- photography: Frances Frith, 1859
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| photographer: Felice Beato +/-1860 |
Wednesday 12 January 2011
19th century Pyramids Frith and Felice Beato
Early photographs of pyramids
posted without permission, will be removed from this blog on request.
Imagination, mistakes, corrections and Cestius' pyramid in Rome
One of the key buildings in my imagination (it still stands proudly on a busy roundabout in Rome ) is Cestius’ Pyramid in Rome. This Cestius guy wasn’t bothered enormously by modesty so he got himself buried under a 37 m. high pyramidal mausoleum. A delusion of grandeur if ever you saw one. The romans had seen pyramids when venturing into Egypt some 15 years before its constuction. So Egypt, being an new province of Rome (Aegyptus) was very much à la mode when Cestius died. However the builders must have built it from imagination rather than from a proper set of measurements since the inclination of its sides is way too steep for an Egyptian mausoleum. Some thousand sevenhundred fifty years later Piranesi (1720-1778) made a famous engraving from the pyramid of Cestius in Rome for his ‘Vedute di Roma,’ the first widespread work of art to satisfy the eyes and imagination of ‘tourists’ making their Grand Tour of Europe at home.
Thus, Cestius ‘mistake’ was to be continued in the minds of antiquity lovers, architects and dreamers.
Unfortunately, the spread of Photographs from the likes of Felice Beato (+/- 1860) finally corrected our vision and idea about how a pyramid looked like. As a blogger of the speculative possibilities of photography I do deplore this correction.
Wikipedia facts and figures:
The pyramid was built about 18 BC–12 BC as a tomb for Caius Cestius, a magistrate. It is of brick-faced concrete covered with slabs of white marble standing on a travertine foundation, measuring 100 Roman feet (29.6 m) square at the base and standing 125 Roman feet (37 m) high.[1]
In the interior is the burial chamber, a simple barrel-vaulted rectangular cavity measuring 5.95 metres long, 4.10 m wide and 4.80 m high. When it was (re)discovered in 1660, the chamber was found to be decorated with frescoes, which were recorded by Pietro Santi Bartoli, but only the scantest traces of these now remain. There was no trace left of any other contents in the tomb, which had been plundered in antiquity. The tomb had been sealed when it was built, with no exterior entrance; it is not possible for visitors to access the interior.
- Cestius Pyramid, Rome 2009, copyright photography@swad.be
Monday 5 July 2010
Le gorge du petit Ailly meets the sea, Varengeville, Normandy, France
Le gorge d'Ailly meets the sea. This is a place of wonder a couple of meters below the place where Monet painted his 'gorge du petit Ailly' . But I hate Monet. Just a little one to keep your nose to the grindstone.
Byron's cave
French communards
After the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war parisian insurgents took power in the post war chaos. The so-called 'Paris Commune' lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871.
The french government abolished the commune. Around 18.000 parisians were killed by government soldiers during bloody week
A lot of the the french communards were executed.
The psychiatric patient in the previous article actually depicted such an execution in the top-right hand corner of the Charbonnier photograph. In his drawing he adds an executioner to the already coffined communards. So the drawing must have been based on these two photographs. Ironically, with the photographic process of 1871 it was important to have your subjects to sit motionless.
The french commune and its bloody suppression took root in the collective memory of the sane and the insane alike.
photographs: probably André Adolphe Eugène Disderi
Charbonnier documents french psychiatric hospitals.
Hopital Clermont
[Psychiatric hospitals]
1954
Gelatin silver print
Galerie Agathe Gaillard
LL/15415
In 1954 Jean-Philippe Charbonnier documented French Psychiatric hospitals and this photograph was a part of that series. Some of the photographs were published in Réalités in January 1955. In 2006 a 24 page booklet Jean-Philippe Charbonnier: HP hôpitaux psychiatriques was published by Le traitement contemporain n°4 in conjunction with gallery Agathe Gaillard.
This message was taken without permission from http://www.luminous-lint.com/app/vexhibit/_PHOTOGRAPHER_Jean-Philippe__Charbonnier_.
Will be removed on simple request
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