Lindsey Davis is now the most prolific of all the novelists who focus is on ancient Rome, and that is saying something, considering we are also talking about Colleen McCullough, Stephen Saylor, and Robert Harris to mention a few. There are now an even dozen novels about the sleuth Flavia Albia, adopted daughter of Falco, and counting. I did not much care for the first of the novels in the series as it portrayed Flavia anachronistically as some sort of... Read more
The Lego Victor Hugo Read more
On our first day in Paris we went for a walking tour in the Luxembourg Garden and adjacent streets, with the plan to end up where Yuliya teaches, namely the Sorbonne. This is an enormous garden/park, and Parisians spend a good deal of time in these places– doing exercise, playing soccer, reading a novel, eating lunch etc. Here’s the fountain.. At the other end of the park there is what once was a palace. There is even a triumphal arch... Read more
O.K. So there was more at the Louvre that I had good pictures of, particularly the work of Delacroix and Corot. For example, here’s Delacroix’s St. Sebastien– And Corot’s A Monk Reading.. Or Corot’s The Prisoner of Chillon.. Or Delacroix’s Turk seated by a saddle… Or his Turk Smoking a Pipe Or the Crusaders entering Constantinople in 1204.. And here’s Corot’s looking at the Coliseum through the arch of Constantine… In the following pictures we are looking at the... Read more
Let’s start off with celestial glory, which is the name of this work by Michel Corneille… Originally a much larger version of this was in the ceiling of a church called Val-de-Grace. This beautiful picture by Camille Corot done in the 19th century is of Chartres Cathedral. This is the painting of the three graces– joy, elegance, and beauty, said to characterize the three daughters of Zeus. There are many paintings of ancient ruins, some real, some imagined. This one... Read more
Certainly one of my favorite paintings based the NT Apocrypha is Joseph and the boy Jesus in the carpenter’s shop, working by candlelight. The painter is Latour…. The problem with this painting is Joseph is too old, and Jesus is too feminine and too white as well. A little better is this busy painting of the raising of Lazarus.. another huge picture too big so again I did the close up… This painting of Jesus appearing to the three Marys,... Read more
The Louvre, besides being one of the world’s largest museums, now divided into three major parts, and expanding. It’s well to remember it was once a huge palace for the royalty. There is little trace of it, but here is one hint. There was a zillion people there waiting to get in, but Yuliya has a special pass, so we were lucky, but once inside the major items to see were swamped, so we focused on two, before ascending to... Read more
Yuliya wanted to show us this church for several reasons– firstly, she was baptized here, and secondly, it was ecumenical in character, being both Catholic and Orthodox, as the iconography will show. Interestingly, they don’t baptize infants! Weird. The Jerusalem Brotherhood was probably an offshoot of the Knights Templars, which King Louis of France tried to get rid of (see the novel reviewed earlier on this blog– Realm of Darkness). But this group of brethren who came from Jerusalem to... Read more
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