Manneken Pis is a symbol of Brussels, but I will start this post with a fountain from another place. One of my favourite cities in Europe is Prague: full of wonderful places perfect for walking around, resting and admiring artworks. Surely one of such places is Wallenstein Garden (Valdštejnská zahrada)…
Temperaments, zodiac and the “children of planets”
January, or more generally – the beginning of a New Year – is the time when I want to talk about medieval calendars, or wider: about various ideas of visualising passing of time, often interlaced with astrological subjects. I have once written about depictions of two-faced god Janus, after whom…
Lascivious “Lascivie”
[This post is unsuitable for Readers under 18 years old.] Some time ago I have written about the 16th-century erotic prints (post available HERE) depicting various sexual positions. In that text I referred to the cycle by Agostino Carracci, which survived only in later copies. Today I would like…
Transsexualism?
One of the most surprising ancient sculptures in the collection of Louvre in Paris is probably Sleeping Hermaphroditus – it is a Roman marble statue, and a copy after lost bronze Hellenistic Greek sculpture (dating back to mid-second century B.C., mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his “Natural History”). It…
Masculinity of the 16th century
Federico II Gonzaga, the ruler of Mantua, decided one day that he wants to have a nice summer residence, and he commissioned Palazzo del Te, completed in 1525-1534 by an architect and painter Giulio Romano, pupil of Raphael. I have once mentioned Giulio Romano before, in a post on erotic…