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)…
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…
[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…
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…
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…