Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino

This is a 170 year old painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner and is supposed to go to auction on 7 July 2010.

Sotheby’s auction house said the painting was being sold by a descendant of the 5th Earl of Rosebery to help secure the future of estates. The painting has been estimated to fetch £18 million. It will be on view in Sotheby’s New York auction house from 29 April to 14 May, before returning to London for the auction. The painting, which is in immaculate condition, has been described by Sotheby’s as “undoubtedly among the most important of Turner’s works ever to come to auction”.

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Cloud Gate

Cloud Gate, a public sculpture by Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor, is the centerpiece of the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Constructed between 2004 and 2006, the sculpture is nicknamed “The Bean” because of its legume-like shape. Made up of 168 stainless steel plates welded together, its highly polished exterior has no visible seams. It is 33 feet by 66 feet by 42 feet (10 m × 20 m × 13 m), and weighs 110 short tons (100 t; 98 long tons).

Kapoor’s design was inspired by liquid mercury and the sculpture’s surface reflects and distorts the city’s skyline. Visitors are able to walk around and under Cloud Gate’s 12-foot (3.7 m) high arch. On the underside is the “omphalos” (Greek for “navel”), a concave chamber that warps and multiplies reflections. The sculpture builds upon many of Kapoor’s artistic themes, although many tourists simply view the sculpture and its unique reflective properties as a photo-taking opportunity.

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Escagraph

The term “escagraph”  is used describe the many forms, past and present, of writing on food and letters as food. The term is a concatenation of esca (from Latin meaning “victuals” or “things to be eaten”) and graph (after the Greek meaning: “mark” or the infinitive verb “to write”).

Research has identified examples of escagraphs as far back as Ancient Egypt  and the Roman Empire, primarily bread with words stamped into them prior to baking. Use of escagraphs waned a bit during periods of early Christianity to the 19th century, though some interesting examples exist in bread assizes and sotelties.

Today, of course, examples of escagraphs are legion, organized roughly into three basic categories:

Sweet

Most forms of escagraphs today are sweet, either molded into or drawn onto the surface of the food. Cakes with “Happy Birthday” are extremely common. Heart-shaped candies with mottoes on them have been produced since about 1901 and are often shared at Valentine’s Day. Many chocolate bars bear the name of their maker imprinted on their surface.

Lawful

Only a few lawful examples remain, since the bread assizes of the 15th century. However, the United States Department of Agriculture does mark certain meat products with certifications and grades in an edible ink.

Moveable Type

From alphabet cookies to cereal to pasta, letters and moveable type are very common even today. Throughout the western world, cookies shaped as letters are made both as edible toys and ostensibly to help children learn their letters. Many manufacturers provide alphabet pasta letters (and numbers) in both ready-to-eat and dry forms.

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Baroque

Baroque is an artistic style prevalent from the late 16th century to the early 18th century.

The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumphant power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence.

Baroque actually expressed new values, which often are summarized in the use of metaphor and allegory, widely found in Baroque literature, and in the research for the “maraviglia” (wonder, astonishment — as in Marinism), the use of artifices. The psychological pain of Man — a theme disbanded after the Copernican and the Lutheran revolutions in search of solid anchors, a proof of an “ultimate human power” — was to be found in both the art and architecture of the Baroque period. Virtuosity was researched by artists (and the virtuoso became a common figure in any art) together with realism and care for details (some talk of a typical “intricacy”).

A defining statement of what Baroque signifies in painting is provided by the series of paintings executed by Peter Paul Rubens for Marie de Medici at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris (now at the Louvre), in which a Catholic painter satisfied a Catholic patron: Baroque-era conceptions of monarchy, iconography, handling of paint, and compositions as well as the depiction of space and movement.

In Baroque sculpture, groups of figures assumed new importance, and there was a dynamic movement and energy of human forms— they spiraled around an empty central vortex, or reached outwards into the surrounding space. For the first time, Baroque sculpture often had multiple ideal viewing angles. The characteristic Baroque sculpture added extra-sculptural elements, for example, concealed lighting, or water fountains.

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