Shake your hips
Tag Archives: Gentile Bellini
tinkling the ivory: recital in the seraglio
Travel hint: Don’t mock Islamic beliefs about Paradise. Not even a John Milton connection about Paradise Lost. There are laws in Paradise, and its no place some some funky anarchist. Screw the Enlightenment. More Heidegger and less Voltaire. Although in … Continue reading
Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Ahmet III Tulip Era, Auguste Roubille, Chris Hedges, Christopher Hitchens, Fazil Say, Fazil Say pianist, Franz Werfel, Gentile Bellini, Madame Girardin wife of French ambassador, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Martin Heidegger, Mimar Sinan University, Norman Finkelstein, Omar Khayyam, orhan pamuk, Rambam, Slavoj Zizek, Sylvester Stallone, Tariq Ramadan, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, Voltaire The Enlightenment
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suspicious minds
Good to walk around with a mirror just to see who may be sneaking up on you. Hard to find a Sultan who wasn’t suspicious and didn’t keep a food tester on the payroll. And lets not talk about the … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Aya Sofia mosque, Conquest of Constantinople, Fabbi Fabbio, Gentile Bellini, Grand Seraglio Istanbul, Hagia Sophia church, Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant, Jean Leon Gerome, Jean-Claude Flachat, john frederick lewis, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Baltimore, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Ottaviano Bon, Selim III sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, Valide Sultans
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peeping thomas and the organ grinding sultan
The comings and goings in the Grand Seraglio would make a Dostoevsky novel look like a child’s short story. No, call this Persian Goth mixed with a surreal world that was so over the top so as to seem like … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Gentile Bellini, Jean Claude Flechet, Jean Leon Gerome, John Mole, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed III, Queen Elizabeth Ottoman Empire, Thomas Dallam, William Harborne
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within these walls what secrets…
The Grand Seraglio. Within its walls the Turkist Sultans sought an answer to a an old question: Can absolute power bring absolute bliss? Within the confines of what is today the Topakapi Museum, the Sultan’s residence the answer between the … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Gentile Bellini, Grand Seraglio, Janissary Corps, john frederick lewis, Lady Mary Whortley, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Mahmud II, Michel Baudier, Murad IV, Ottaviano Bon, Pierre Auguste Renoir
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seraglio: methodical despotism
The Grand Seraglio. The search for absolute bliss backed up by absolute power with all the variations of sex, death, and violence could muster. The price to pay for approaching utopian conditions in a sort of Islamic version of the … Continue reading
palace intrigue: little castle on the prairie
The court artists who were called upon to depict so august and all-powerful a personage as a sultan were faced with a challenging task. The represented the sultan larger than those around him, their rich robes expansively filling out the … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Clement Greenberg, Gentile Bellini, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Mohammed II, Ottoman Empire, Roxelana and Suleiman, Sultan Ahmed I, Sultan Murad III Ottoman, Sultan Mustafa II, Turkish art history
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in and around the seraglio
….Turkey is putting up good economic numbers, and flourishing without the militarily imposed corruption that the Kemalist guarantors of secularism wallowed in as the price of preserving modern Turkey. Tiresome though Turkey’s anti-Israel posturing and pandering to the Arabs is, … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Byzantine Empire, capture of Constantinople, Conrad Black, Gentile Bellini, Grand Seraglio, Islamic Art, King Henry VIII, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Mehmet II, Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Empire Art, Ottoman style portraiture, Selim II The Sot, Siblizade Ahmed, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent
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Money is the sixth sense
Isabella Stewart Gardner was certainly no prude. She liked to tell risque jokes in public, and she did her best to shake up, startle, and rattle staid old Boston society. Her pleasure dome in the Back Bay filled with masterpieces … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Anders Zorn, Bernard Berenson, Charles Eliot Norton, Countess Eleanor Palffy, Edith Wharton, Fenway Court Gardner Museum, Gentile Bellini, Henry James, isabella stewart gardner, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, John L. Sullivan, John Singer Sargent, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Morris Carter
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Gardner: build and they will come
A bowl of fresh violets, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s favorite flower, in accordance with her custom, is kept besode her favorite painting- a somewhat effeminate Christ Carrying the Cross which she bought as a Giorgione despite Bernard Berenson’s advice: “unquestionably genuine… … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Alessandro Botticelli, Bernard Berenson, Charles Eliot Norton, Fenway Court Gardner Museum, Gardner Museum Boston, Gentile Bellini, Isabela Stewart gardner, jack gardner, Lionello Venturi, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Morris Carter, Palma Vecchio, Philip Hendy, Sando Botticelli
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drinking with the man
from Paul Hamilton of the Bisonics: DRINKING WITH JESUS I’ve been drinking with Jesus In a bar full of New Cross geezers He won the jackpot on the one-armed bandit Scooping the loot he smiled, ‘That’s the way Dad planned … Continue reading
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