The lost colony has been one of the favorite mysteries N.C. school children have been regaled with forever. My personal theory, having gone to see the Lost Colony play, is that the colonists were carted off my giant mosquitoes. If you go to the play in summer, bring your spray. We are fortunate that we have early drawings by John White and others of what such a colony would have looked like. Before the 17th century, Thomas Harriot published his... Read more
Of the various special collections there are indeed some amazing rare books, for instance this one from John Adams. There is as well a special exhibit on John Audubon… In our next and final post we will say more about the exhibit on the Lost Colony. Read more
My favorite part of the library these days is the Special Collections which you enter through a door on the left side of building. There is a standing exhibit about Sir Walter Raleigh (pronounced Rowley according to Chris Armitage, emeritus professor of English at UNC who taught there for about 50 years!). Above is the oldest painting of the man, for whom the capital city of the state is named. Raleigh was a commoner, that through poetry written for... Read more
This is the view from in front of the Admin building looking towards the front of the old library. Notice the top of the bell tower behind it, which looks like this….. and stands across the street from the back of the library. This first shot below shows the central part of the library built while Uncle Louey was the head librarian. He wanted a classic library with marble, and Greek columns, and an oculus, and cathedral ceilings and roof... Read more
Louis Round Wilson was born in the mountains of N.C. in Lenoir in 1876. No one could have known he was destined to become the most famous librarian in the whole state in the 20th century, for whom the grand old library at UNC is quite appropriately named. He’s the one that brought that library into modernity. The original building was completed in 1929, the two wings were added in 1952, and an addition to the stacks happened in 1977.... Read more
This post could be called odds and ends…. of sorts. Here first is some ancient glassware, including perfume bottles… and a mirror And right around the corner is a collection of mostly small statues by the famous French sculptor, Rodin… His most famous statue was Le Penser— the Thinker…. of which there were many renderings, and here’s a small one…. The one I found most evocative is the statue of Eve, trying to hide her shame…. And finally, there is... Read more
In some ways the arrangement of materials in the new building seems random. Yes there are some things grouped together, but with one off kinds of paintings one never knows what is around the next corner. For example, I did not expect what came after this Dutch painting of a storm at sea… Followed by a famous painting of Martin Luther and Melanchthon! Followed by a Milanese woman with flowers in her hair…. Which in turn led to a... Read more
There is quite a lot of funerary art from the Roman and Greek antiquity, and related statues as well. For instance here is Herakles/Hercules usually depicted with a club and/or a animal skin from one of the labors he accomplished. Notice how he shows up on this burial box as well… Here’s a very elaborate tomb for an elite Roman man and his wife… In the Republic period and into the first century A.D. Romans practiced cremation and so did... Read more
In the last post we focused on paintings mostly with Christian and Biblical themes. A word about the Venetian renaissance which attracted many artists. Some of the art was quite humorous such as this painting….. Here’s a painting of a handsome young John the Baptizer…. Yes there were some paintings from classical settings…. here’s a rather lame attempt to depict a Vestal Virgin in all the wrong clothes…. This is Democritus and Heraclitus painted by a Dutch painter... Read more
There is a wide variety of art in the N.C. Museum of Art, which was originally just located in downtown Raleigh, but now has a sprawling campus of several buildings on the west side of the capital city, not far from Chapel Hill. In the following posts I’ll be highlighting some of the things in the new building, like for instance the painting above of Vulcan and his forge, and Cyclops. This is one of two large, major paintings likely... Read more
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