1.
Italy
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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
2.
Renaissance
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The Renaissance was a period in European history, from the 14th to the 17th century, regarded as the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. It started as a movement in Italy in the Late Medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe. This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science, Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, the Renaissance began in Florence, in the 14th century. Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, the word Renaissance, literally meaning Rebirth in French, first appeared in English in the 1830s. The word also occurs in Jules Michelets 1855 work, Histoire de France, the word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century. The Renaissance was a movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism, however, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were back from Byzantium to Western Europe. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe life as it really was. Others see more competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much debated why the Renaissance began in Italy, accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins. During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand, Artists depended entirely on patrons while the patrons needed money to foster artistic talent. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia, silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Eastern world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa, unlike with Latin texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity, Arab logicians had inherited Greek ideas after they had invaded and conquered Egypt and the Levant. Their translations and commentaries on these ideas worked their way through the Arab West into Spain and Sicily and this work of translation from Islamic culture, though largely unplanned and disorganized, constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history
3.
Verona
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Verona is a city on the Adige river in Veneto, Italy, with approximately 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven provincial capitals of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third largest in northeast Italy, the metropolitan area of Verona covers an area of 1,426 km2 and has a population of 714,274 inhabitants. Three of Shakespeares plays are set in Verona, Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and it is unknown if Shakespeare ever visited Verona or Italy at all, but his plays have lured many visitors to Verona and surrounding cities many times over. The city has been awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO because of its structure and architecture. According to a theory that considers the geographical position of the city, Verona is short for Versus Romae which means In the direction of Rome because as italian people say All roads lead to Rome. The exclamation Vae Romae if understood in Latin means Alas Rome, in fact, to express distress or denounce a disgrace ancient Romans used the Latin interjection vae. So, you explain the famous poem by William Shakespeare There is no world without Verona walls, But purgatory, torture. Hence-banished is banishd from the world, And worlds exile is death, the writer would express a Roman concept through its character named Romeo, a name that invokes Rome, according to which the city of Verona was a boundary between the Roman world and barbaric one. Verona was a place of passage and to horses, for those who wanted to go and had walked the Via Claudia Augusta. So the expression Vae Romae Alas Rome would indicate spirit of the place, another theory is that it is connected to the river. Vera was a name of the river Adige before the adoption of the current name, as in many similar instances in Europe the name of the town is formed with the addition of suffix -ona which means settlement over. The city was sometimes known as Welsch-Bern in German. The precise details of Veronas early history remain a mystery, one theory is it was a city of the Euganei, who were obliged to give it up to the Cenomani. With the conquest of the Valley of the Po the Veronese territory became Roman, Verona became a Roman colonia in 89 BC, and then a municipium in 49 BC when its citizens were ascribed to the Roman tribe Poblilia or Publicia. The city became important because it was at the intersection of several roads, stilicho defeated Alaric and his Visigoths here in 403. But, after Verona was conquered by the Ostrogoths in 489, theoderic the Great was said to have built a palace there. It remained under the power of the Goths throughout the Gothic War, except for a day in 541. The defections that took place among the Byzantine generals with regard to the booty made it possible for the Goths to regain possession of the city, in 552 Valerian vainly endeavored to enter the city, but it was only when they were fully overthrown that the Goths surrendered it
4.
Paolo Veronese
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Known as a supreme colorist, and after an early period with Mannerism, Paolo Veronese developed a naturalist style of painting, influenced by Titian. His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colorful style, full of architectural settings. Nonetheless, many of the greatest artists, may be counted among his admirers, including Rubens, Watteau, Tiepolo, Delacroix and Renoir. Veronese took his name from his birthplace of Verona, then the largest possession of Venice on the mainland. The census in Verona attests that Veronese was born sometime in 1528 to a stonecutter, or spezapreda, named Gabriele and it was common for surnames to be taken from a fathers profession, and thus Veronese was known as Paolo Spezapreda. He later changed his name to Paolo Caliari, because his mother was the daughter of a nobleman called Antonio Caliari. He was often called Paolo Veronese before the last century to him from another painter from Verona, Alessandro Veronese. By 1541, Veronese was apprenticed with Antonio Badile, who was later to become his father-in-law, although trained in the culture of Mannerism then popular in Parma, he soon developed his own preference for a more radiant palette. In 1552 Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, great-uncle of the ruling Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, commissioned an altarpiece for Mantua Cathedral and his panel of Jupiter Expelling the Vices for the former is now in the Louvre. He then painted a History of Esther in the ceiling for the church of San Sebastiano and it was these ceiling paintings and those of 1557 in the Marciana Library that established him as a master among his Venetian contemporaries. Already these works indicate Veroneses mastery in reflecting both the subtle foreshortening of the figures of Correggio and the heroism of those by Michelangelo. By 1556 Veronese was commissioned to paint the first of his monumental banquet scenes, the Feast in the House of Simon, owing to its scattered composition and lack of focus, however, it was not his most successful refectory mural. In the late 1550s, during a break in his work for San Sebastiano, Veronese decorated the Villa Barbaro in Maser, Veroneses decorations employed complex perspective and trompe loeil, and resulted in a luminescent and inspired visual poetry. The encounter between architect and artist was a triumph, the Wedding at Cana, painted in 1562–1563, was also collaboration with Palladio. It was commissioned by the Benedictine monks for the San Giorgio Maggiore Monastery, on an island across from Saint Marks. The contract insisted on the size, and that the quality of pigment. For example, the contract specified that the blues should contain the precious mineral lapis-lazuli, the contract also specified that the painting should include as many figures as possible. There are a number of portraits staged upon a canvas surface nearly ten meters wide
5.
Santa Marta al Collegio Romano
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Santa Marta al Collegio Romano is a deconsecrated church located in the Piazza del Collegio Romano in the Rione Pigna of Rome, Italy. The church became a monastery, and by 1560 was under the Augustinian order, the church was consecrated in 1696, with a reconstruction by Carlo Fontana. Deconsecrated by Napoleonic invasions, it functions as a cultural center. The interior art has been mostly transferred, some of the stucco and architectural decoration remains. The ceiling is frescoed by Baciccio, M. Armellini, Le chiese di Roma dal secolo IV al XIX, Roma 1891 C. Hulsen, Le chiese di Roma nel Medio Evo, Firenze 1927
6.
Maffeo Verona
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Maffeo Verona was an Italian painter of the late-Renaissance. He was born at Verona in 1576, and was a pupil of Luigi Benfatto and he is said to have painted with uncommon celerity. Many of his works exist in the buildings of Venice, among them a Christ bearing His Cross. The same church has two altar-pieces, a Deposition from the Cross and a Resurrection and he also painted several pictures for the Udine Cathedral, and for churches in his native city. Walter Armstrong & Robert Edmund Graves, ed, dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical. York St. #4, Covent Garden, London, Original from Fogg Library, Digitized May 18,2007, George Bell and Sons
7.
Netherlands Institute for Art History
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The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center in the world. The center specializes in documentation, archives, and books on Western art from the late Middle Ages until modern times, all of this is open to the public, and much of it has been digitized and is available on their website. The main goal of the bureau is to collect, categorize, via the available databases, the visitor can gain insight into archival evidence on the lives of many artists of past centuries. The library owns approximately 450,000 titles, of which ca.150,000 are auction catalogs, there are ca.3,000 magazines, of which 600 are currently running subscriptions. Though most of the text is in Dutch, the record format includes a link to library entries and images of known works. The RKD also manages the Dutch version of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, the original version is an initiative of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Their bequest formed the basis for both the art collection and the library, which is now housed in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Though not all of the holdings have been digitised, much of its metadata is accessible online. The website itself is available in both a Dutch and an English user interface, in the artist database RKDartists, each artist is assigned a record number. To reference an artist page directly, use the code listed at the bottom of the record, usually of the form, https, for example, the artist record number for Salvador Dalí is 19752, so his RKD artist page can be referenced. In the images database RKDimages, each artwork is assigned a record number, to reference an artwork page directly, use the code listed at the bottom of the record, usually of the form, https, //rkd. nl/en/explore/images/ followed by the artworks record number. For example, the record number for The Night Watch is 3063. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus also assigns a record for each term, rather, they are used in the databases and the databases can be searched for terms. For example, the painting called The Night Watch is a militia painting, the thesaurus is a set of general terms, but the RKD also contains a database for an alternate form of describing artworks, that today is mostly filled with biblical references. To see all images that depict Miriams dance, the associated iconclass code 71E1232 can be used as a search term. Official website Direct link to the databases The Dutch version of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus
8.
Virtual International Authority File
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The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library, the National Library of France joined the project on October 5,2007. The project transitions to a service of the OCLC on April 4,2012, the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together, a VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary see and see also records from the original records, and refers to the original authority records. The data are available online and are available for research and data exchange. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol, the file numbers are also being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAFs clustering algorithm is run every month, as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records
