Category: Europe
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Selinunte
Selinunte This photo tells a similar story as the one of last week, through its subject as well as its composition. Here we are in an ancient Greek city, not in western Turkey but on the south coast of Sicily, Italy. And the temple in the distance on the left is not of Ionic but…
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A ray of sunshine …
A ray of sunshine … … just enough for the museum guard to bask for a moment in its warmth. A quiet, peaceful scene, for a considerable part due to the inventive architectural design of Daniel Libeskind, with its sober interplay of lines, light and colours. We are in the Jewish Museum in Berlin, where…
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The encounter
The encounter Light reflections make for intriguing pictures. I like posting them on my blog now and then (look for them under Reflections tag). In the 3-dimensional world we often see reflections without really noticing them. Our brain immediately filters them out; we look through them. But on a photograph they clearly show up. The…
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Musers
Musers The musings of the stone figures are focussed on the child at their feet that goes its own way. The large head in the back is looking in the same direction but seems engrossed in his own thoughts. This musing in unison is contagious, I feel like joining them. Photo of the week: Berlin,…
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He who laughs last, laughs best
He who laughs last, laughs best “There was a time when the staging of skeletons of the saints, installed in astonishing postures, was intended to defy death and to show victorious martyrs, therefore to vivify the faith of believers. Each parish had to have a recumbent figure, or at least relics of saints, often taken…
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Sainte Quintienne
Sainte Quintienne The nuns of Montorge didn’t make only wax heads of angels (see last week’s post), also of saints, preferably saints that had come to a violent end while defending their Faith. The nuns would meticulously carve and paint the wounds on the pale faces of the martyrs, showing the suffering they had gone…
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Wax twosome
Wax twosome Two women’s wax heads waiting to be completed with a wealth of hair and a long dress. And then to become flying angels or maybe even the Virgin Mary. But that was in the 18th or 19th century when they were fabricated by the nuns of Montorge. With their wry mouths, I wouldn’t…
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Flat twosome
Flat twosome Like ancient Egyptian reliefs – see for example the reliefs inside Ramose’s tomb in Thebe – Assyrian reliefs too stand out by their flatness and beauty. They are hardly three-dimensional but the subtle curves of head and hair are delicately shaped and bring the face to life. When the relief shows two partly…
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Not to forget
Not to forget At the beginning of the 2nd World War there were 17.000 Jewish residents in the part of Amsterdam where I live. During the war 13.000 of them were deported and murdered in the concentration camps. When I walk through my neighbourhood I can ‘stumble’ sometimes upon little brass plates in the pavement.…
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Anne Frank
Anne Frank There she stands, Anne Frank, on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam where she lived 9 years of her short life till 1942. On 6 July of that year she went with her family into hiding on the Prinsengracht in what now is known as the Anne Frank House. Sculptor Jet Schepp has portrayed her all…
καιρός remembered 