Holiday photo post - Emilia-Romagna glories

[brutti_ma_buoni]

I was thinking how best to present these photos before they get even more out of date, and in the end decided to leave Basel for later - it’s a different world, though also photogenic. So here are some Italian themes (loads more on my flickr but I’m trying to restrain myself… not notably successfully).

Comments

[kazzy_cee]

Lovely! Thanks for the mosaic photos :)

[brutti_ma_buoni]

They are so, so beautiful. Photos convey it a bit (better than books where the gold goes flat). But they are such wonderful spaces to be in too.

If you want one to blow up and explore, this one is my pick: https://www.flickr.com/photos/52983331@N08/30976397338/in/album-72157695775953110/. It's the anteroom to a chapel now in the archiepiscopal museum, and you aren't supposed to take photos. But I'm glad I did, cos there are pictures of the chapel but not of this ceiling. It's just a decorative thing, I guess, and the churches are much more spectacular, but I loved the way all the birds are charaterised.

[ningloreth]

Why do you think the mediaeval mosaics are so different? Is it just a change of taste? Or has the status of mosaics shifted from art to craft? Or is it something else?

I love the starry ceiling, and the mediaeval months, and the wolves!

[brutti_ma_buoni]

I'm being a bit unfair with the Dark Ages crack - the major thing that's changed is that Ravenna is no longer the capital of the Western Roman Empire! It's a backwater, and you wouldn't expect high status productions - you wouldn't have the money, the expert setters or access to bucketloads of expensive tesserae. It's quite sweet that they even kept trying - that one with Constantinople on is trying to ape some of the earlier ones which showed magnificent cities

[ningloreth]

That makes sense. (It's many years since I was at uni, but I was always very much a continuity person myself).

What amazed me in your photos -- and I know practically nothing about Italy other than stuff that relates to the Renaissance big hitters, though I did know that Ravenna had been the capital of the Western Empire -- was how Ravenna looks like an AU Byzantium. I think it comes down to the figures being shown in motion, with their weight off centre.

[snogged]

Incredible photos!
Thanks for sharing.

[brutti_ma_buoni]

Welcome!