Gabriel von Seidl
Gabriel von Seidl was a German architect and a representative of the historicist style of architecture. Gabriel Seidl was born in Munich, Bavaria in 1848, he was the first son of the wealthy baker Anton Seidl and his wife Therese, daughter of the well-known brewer Gabriel Sedlmayr. Seidl studied mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic School in Munich, he worked as a mechanical engineer in England, where he found that his real talent lay in the field of architecture. He began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, his studies were interrupted during 1870–1871 due to his volunteer participation in the Franco-Prussian War. After an extended period of study in Rome, he opened an interior decoration studio in 1878. Seidl was a member of the Bavarian Arts and Crafts Association founded in 1851 and won the admiration of its members, including Lorenz Gedon, Rudolf von Seitz, Fritz von Miller. In 1900 Gabriel Seidl was awarded the Verdienstorden der Bayerischen Krone. Thereby he became Ritter von Seidl.
In 1908 he was awarded the Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. In 1902 he founded the Isartalverein, an association for the preservation of the natural beauty of the Isar valley, at the Artists' House in Munich; the Isartalverein was founded in order to prevent further destruction of the Isar valley by building speculators after the establishment of the first power plants in that area by the electric power company Isarwerke GmbH. Seidl was made an honorary citizen of Speyer on 14 April 1909 because of his construction of a new building for the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer. In 1913 he was made an honorary citizen of Munich. From 1866, like his cousin Gabriel Ritter von Sedlmayr, was a member of the Corps Germania Munich. Not only was he a faithful corps brother till his death, he drew the plans for the construction of the corps house, overseeing the progress of the work personally. In 1890 Seidl married Franziska Neunzert, the daughter of a forester. Five children were born of this marriage.
Seidl died in 1913 in his residential and office building at 28 Mars Road in Munich. Gabriel von Seidl's brother Emanuel von Seidl was an architect, but because his work focused on private residential buildings, he is not as well known today. Gabriel von Seidl is buried at the Old South Cemetery in Munich. Honorary curator of the Bavarian National Museum Honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich Royal Bavarian professor Honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Munich Honorary Citizen of the City of Munich Honorary citizen of the city of Speyer Honorary citizen of the town of Bad TölzGabriel von Seidl is the namesake of the Gabriel-von-Seidl-Gymnasium in Bad Tölz. Streets or squares are named after him in Bremen, Gräfelfing, Grünwald, Nuremberg and Worms; the Isartalverein erected a commemorative pillar in his memory in Pullach in 1922. Stephan Bammer, Natur- und Heimatschützer. Zum 100. Todestag von Gabriel von Seidl. In Schönere Heimat, 102, p. 4–12, 2013. Hans Bössl, Gabriel von Seidl, Verlag des Historischen Vereins von Oberbayern, Munich, 1966.
Hans Herpich, Monumenta Germaniae, Gedenkblätter zum 100. Bundesfest des Corps Germania zu München, Ingolstadt, 1963. Veronika Hofer, Gabriel von Seidl. Architekt und Naturschützer. Hugendubel Verlag, Munich, 2002. ISBN 3-7205-2295-4 Wilhelm Neu, Volker Liedke, Otto Braasch: Denkmäler in Bayern, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1986. ISBN 978-3-486-52392-8 Gabriele Schickel, "Seidl, Gabriel", Neue Deutsche Biographie, 24, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 180–181. Ein Architekt prägt München.. TV documentary by Bernhard Graf, Germany 2004, BR, 45 minutes. Gabriel von Seidl. Architekt des bayerischen Heimatstils.. TV documentary by Bernhard Graf, Germany 2004, BR, 45 minutes. Literature by and about Gabriel von Seidl in the German National Library catalogue Gabriel von Seidl at archINFORM Homepage of Gabriel-von-Seidl-Gymnasiums in Bad Tölz
Germania Superior
Germania Superior was an imperial province of the Roman Empire. It comprised an area of today's western Switzerland, the French Jura and Alsace regions, southwestern Germany. Important cities were Besançon, Strasbourg and Germania Superior's capital, Mainz, it comprised the Middle Rhine, bordering on the Limes Germanicus, on the Alpine province of Raetia to the south-east. Although it had been occupied militarily since the reign of Augustus, Germania Superior was not made into an official province until c. 85 AD. The terms, "Upper Germania" and "Lower Germania" do not appear in the Gallic Wars of Julius Caesar, yet he writes about reports that the people who lived in those regions were referred to as Germani locally, a term used for a tribe that the Romans called the Germani Cisrhenani, that the name Germania seems to have been adopted to designate other indigenous tribes in the area. Lower Germania was occupied by the Belgae. Upper Germania was occupied by Gaulish tribes including the Helvetii, Sequani and Treveri, and, on the north bank of the middle Rhine, the remnant of the Germanic troops that had attempted to take Vesontio under Ariovistus, but who were defeated by Caesar in 58 BC.
The Romans did not abandon this region at any time after then. During a 5-year period in the initial years of his reign, as Cassius Dio tells us, Octavian Caesar assumed direct governorship of the major senatorial provinces on grounds that they were in danger of insurrection and he alone commanded the troops required to restore security, they were to be restored to the senate in 10 years under proconsuls elected by the senate. Among these independent provinces were upper Germania, it had become a province in the last years of the republic. Tacitus mentions it as the province of Germania Superior in his Annales. Cassius Dio viewed the Germanic tribes as Celts, an impression given by Belgica, the name assigned to lower Germania at the time. Dio does not mention the border, it is not clear. Today we call the section of the Rhine running through upper Germania the middle Rhine. Augustus had planned to incorporate all of central Germania in Germania Magna; this plan was frustrated by the Germanic tribesmen at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.
Augustus decided to limit the empire at the Rhine-Danube border. Thereafter continual conflict prevailed along it, forcing the Romans to conduct punitive expeditions and fortify Germania Superior. By 12 BC, major bases existed from which Drusus operated. A system of forts developed around these bases. In 69-70, all the Roman fortications along the Rhine and Danube were destroyed by Germanic insurrections and civil war between the legions. At the conclusion of this violent but brief social storm they were rebuilt more extensively than before, with a road connecting Mainz and Augsburg. Domitian went to war against the Chatti in 83-85. At this time the first line, or continuous fortified border, was constructed, it consisted of a cleared zone of observation, a palisade where practicable, wooden watchtowers and forts at the road crossings. The system reached maximum extent by 90. A Roman road went through the Odenwald and a network of secondary roads connected all the forts and towers; the plan governing the development of the limes was simple.
From a strategic point of view, the Agri Decumates, or region between the Rhine and Danube, offers a bulge in the line between the Celts and the Germanics, which the Germanics had tried to exploit under Ariovistus. The bulge divided the densely populated Celtic settlements along the entire river system in two. Invading forces could move up under cover of the Black Forest. Roman defensive works therefore cut across the base of the bulge, denying the protected corridor and shortening the line; the key point was the shoulder of the bulge at Mogontiacum where the masse de manoevre or strategic reserves were located. The forts through the forest were lightly defended and on that account were always being burned by the Alamanni, they gave advance notice, however. On being notified, the legions would strike out in preventative and punitive expeditions from Mainz or Strasburg, or Augsburg on the other side; the entire system could only succeed. Fixed defenses alone are not much of a defense, in either modern times.
Other forces are required for attack. At best the fixed defenses serve to delay until a counterattack can be launched. For more complete details on the development of the limes, or frontier, see under Limes Germanicus. In the subsequent peaceful years, the limes lost its temporary character. Vici, or communities, developed around the forts. By 150, the towers and the bases had been rebuilt in stone; the soldiers now lived in good stone barracks within walls decorated by frescoes. Germanic civilization had changed as well. Where Caesar had described burning the wretched brush hovels of the Suebi who had come to fight for Ariovistus, the Chatti and the Alamanni now lived in comfortable Romanized villages around the limes. Germania Superior was reestablished as an Imperial Roman province in 90, taking large amounts of territory from Gallia Lugdunensis. One of its first and most famous governors was the future Emperor Trajan, who ruled the province from 96 until his accession in 98; the Helvetii settlement area became part of the province of Ge
Speyer Cathedral
Speyer Cathedral the Imperial Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption and St Stephen, in Latin: Domus sanctae Mariae Spirae in Speyer, Germany, is the seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Speyer and is suffragan to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bamberg. The cathedral, dedicated to St. Mary, patron saint of Speyer and St. Stephen is known as the Kaiserdom zu Speyer. Pope Pius XI raised Speyer Cathedral to the rank of a minor basilica of the Roman Catholic Church in 1925. Begun in 1030 under Konrad II, with the east end and high vault of 1090–1103, the imposing triple-aisled vaulted basilica of red sandstone is the "culmination of a design, influential in the subsequent development of Romanesque architecture during the 11th and 12th centuries"; as the burial site for Salian and Habsburg emperors and kings the cathedral is regarded as a symbol of imperial power. With the Abbey of Cluny in ruins, it remains the largest Romanesque church, it is considered to be "a turning point in European architecture", one of the most important architectural monuments of its time and one of the finest Romanesque monuments.
In 1981, the cathedral was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List of culturally important sites as "a major monument of Romanesque art in the German Empire". In 1025, Conrad II ordered the construction of the Christian Western world's largest church in Speyer, supposed to be his last resting place. Construction began 1030 on the site of a former basilica which stood on an elevated plateau right by the Rhine but safe from high water. Along with Santiago de Compostela, Cluny Abbey, Durham Cathedral, it was the most ambitious project of the time; the red sandstone for the building came from the mountains of the Palatine Forest and is thought to have been shipped down the channelled Speyerbach, a stream running from the mountains into the Rhine at Speyer. Neither Conrad II, nor his son Henry III, were to see the cathedral completed. Conrad II was buried in the cathedral while it was still under construction; the graves were placed in the central aisle in front of the altar. Nearly completed, the cathedral was consecrated in 1061.
This phase of construction, called Speyer I, consists of a Westwerk, a nave with two aisles and an adjoining transept. The choir was flanked by two towers; the original apse rectangular on the outside. The nave was covered with a flat wooden ceiling but the aisles were vaulted, making the cathedral the second largest vaulted building north of the Alps, it is considered to be the most stunning outcome of early Salian architecture and the "culmination of a design, influential in the subsequent development of Romanesque architecture during the 11th and 12th centuries". Around 1090, Conrad's grandson, Emperor Henry IV, conducted an ambitious reconstruction in order to enlarge the cathedral, he had the eastern sections demolished and the foundations enforced to a depth of up to eight metres. Only the lower floors and the crypt of Speyer I remained intact; the nave was elevated by five metres and the flat wooden ceiling replaced with a groin vault of square bays, one of the outstanding achievements of Romanesque architecture.
Each vault extends over two bays of the elevation. Every second pier was enlarged by adding a broad pilaster or dosseret, which formed a system of interior buttressing. Engaged shafts had appeared around 1030 in buildings along the Loire from where the technique spread to Normandy and the Rhineland; the only other contemporary example of such a bay system is in the church of San Vincente, Spain. The "double-bay system" of Speyer functioning as a support for the stone vaults was copied in many monuments along the Rhine; the addition of groin vaults made the incorporation of clerestory windows possible without weakening the structure. "The result is an interior of monumental power, albeit stark and prismatic when compared with contemporary French buildings, but one which conveys an impression of Roman gravitas, an impression singularly appropriate for a ruler with the political pretensions of Henry IV."In the course of these modifications the cathedral was equipped with an external dwarf gallery, an arcaded gallery recessed into the thickness of the walls, and, a natural development of the blind arcade.
Such blind arcades were used extensively as decorations, lining internal and external walls of many Romanesque churches. At the east end of Speyer Cathedral the dwarf gallery and the blind arcades were composed into "one of the most memorable pieces of Romanesque design"; the dwarf gallery encircles the top of the apse, underlining its rounded form, runs all around the structure below the roofline. This feature soon became a fundamental element in Romanesque churches. "The cathedral re-emerged in a more sculptural style typical of the prime of the Romanesque period." "The transept, the square of the choir, the apse, the central tower and the flanking towers were combined in a manner and size surpassing anything done before. All surfaces and edges rise without stages; the major elements within the combination remain independent.... Speyer became a model for many other church buildings but was unsurpassed in its magnificence."The expanded cathedral, Speyer II, was completed in 1106, the year of Henry's IV death.
With a length of 444 Roman feet and a width of 111 Roman feet it was one of the largest buildings of
Anselm Feuerbach
Anselm Feuerbach was a German painter. He was the leading classicist painter of the German 19th-century school. Feuerbach was born at Speyer, the son of the archaeologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach and the grandson of the legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach; the house of his birth is now a small museum. Between 1845 and 1848 he attended the Düsseldorf Academy, where he was taught by Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Wilhelm von Schadow, Carl Sohn, he went on to the Munich Academy, but in 1850, along with a number of other dissatisfied students, he moved to the academy at Antwerp, where he studied under Gustav Wappers. Feuerbach moved to Paris in 1851, where he was a pupil of Thomas Couture until 1854, it was in Paris that he produced Hafiz at the Fountain. In 1854, funded by Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden he visited Venice, where he fell under the spell of the greatest school of colourists, several of his works demonstrating a close study of the Italian masters. From there he continued to Florence and to Rome.
He remained in Rome until 1873. In 1861 he met Anna Risi. In 1866 she was succeeded as his principal model by Lucia Brunacci, an innkeeper's wife who posed for his pictures of Medea. In 1862 Feuerbach met Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack, who commissioned copies of Italian old masters from him; the count introduced him to Hans von Marées. The three artists became known as the Deutschrömer because of their preference for Italian over German art. Between 1869 and 1874 he painted two versions of Plato's Symposium. In 1873 Feuerbach moved to Vienna, having been appointed professor of history painting at the Academy. Feuerbach developed a disagreement with architect Theophil Hansen over his ceiling mural The Fall of the Titans, painted for the Great Hall of the new Academy building on the Ringstrasse. While in the Vienna he came to know Johannes Brahms. Brahms dedicated a composition to Feuerbach, Nänie. In 1877 he resigned from his post at the Vienna Academy and moved to Venice, where he died in 1880.
Brahms composed Nänie, a piece for chorus and orchestra, in his memory. Following his death, his step-mother Henriette, to whom he had always been close, who had always done much to promote his career, wrote a book entitled Ein Vermächtnis, including his letters and autobiographical notes, it proved enormously successful and enhanced his posthumous reputation. According to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica: He was steeped in classic knowledge, his figure compositions have the statuesque dignity and simplicity of Greek art, he was the first to realize the danger arising from contempt of technique, that mastery of craftsmanship was needed to express the loftiest ideas, that an ill-drawn coloured cartoon can never be the supreme achievement in art. His works are housed at leading public galleries in Germany. Stuttgart has the second version of Iphigenia. Other major works include The Battle of the Amazons, Pietà, The Symposium of Plato and Eurydice and Ariosto in the Park of Ferrara. List of German painters Chisholm, Hugh, ed..
"Feuerbach, Anselm". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press. Rines, George Edwin, ed.. "Feuerbach, Anselm". Encyclopedia Americana. Links to works German masters of the nineteenth century: paintings and drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany, a full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on Anselm Feuerbach
Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
National Library of the Czech Republic
The National Library of the Czech Republic is the central library of the Czech Republic. It is directed by the Ministry of Culture; the library's main building is located in the historical Clementinum building in Prague, where half of its books are kept. The other half of the collection is stored in the district of Hostivař; the National Library is the biggest library in the Czech Republic, in its funds there are around 6 million documents. The library has around 60,000 registered readers; as well as Czech texts, the library stores older material from Turkey and India. The library houses books for Charles University in Prague; the library won international recognition in 2005 as it received the inaugural Jikji Prize from UNESCO via the Memory of the World Programme for its efforts in digitising old texts. The project, which commenced in 1992, involved the digitisation of 1,700 documents in its first 13 years; the most precious medieval manuscripts preserved in the National Library are the Codex Vyssegradensis and the Passional of Abbes Kunigunde.
In 2006 the Czech parliament approved funding for the construction of a new library building on Letna plain, between Hradčanská metro station and Sparta Prague's football ground, Letná stadium. In March 2007, following a request for tender, Czech architect Jan Kaplický was selected by a jury to undertake the project, with a projected completion date of 2011. In 2007 the project was delayed following objections regarding its proposed location from government officials including Prague Mayor Pavel Bém and President Václav Klaus. Plans for the building had still not been decided in February 2008, with the matter being referred to the Office for the Protection of Competition in order to determine if the tender had been won fairly. In 2008, Minister of Culture Václav Jehlička announced the end of the project, following a ruling from the European Commission that the tender process had not been carried out legally; the library was affected by the 2002 European floods, with some documents moved to upper levels to avoid the excess water.
Over 4,000 books were removed from the library in July 2011 following flooding in parts of the main building. There was a fire at the library in December 2012. List of national and state libraries Official website
Golden Hat of Schifferstadt
The Golden Hat of Schifferstadt was discovered in a field near the town of Schifferstadt in Southwest Germany in 1835. It is a Bronze Age artefact made of thin sheet gold and served as the external decoration of a head-dress of an organic material, with a brim and a chin-strap; the hat is on display in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer. It is one of a group of four similar artifacts known as the Golden hats, all cone-shaped Bronze Age head-dresses made of sheet gold; the Schifferstadt specimen was the oldest of the group of four known Golden hats, The Schifferstadt hat was the first to be discovered. After the example from Berlin, it is the best-preserved one preserved with the exception of a small part of the brim. Three associated bronze axes and a comparison with other Late Bronze Age metalwork date the Schifferstadt Hat to circa 1,400-1,300 BC; the hat, like its counterparts, is assumed to have served as a religious insignia for the deities or priests of a sun-cult common in Bronze Age Europe.
The hats are suggested to have served calendrical functions. The Schifferstadt Hat is a 350 g gold cone, subdivided into horizontal ornamental bands, applied in the repoussé technique, it has a undecorated tip. The shaft is squat, with a distinct widening and a wide brim at the bottom; the hat has a lower diameter of about 18 cm. The brim is 4.5 cm wide. At its base the gold sheet was wound around a copper wire for extra stability. Along its whole length the hat is decorated by rows of horizontal symbols and bands. Five different stamps and a chisel or liner were used to create the horizontal bands of repeated stamped symbols, following a systematic scheme; the optical separation of the individual ornamental bands was achieved by ring ribs or bands around the whole external face of the hat. The symbols in the bands are disk and circle motifs with an internal disk or buckle, surrounded by up to six concentric circles. Striking are two bands with eye-like motifs, resembling similar symbols on the hats of Ezelsdorf and Berlin.
Unlike the other known examples, the cone's top is not decorated with a star but left unembellished. The illustration shows the scheme of the shape and composition of the hat, as well as number of ornamental zones and of the number of stamps used for each; the Golden Hat of Schifferstadt was discovered on the 29th of April 1835, during agricultural work in a field named Reuschlache, one km north of Schifferstadt. On the following day the find was handed to officials at Speyer part of the Kingdom of Bavaria; the known circumstances suggest a cult-related deposition: The hat was buried upright, about 60 cm deep. Its top reached to just below the ground surface; when found the hat stood on a slab of back-burnt clay. It was filled with an earth-ashes mixture, of which nothing remains; the clay slab, which crumbled during its recovery and is now lost, sat on a one-inch layer of sand, placed in a rectangular pit. Three bronze axes were leaning against the cone; the hat is hammered from a single piece of gold alloy of 86.37 % 13 % Ag, 0.56 % Cu and 0.07 % Sn.
Its average thickness is 0.2 to 0.25 cm, except the brim, far thinner, at 0.08 to 0-13 mm. The latter may suggest. If the amount of gold used for the hat was moulded into a square bar, it would only measure 2.5 cm square. Such a bar or lump was hammered to the thickness of a modern sheet of printing paper during its production; because of the tribological characteristics of the material, it tends to harden with increasing deformation, increasing its potential to crack. To avoid cracking, an even deformation was necessary. Additionally, the material had to be softened by heating it to a temperature of at least 750 °C. Since gold alloy has a low melting point of circa 960 °C, a careful temperature control and an isothermal heating process were required, so as to avoid melting any of the surface. For this, the Bronze Age artisans used a charcoal oven similar to those used for pottery; the temperature could only be controlled through the addition of oxygen. In the course of its further manufacture, the hat was embellished with rows of radial ornamental bands, chased into the metal.
To make this possible, it was filled with a putty or pitch based on tree resin and wax, traces of which have survived. The thin gold leaf was structured by chasing: stamp-like tools or moulds depicting the individual symbols were pressed into the exterior of the gold. Golden hats Berlin Gold Hat, circa 1,000 – 800 BC Golden Cone of Ezelsdorf-Buch, circa 1,000 – 800 BC Avanton Gold Cone, circa 1,000 – 900 BC Nebra skydisk, circa 2,100 – 1,700 BC Gold und Kult der Bronzezeit.. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg 2003. ISBN 3-926982-95-0 Wilfried Menghin: Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica. Unze, Potsdam 32.2000, S. 31-108. ISSN 0341-1184 Peter Schauer: Die Goldblechkegel der Bronzezeit – Ein Beitrag zur Kulturverbindung zwischen Orient und Mitteleuropa. Habelt, Bonn 1986. ISBN 3-7749-2238-1 Gerhard Bott: Der Goldblechkegel von Ezelsdorf.. Theiß, Stuttgart 1983. ISBN 3-8062-0390-3 Mark Schmidt: Von Hüten, Kegeln und Kalendern oder Das blendende Licht des Orients. in: Ethnographisch-Archäologische Zeitschrift.
Berlin 43.2002, p. 499-541. ISSN 0012-7477 Ernst Probst: Deutschland in der Bronzezeit. Bauern, Bronzegießer und Burgherren zwischen Nordsee und Alpen. München 1999. ISBN 3-572-01059-4 On Schifferstadt town website Historisches Museum der Pfalz
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