gallery’s treasures were displayed in the streets of York. Not all of them produced the effect similar to the Spaniard’s painting. For instance, the Feast of Baltazar by Rembrandt, or paintings by Leonardo or Henri Rousseau were much more classical and didn’t hang in the place where a crowd of people were not expecting to stumble into them.

A similar project is currently going on in Moscow, for which I do not have all the details yet.

error: Sorry, no copying !!