United States or Central African Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the rear of and adjoining the library, a narrow, vaulted passage with high Gothic windows of stained-glass, opened into a beautifully proportioned rotunda, and beyond this circular apartment with its ruby-tinted skylight and Moresque frescoes, extended two other rooms, of whose shape or contents Edna knew nothing, save the tall arched windows that looked down on the terrace.
They were never tired of looking at his Holy Families and Madonnas in the galleries, but especially loved to go to the S.S. Annunziata and linger in the court, surrounded by glass colonnades, where are so many of his frescoes.
All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier tables mingling with modern /bric-a-brac/. And things become abominable when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing but disaster, a series of magnificent deserted halls given over to rats and spiders.
George looked at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to him.
The table around which they had sat was there still, and likewise the stations where the masked inquisitors and executioners formerly stood, frozen, upright and silent, till they received a bloody order, and then, without a word, moved off like the inexorable machines they were, to carry it out. The frescoes on the walls were startlingly suited to the place.
The frescoes are by Pordenone, but they have almost perished. By some visitors to Venice, S. Stefano may be esteemed furthermore as offering a harbour of refuge from pictures, for it has nothing that need be too conscientiously scrutinized.
While in the first chapel on the right is the tomb of Michael Angelo, who died at Rome on the 17th of February, 1564; the monument was designed by Vasari, the bust was executed by Battista Lorenzo. Two contemporary sculptors, Valerio Cioli and Giovanni Dell'Opera, did the allegories of Sculpture and Architecture, the frescoes around the monument being by Battista Naldini.
The three vases from Hagia Triada, the Boxer, the Harvester, and the Chieftain, belong to this period, as do also the frescoes of the Hunting Cat and the Climbing Plants, and probably the Royal Gaming Board from the palace at Knossos. At this time, too, we come upon the long bronze swords which had succeeded the daggers of the preceding ages.
But somehow, I can not keep that Medici mausoleum out of my memory. It is as large as a church; its pavement is rich enough for the pavement of a King's palace; its great dome is gorgeous with frescoes; its walls are made of what? Marble? plaster? wood? paper? No. Red porphyry verde antique jasper oriental agate alabaster mother-of-pearl chalcedony red coral lapis lazuli!
You pass from one church to another from S. Francesco, with its façade of green and white, its pleasant cloister and old frescoes, to La Madonna delle Carceri, to S. Niccolò da Tolentino, to S. Domenico and you ask yourself, as you pass from one to another, what you have come to see: only this flower fallen by the wayside.
Word Of The Day