Antwerp
Antwerp is a city in Belgium, is the capital of Antwerp province in Flanders. With a population of 520,504, it is the most populous city proper in Belgium, with 1,200,000 the second largest metropolitan region after Brussels. Antwerp is on the River Scheldt, linked to the North Sea by the river's Westerschelde estuary, it is about 40 kilometres north of Brussels, about 15 kilometres south of the Dutch border. The Port of Antwerp is one of the biggest in the world, ranking second in Europe and within the top 20 globally; the city is known for its diamond industry and trade. Both economically and culturally, Antwerp is and has long been an important city in the Low Countries before and during the Spanish Fury and throughout and after the subsequent Dutch Revolt. Antwerp was the place of the world's oldest stock exchange building built in 1531 and re-built in 1872; the inhabitants of Antwerp are nicknamed Sinjoren, after the Spanish honorific señor or French seigneur, "lord", referring to the Spanish noblemen who ruled the city in the 17th century.
The city hosted the 1920 Summer Olympics. According to folklore, notably celebrated by a statue in front of the town hall, the city got its name from a legend about a giant called Antigoon who lived near the Scheldt river, he extracted a toll from passing boatmen, for those who refused, he severed one of their hands and threw it into the river. The giant was killed by a young hero named Silvius Brabo, who cut off the giant's own hand and flung it into the river. Hence the name Antwerpen, from Dutch hand werpen, akin to Old English hand and wearpan, which has evolved to today's warp. A longstanding theory is that the name originated in the Gallo-Roman period and comes from the Latin antverpia. Antverpia would come from Ante Verpia, indicating land that forms by deposition in the inside curve of a river. Note that the river Scheldt, before a transition period between 600 and 750, followed a different track; this must have coincided with the current ringway south of the city, situating the city within a former curve of the river.
However, many historians think it unlikely that there was a large settlement which would be named'Antverpia', but more something like an outpost with a river crossing. However, John Lothrop Motley argues, so do a lot of Dutch etymologists and historians, that Antwerp's name derives from "anda" and "werpum" to give an't werf. Aan't werp is possible; this "warp" is a man-made hill or a river deposit, high enough to remain dry at high tide, whereupon a construction could be built that would remain dry. Another word for werp is pol hence polders. Alfred Michiels has suggested that derivations based on hand werpen, Antverpia, "on the wharf", or "at the warp" lack historical backing in the form of recorded past spellings of the placename, he points instead to Dado's Life of St. Eligius from the 7th century, which records the form Andoverpis, he sees in it a Celtic origin indicating "those who live on both banks". Historical Antwerp had its origins in a Gallo-Roman vicus. Excavations carried out in the oldest section near the Scheldt, 1952–1961, produced pottery shards and fragments of glass from mid-2nd century to the end of the 3rd century.
The earliest mention of Antwerp dates from the 4th century. In the 4th century, Antwerp was first named; the Merovingian Antwerp was evangelized by Saint Amand in the 7th century. At the end of the 10th century, the Scheldt became the boundary of the Holy Roman Empire. Antwerp became a margraviate in 980, by the German emperor Otto II, a border province facing the County of Flanders. In the 11th century, the best-known leader of the First Crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon, was Margrave of Antwerp, from 1076 until his death in 1100, though he was also Duke of Lower Lorraine and Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. In the 12th century, Norbert of Xanten established a community of his Premonstratensian canons at St. Michael's Abbey at Caloes. Antwerp was the headquarters of Edward III during his early negotiations with Jacob van Artevelde, his son Lionel, the Duke of Clarence, was born there in 1338. After the silting-up of the Zwin and the consequent decline of Bruges, the city of Antwerp part of the Duchy of Brabant, grew in importance.
At the end of the 15th century the foreign trading houses were transferred from Bruges to Antwerp, the building assigned to the English nation is mentioned in 1510. Antwerp became the sugar capital of Europe, importing the raw commodity from Portuguese and Spanish plantations; the city attracted Italian and German sugar refiners by 1550, shipped their refined product to Germany Cologne. Moneylenders and financiers developed a large business lending money all over Europe including the English government in 1544–1574. London bankers were too small to operate on that scale, Antwerp had a efficient bourse that itself attracted rich bankers from around Europe. After the 1570s, the city's banking business declined: England ended its borrowing in Antwerp in 1574. Fernand Braudel states that Antwerp became "the centre of the entire international economy, something Bruges had never been at its height." Antwerp was the richest city in Europe at this time. Antwerp's golden age is l
Historical Museum, Frankfurt
The Historical Museum in Frankfurt am Main, was founded in 1878, includes cultural and historical objects relating to the history of Frankfurt and Germany. It moved into the Saalhof in 1955, a new extension was opened in 1972; the 1970s extension is being replaced by a modern new exhibition building and a small administration building which are expected to be completed by 2015. The museum's collection is displayed in several permanent chronological exhibitions: Mediaeval Frankfurt, the Late Middle Ages, the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the nineteenth-century city, its history as a metropolis from 1866 to 2001. Special exhibitions are on display. Museumsufer List of museums in Germany Historisches Museum Frankfurt web site
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being 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, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's 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. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Frankfurt
Frankfurt is a metropolis and the largest city of the German federal state of Hesse, its 746,878 inhabitants make it the fifth-largest city of Germany after Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. On the River Main, it forms a continuous conurbation with the neighbouring city of Offenbach am Main, its urban area has a population of 2.3 million. The city is at the centre of the larger Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region, which has a population of 5.5 million and is Germany's second-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr Region. Since the enlargement of the European Union in 2013, the geographic centre of the EU is about 40 km to the east of Frankfurt's central business district. Like France and Franconia, the city is named after the Franks. Frankfurt is the largest city in the Rhine Franconian dialect area. Frankfurt was a city state, the Free City of Frankfurt, for nearly five centuries, was one of the most important cities of the Holy Roman Empire, as a site of imperial coronations, it has been part of the federal state of Hesse since 1945.
A quarter of the population are foreign nationals, including many expatriates. Frankfurt is an alpha world city and a global hub for commerce, education and transportation, it is the site of many European corporate headquarters. Frankfurt Airport is among the world's busiest. Frankfurt is the major financial centre of the European continent, with the headquarters of the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, KfW, several cloud and fintech startups and other institutes. Automotive and research, consulting and creative industries complement the economic base. Frankfurt's DE-CIX is the world's largest internet exchange point. Messe Frankfurt is one of the world's largest trade fairs. Major fairs include the Frankfurt Motor Show, the world's largest motor show, the Music Fair, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest book fair. Frankfurt is home to influential educational institutions, including the Goethe University, the UAS, the FUMPA, graduate schools like the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.
Its renowned cultural venues include the concert hall Alte Oper, Europe's largest English theatre and many museums. Frankfurt's skyline is shaped by some of Europe's tallest skyscrapers; the city is characterised by various green areas and parks, including the central Wallanlagen, the City Forest and two major botanical gardens, the Palmengarten and the University's Botanical Garden. Important is the Frankfurt Zoo. In electronic music, Frankfurt has been a pioneering city since the 1980s, with renowned DJs including Sven Väth, Marc Trauner, Scot Project, Kai Tracid, the clubs Dorian Gray, U60311, Omen and Cocoon. In sports, the city is known as the home of the top tier football club Eintracht Frankfurt, the Löwen Frankfurt ice hockey team, the basketball club Frankfurt Skyliners, the Frankfurt Marathon and the venue of Ironman Germany. Frankfurt is the largest financial centre in continental Europe, it is home to the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt Stock Exchange and several large commercial banks.
The Frankfurt Stock Exchange is one of the world's largest stock exchanges by market capitalization and accounts for more than 90 percent of the turnover in the German market. In 2010, 63 national and 152 international banks had their registered offices in Frankfurt, including Germany's major banks, notably Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, KfW and Commerzbank, as well as 41 representative offices of international banks. Frankfurt is considered a global city. Among global cities it was ranked 10th by the Global Power City Index 2011 and 11th by the Global City Competitiveness Index 2012. Among financial centres it was ranked 8th by the International Financial Centers Development Index 2013 and 9th by the Global Financial Centres Index 2013, its central location within Germany and Europe makes Frankfurt a major air and road transport hub. Frankfurt Airport is one of the world's busiest international airports by passenger traffic and the main hub for Germany's flag carrier Lufthansa. Frankfurt Central Station is one of the largest rail stations in Europe and the busiest junction operated by Deutsche Bahn, the German national railway company, with 342 trains a day to domestic and European destinations.
Frankfurter Kreuz, the Autobahn interchange close to the airport, is the most used interchange in the EU, used by 320,000 cars daily. In 2011 human-resource-consulting firm Mercer ranked Frankfurt as seventh in its annual'Quality of Living' survey of cities around the world. According to The Economist cost-of-living survey, Frankfurt is Germany's most expensive city and the world's 10th most expensive. Frankfurt has many high-rise buildings in the city centre, forming the Frankfurt skyline, it is one of the few cities in the European Union to have such a skyline and because of it Germans sometimes refer to Frankfurt as Mainhattan, a portmanteau of the local Main River and Manhattan. The other well known and obvious nickname is Bankfurt. Before World War II the city was globally noted for its unique old town with timber-framed buildings, the largest timber-framed old town in Europe; the Römer area was rebuilt and is popular with visitors and for eve
Museo del Prado
The Prado Museum is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It is considered to have one of the world's finest collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish Royal Collection, the single best collection of Spanish art. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture in 1819, it contains important collections of other types of works. El Prado is one of the most visited sites in the world, it is considered one of the greatest art museums in the world; the numerous works by Francisco Goya, the single most extensively represented artist, as well as by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velázquez, are some of the highlights of the collection. The collection comprises around 8,200 drawings, 7,600 paintings, 4,800 prints, 1,000 sculptures, in addition to a large number of other works of art and historic documents; as of 2012, the museum displayed about 1,300 works in the main buildings, while around 3,100 works were on temporary loan to various museums and official institutions.
The remainder were in storage. The museum received 2.8 million visitors in 2012. It is one of the largest museums in Spain; the best-known work on display at the museum is Las Meninas by Velázquez. Velázquez and his keen eye and sensibility were responsible for bringing much of the museum's fine collection of Italian masters to Spain, now the largest outside Italy; the museum is planning a 16% extension in the nearby Salón de Reinos, to be opened in 2019. The building, now the home of the Museo Nacional del Prado was designed in 1785 by architect of the Enlightenment in Spain Juan de Villanueva on the orders of Charles III to house the Natural History Cabinet. Nonetheless, the building's final function was not decided until the monarch's grandson, Ferdinand VII, encouraged by his wife, Queen María Isabel de Braganza, decided to use it as a new Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures; the Royal Museum, which would soon become known as the National Museum of Painting and Sculpture, subsequently the Museo Nacional del Prado, opened to the public for the first time in November 1819.
It was created with the double aim of showing the works of art belonging to the Spanish Crown and to demonstrate to the rest of Europe that Spanish art was of equal merit to any other national school. The first catalogue of the Museum, published in 1819 and devoted to Spanish painting, included 311 paintings, although at that time the Museum housed 1,510 from the various royal residences, the Reales Sitios, including works from other schools; the exceptionally important royal collection, which forms the nucleus of the present-day Museo del Prado, started to increase in the 16th century during the time of Charles V and continued under the succeeding Habsburg and Bourbon monarchs. Their efforts and determination led to the Royal Collection being enriched by some of the masterpieces now to be seen in the Prado; these include The Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden, The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch, Knight with his Hand on his Breast by El Greco, The Death of the Virgin by Mantegna, The Holy Family, known as "La Perla", by Raphael, Charles V at Mülhberg by Titian, Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet by Tintoretto, Dürer's Self-portrait, Las Meninas by Velázquez, The Three Graces by Rubens, The Family of Charles IV by Goya.
In addition to works from the Spanish royal collection, other holdings increased and enriched the Museum with further masterpieces, such as the two Majas by Goya. Among the now closed museums whose collections have been added to that of the Prado were the Museo de la Trinidad in 1872, the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1971. In addition, numerous legacies and purchases have been of crucial importance for the growth of the collection. Various works entered the Prado from the Museo de la Trinidad, including The Fountain of Grace by the School of Van Eyck, the Santo Domingo and San Pedro Martír altarpieces painted for the monastery of Santo Tomás in Ávila by Pedro Berruguete, the five canvases by El Greco executed for the Colegio de doña María de Aragón. Most of the Museum's 19th-century paintings come from the former Museo de Arte Moderno, including works by the Madrazos, José de Madrazo y Agudo and Federico de Madrazo, Vicente López, Carlos de Haes, Eduardo Rosales and Sorolla. Upon the deposition of Isabella II in 1868, the museum was nationalized and acquired the new name of "Museo del Prado".
The building housed the royal collection of arts, it proved too small. The first enlargement to the museum took place in 1918. Since the creation of the Museo del Prado more than 2,300 paintings have been incorporated into its collection, as well as a large number of sculptures, prints and works of art through bequests and purchases, which account for most of the New Acquisitions. Numerous bequests have enriched the Museum's holdings, such as the outstanding collection of medals left to the Museum by Pablo Bosch. Important donations include Barón Emile d'Erlanger's gift of Goya's Black Paintings in 1881. Among the numerous works that have entered the collection through purchase are some outstanding ones acquired in recent years including two works by El Greco, The Fable and The Flight into Egypt acquired in 1993 and 2001, Goya's Countess of Chinchón bought in 2000, Velázquez's portrait of The Pope's Barber, acquired in 2003 and Fra Angelico's Madonna of the Pomegranate purchased in 2016. Between 1873
Biografisch Portaal
The Biografisch Portaal is an initiative based at the Huygens Institute for Dutch History in The Hague, with the aim of making biographical texts of the Netherlands more accessible. The project was started in February 2010 with material for 40,000 digitized biographies, with the goal to grant digital access to all reliable information about people of the Netherlands from the earliest beginnings of history up to modern times; the Netherlands as a geographic term includes former colonies, the term "people" refers both to people born in the Netherlands and its former colonies, to people born elsewhere but active in the Netherlands and its former colonies. As of 2011, only biographical information about deceased people is included; the system used is based on the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative. Access to the Biografisch Portaal is available free through a web-based interface; the project is a cooperative undertaking by ten scientific and cultural bodies in the Netherlands with the Huygens Institute as main contact.
The other bodies are: The Biografie Instituut The Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie The Digital Library for Dutch Literature Data Archiving and Networked Services The International Institute of Social History The Onderzoekscentrum voor Geschiedenis en Cultuur, The Parlementair Documentatie Centrum The Netherlands Institute for Art History Besides ongoing digital projects, Dutch biographical dictionaries published in book form that have been digitized and incorporated into the indexes of the Biografisch Portaal are: The work of Abraham van der Aa, the first Dutch biographical dictionary The BWN, or Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland The NNBW, or Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek The work of Johan Engelbert Elias on the Amsterdam regency known as Vroedschap van Amsterdam The work of Barend Glasius known as Godgeleerd Nederland The work of Roeland van Eynden and Adriaan van der Willigen, known as Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst The work of Jan van Gool known as Nieuwe Schouburg The work of Jacob Campo Weyerman known as The Lives of Dutch painters and paintresses The BLNP, or Biografisch lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlands protestantismeAs of November 2012 the Biografisch Portaal contained 80,206 persons in 125,592 biographies.
In February 2012, a new project was started called "BiographyNed" to build an analytical tool for use with the Biografisch Portaal that will link biographies to events in time and space. The main goal of the three-year project is to formulate ‘the boundaries of the Netherlands’. List of Dutch people Official website
Grisaille
A grisaille is a painting executed in shades of grey or of another neutral greyish colour. It is used in large decorative schemes in imitation of sculpture. Many grisailles include a wider colour range, like the Andrea del Sarto fresco illustrated. Paintings executed in brown are referred to as brunaille, paintings executed in green are called verdaille. A grisaille may be executed for its own sake, as underpainting for an oil painting, or as a model for an engraver to work from. "Rubens and his school sometimes use monochrome techniques in sketching compositions for engravers." Full colouring of a subject makes many more demands of an artist, working in grisaille was chosen as being quicker and cheaper, although the effect was sometimes deliberately chosen for aesthetic reasons. Grisaille paintings resemble the drawings in monochrome, that artists from the Renaissance on were trained to produce. Giotto used grisaille in the lower registers of his frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck and their successors painted grisaille figures on the outsides of the wings of triptychs, including the Ghent Altarpiece.
These were the sides on display for most of the time, as the doors were kept closed except on feast days or at the request of tourists. However today these images are invisible in museums when the tryptych is displayed open and flat against a wall. In these cases imitation of sculpture was intended. Illuminated manuscripts had been produced in pen and wash with a limited colour range, many artists such as Jean Pucelle and Matthew Paris specialised in such work, common in England since Anglo-Saxon times. Renaissance artists such as Mantegna and Polidoro da Caravaggio used grisaille as a classicising effect, either in imitation of the effect of a classical sculptured relief, or of Roman painting. In the Low Countries a continuous tradition of grisaille paintings can be traced from Early Netherlandish painting to Martin Heemskerck, Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hendrik Goltzius, through the copious output of Adriaen van de Venne, to the circle of Rembrandt, Jan van Goyen; the ceiling frescoes of the Sistine Chapel have portions of the design in grisaille, as does the lower part of the great staircase decoration by Antonio Verrio at Hampton Court.
Grisaille, while less widespread in the 20th Century, continues as an artistic technique. Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica is one contemporary example. Hugo Bastidas is a contemporary American painter known for black and white paintings that imitate the effect of grisaille and resemble black and white photographs. Bastidas’ paintings reference architecture, water and art history, reflect his concern about the human condition and their effect on the Earth’s well-being. After returning to New York from a Fulbright Fellowship in his native Ecuador in the early 1990s, Bastidas began using a restricted color palette of black and white, his medium- and large-scale paintings allude to black-and-white photography, feature contrasting zones of high and low detail. By making thousands of marks with a size No. 1 hog's bristle brush on linen primed with rabbit-skin glue, Bastidas achieves a high level of image definition. He works in digital photography, which informs his subject matter without rendering a photo-realistic effect.
With the 20th century's emphasis on direct painting, the grisaille technique lost favour with artists of the period. This historic method is still incorporated into the curriculum of some private ateliers; the term is applied to monochrome painting in other media such as enamels, where an effect similar to a relief in silver may be intended. It is common in stained glass, where the need for sections in different colours was thereby reduced. Portions of a window may be done in grisaille — using, for example, silver stain or vitreous paint — while other sections are done in coloured glass. Sepia tone ReferencesA Watercolour Demonstration Using GrisailleNotes Jan Gossart's Saint Jerome Penitent using grisaille Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and workshop, Odalisque in Grisaille
,_Sagrada_Familia_con_%C3%A1ngel_m%C3%BAsico,_Santa_Catalina_de_Alejandr%C3%ADa,_Santa_B%C3%A1rbara,_1510-1520,_Museo_del_Prado,_Madrid..jpg)
,_Mauritshuis_Royal_Picture_Gallery,_The_Hague..jpg)
,_Koninklijk_Museum_voor_Schone_Kunsten_Antwerpen,_529.jpg)
Media related to Master of Frankfurt at Wikimedia Commons
