Galocha Cultural

sábado, 20 de janeiro de 2018

Encouraçado 24 de Maio, Antigo Aquidabã, Armada Imperial Brasileira, 1870-1882, Brasil - Marc Ferrez

Encouraçado 24 de Maio, Antigo Aquidabã, Armada Imperial Brasileira, 1870-1882, Brasil - Marc Ferrez
Armada Imperial Brasileira
Álbum Brazil 1870-1882
Fotografia

Gabinete Português de Leitura / Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, 1870-1882, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Gabinete Português de Leitura / Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, 1870-1882, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Rio de Janeiro - RJ
Álbum Brazil 1870-1882
Fotografia

Em 1822 – o ano da Independência política do Brasil da antiga metrópole europeia, Portugal – teve início um período de um certo afastamento entre os dois países, percebendo-se frieza e desinteresse de parte a parte em relação inclusive a aspectos culturais. Ao longo do século XIX o Brasil buscou forjar sua identidade, diferenciando-se da antiga metrópole. A presença de imigrantes portugueses no Brasil, contudo, nunca deixou de ser marcante, e a partir do final do século XIX o fluxo de imigrantes aumentou, e ao longo de todo o século XX e até os dias de hoje, este fluxo passou por movimentos pendulares que ora incrementavam o movimento para a antiga colônia, ora aumentavam o número de pessoas que retornavam para a “pátria-mãe.”
No início do século XX personalidades, em especial intelectuais brasileiros e portugueses intensificaram seus esforços no sentido de reaproximar os dois países. Associações beneficentes e culturais se multiplicaram, e em 1931 é criada a Federação das Associações Portuguesas, com o objetivo de coordenar a atuação da colônia portuguesa no Brasil. Seu primeiro presidente é ninguém menos que Carlos Malheiros Dias, uma das personalidades mais importantes para o Real Gabinete Português de Leitura.
Fundado em maio de 1837 por 43 portugueses moradores do Rio de Janeiro, o Gabinete Português surgiu como uma biblioteca para sócios que se propunha a ser um centro de cultura lusitana que incentivasse os portugueses a apreciar a cultura da mãe pátria. Desde então o Gabinete, atualmente a maior biblioteca de obras portuguesas fora de Portugal e considerado um dos mais lindos edifícios a abrigar uma biblioteca no mundo, vem funcionando como um dos maiores organizadores da comunidade portuguesa no Brasil, em termos de cultura.
Funcionou inicialmente na antiga rua de São Pedro, imediações do Campo de Santana (centro do Rio de Janeiro), e abrigou-se em outros endereços antes de se instalar definitivamente no ponto atual em 1871, na antiga rua de Lampadosa, atual Luís de Camões. O atual edifício, no entanto, foi erguido quase dez anos depois, em 1880, um projeto do arquiteto português Rafael da Silva Castro. O estilo neomanuelino do qual o Gabinete é exemplo fiel prima pela exuberância, a dinâmica de curvas e inspiração na aventura portuguesa nos mares à época chamada dos Descobrimentos. Em 1900 a instituição passa a ser pública (aberta a qualquer pessoa) e em 1906 recebe do rei português d. Carlos o título de “Real”.
A década de 1920 (e também a de 1930) é caracterizada pelo empenho de vários sócios da instituição, em especial o já citado Carlos Malheiros, e o empresário Albino Souza Cruz (dono de um grande negócio de tabaco, vendeu-o a grupos ingleses que o transformaram na Souza Cruz, gigante da indústria dos cigarros). Para as comemorações do centenário da Independência em 1922, o Real Gabinete edita a extensa História da Colonização Portuguesa do Brasil, proposta pela Câmara Portuguesa do Comércio e indústria do Pará sob a direção literária de Malheiros, com a arte realizada pelo aquarelista Roque Gameiro e cartográfica do Conselheiro Ernesto de Vasconcelos.
O impressionante edifício foi tombado pelo Instituto Estadual do Patrimônio em 1970. Atualmente, além das milhares de obras (inclusive exemplares muito raros) oferece cursos, sedia conferências e também possui um pequeno museu com coleções de numismática e de pintura.

Nota do blog: Data circa 1870-1882 / Fotografia Marc Ferrez.

Ponte da Grota Funda, 1870-1882, Estado de São Paulo, Brasil - Marc Ferrez

Ponte da Grota Funda, 1870-1882, Estado de São Paulo, Brasil - Marc Ferrez
Estado de São Paulo - SP
Faz parte do álbum "Brazil" 1870-1882
Fotografia

Palácio do Governo, 1870-1882, São Paulo, Brasil - Marc Ferrez

Palácio do Governo, 1870-1882, São Paulo, Brasil - Marc Ferrez
São Paulo - SP
Álbum Brazil 1870-1882
Fotografia

sexta-feira, 19 de janeiro de 2018

Virgem das Rochas (Virgin of the Rocks) - Leonardo da Vinci e Ambrogio de Predis

Virgem das Rochas (Virgin of the Rocks) - Leonardo da Vinci e Ambrogio de Predis
National Gallery, Londres, Inglaterra
Óleo sobre painel - 189x120 - 1491-1499 e 1506-1508

Leonardo’s mysterious painting shows the Virgin Mary with Saint John the Baptist, Christ’s cousin, and an angel. All kneel to adore the infant Christ, who in turn raises his hand to bless them. They are crowded in a grotto overhung with rocks and dense with vegetation.

The painting was part of a large, elaborate altarpiece made for the church of San Francesco Grande, Milan to celebrate the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. It replaced a similar picture Leonardo made earlier (now in the Louvre, Paris).

Leonardo has used innovative painting techniques to give the impression that the figures are emerging from the darkness of this shaded setting. For example, he has blurred the edges of their forms to indicate the shadows that envelop them. The underdrawing (preliminary outlining of a composition) shows that he attempted a different design but later changed his mind so it is almost identical to the Louvre version.

A Virgem de Granada (Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate) - Lorenzo di Credi

A Virgem de Granada (Madonna and Child with a Pomegranate) - Lorenzo di Credi
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Estados Unidos
Óleo sobre painel - 165x134 - 1475-1480

Alguns estudiosos atribuem esta pintura a juventude de Leonardo da Vinci. Já outros não admitem tal hipótese, citando, por exemplo, a pobreza da anatomia do menino Jesus. Alguns ainda a atribuem a Andrea del Verrocchio.

O Batismo de Cristo (The Baptism of Christ) - Andrea del Verrocchio e Leonardo da Vinci

O Batismo de Cristo (The Baptism of Christ) - Andrea del Verrocchio e Leonardo da Vinci
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florença, Itália
Óleo sobre painel - 177x151 - Circa 1472-1475

The Baptism of Christ is a painting finished around 1475 in the studio of the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea del Verrocchio and generally ascribed to him and his pupil Leonardo da Vinci. Some art historians discern the hands of other members of Verrocchio's workshop in the painting as well.

The picture depicts the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist as recorded in the Biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The angel to the left is recorded as having been painted by the youthful Leonardo, a fact which has excited so much special comment and mythology, that the importance and value of the picture as a whole and within the œuvre of Verrocchio is often overlooked. Modern critics also attribute much of the landscape in the background to Leonardo da Vinci as well. The painting is housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Andrea del Verrocchio was a sculptor, goldsmith and painter who ran a large and successful workshop in Florence in the second half of the 15th century. Among his apprentices and close associates were the painters Botticelli, Botticini, Lorenzo di Credi and Leonardo da Vinci.

Verrocchio was not himself a prolific painter and very few pictures are attributed to his hand, his fame lying chiefly in his sculptured works. Verrocchio's paintings, as are typical of Florentine works of that date, are in tempera on wooden panel. The technique of painting artworks in paint, previously used in Italy only for durable items like parade shields, was introduced to Florence by Dutch and Flemish painters and their imported works at around the date that this painting was created.

The painting The Baptism of Christ was, according to Antonio Billi (1515), commissioned by the Church of S. Salvi, and was later transferred to the Vallombrosan Sisterhood in Santa Verdiana. In 1810 it entered the collection of the Accademia and passed to the Uffizi in 1959. In the 16th century the work was discussed in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters in the biographies of both Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci.
A pupil in Verrocchio's workshop, Leonardo was asked to paint an angel in his master's composition. According to Vasari, this was so impressive that Verrocchio quit painting. It is probable that Leonardo painted much of the background landscape as it is painted in oil, like the angel, while the rest of the painting is in tempera.

Virgem das Rochas (La Vierge aux Rochers / Virgin of the Rocks) - Leonardo da Vinci

Virgem das Rochas (La Vierge aux Rochers / Virgin of the Rocks) - Leonardo da Vinci
Museu do Louvre, Paris, França
Óleo sobre painel transferido para tela - 199x122 - 1483-1486

Leonardo’s emblematic and complexly symbolic The Virgin of the Rocks celebrates the mystery of Incarnation in portrayals of the Virgin Mary, Christ and Saint John the Baptist. For the first time, these holy figures, bathed in a gentle light, are set in rocky landscape. The many contemporary copies of the picture attest to the immense popularity of this new vision of the theme.

The Louvre version of the picture was to have been the central part of a polyptych which the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception commissioned Leonardo and the de Predis brothers to paint for a chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan in 1483. The other version, now in the National Gallery in London and known to have formerly been in this chapel, and several archive documents indicate that the Louvre painting was never installed there. Its presence in the French royal collection is attested from1627, but several clues suggest it may have been acquired much earlier.

The most convincing hypothesis is that the picture, painted between 1483 and 1486, did not meet with Leonardo’s clients’ full satisfaction, which enabled Louis XII to acquire it around 1500−1503. The second, replacement picture, now in London, may have been painted by Ambrogio de Predis under Leonardo’s supervision between 1495 and 1508.

Comparison of the two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks clearly shows the ambiguous iconography of the first, about which much has been written. The identity of the figures may indeed appear unclear due to the absence of attributes and the pre-eminence of the infant Saint John, placed alongside the Virgin Mary, indicated by the archangel Gabriel’s pointing finger and Jesus’s sign of blessing. The desert in which the meeting between the two immaculately conceived children is traditionally depicted has been replaced by a supernatural rocky grotto, water and plants. The mystery of the Incarnation is celebrated by the role of Mary and the precursor John, who in Florentine tradition was one of Jesus’s childhood playmates and already aware of his future sacrifice for mankind. This prefiguration of Christ’s Passion seems to be echoed by the precipice on the edge of which the Infant Jesus is sitting and the vegetation surrounding him (aconite, palms, iris).

The Virgin of the Rocks is the first picture Leonardo is known to have produced in Milan and has stylistic similarities with works painted towards the end of his stay in Florence such as The Adoration of the Magi (Florence) and Saint Jerome (Rome), whose aesthetic concepts it develops. The rigorously ordered pyramidal composition does not hinder the movement of the figures, and the painstaking orchestration of their gestures (the superimposition of hands and interplay of looks) takes on a new intensity in the diffuse light which softens outlines without weakening the modeling of the figures.

The figures’ natural poses and the omnipresence of the predominantly mineral landscape are highly innovative compared to the affected architecture and hieratic poses of the altarpieces of the period. Yet it was not until 1501, when the cartoon of Saint Anne was first shown in Florence that these principles were put into practice by other artists.