1.
All Russian Pushkin Museum
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The National Pushkin Museum is a museum dedicated to the life and work of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. It is located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the museum was established in 1953 on the basis of the All-Russian Pushkin Exhibition of 1937 which opened in Moscow. The exhibition was opened in the Alexander Palace in the town of Pushkin in 1949, the Pushkin Museum contains over 200,000 artifacts, including memorabilia, books and works of art related to Pushkin. St Petersburg Encyclopedia article The All-Russian Pushkin Museum
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Moscow
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Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits and 17.8 million within the urban area. Moscow has the status of a Russian federal city, Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city entirely on the European continent. Moscow is the northernmost and coldest megacity and metropolis on Earth and it is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe, the Federation Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and the Moscow International Business Center. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, the city is well known for its architecture, particularly its historic buildings such as Saint Basils Cathedral with its brightly colored domes. Moscow is the seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are also one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament also sit in the city and it is recognized as one of the citys landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. In old Russian the word also meant a church administrative district. The demonym for a Moscow resident is москвич for male or москвичка for female, the name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river and its cognates include Russian, музга, muzga pool, puddle, Lithuanian, mazgoti and Latvian, mazgāt to wash, Sanskrit, majjati to drown, Latin, mergō to dip, immerse. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa, the original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, Moskva, in a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed, later it became a colloquial name for Russia used in Western Europe in the 16th–17th centuries. From it as well came English Muscovy, various other theories, having little or no scientific ground, are now largely rejected by contemporary linguists. The surface similarity of the name Russia with Rosh, an obscure biblical tribe or country, the oldest evidence of humans on the territory of Moscow dates from the Neolithic. Within the modern bounds of the city other late evidence was discovered, on the territory of the Kremlin, Sparrow Hills, Setun River and Kuntsevskiy forest park, etc. The earliest East Slavic tribes recorded as having expanded to the upper Volga in the 9th to 10th centuries are the Vyatichi and Krivichi, the Moskva River was incorporated as part of Rostov-Suzdal into the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. By AD1100, a settlement had appeared on the mouth of the Neglinnaya River. The first known reference to Moscow dates from 1147 as a place of Yuri Dolgoruky. At the time it was a town on the western border of Vladimir-Suzdal Principality
3.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
4.
Irina Antonova
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Among her many awards and decorations are the State Prize of the Russian Federation and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She is now the President of the Pushkin, a ceremonial post, Antonova studied under Boris Vipper at the Moscow University, graduating in 1945. Later that year she joined the staff of the Pushkin Museum, in February 1961 Nikita Khrushchev put her in charge of the museum. Antonova witnessed as the collection of the Dresden Gallery arrived to the museum from Germany in 1945 and was removed from it ten years later. She opposed the return of the collection to Germany, claiming it was a just compensation for the damage inflicted on Russias cultural heritage by the German invaders, the museum still holds Priams Treasure, looted by the Red Army after the Battle of Berlin. Antonovas interests revolve around Impressionist and Modern art, in 1948, the Pushkin Museum acquired considerable holdings of these works from the nationalized collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Antonova was also instrumental in establishing Svyatoslav Richters December nights, a music festival that has been held in the museum since 1981. Antonova had long supported the recreation of the State Museum of New Western Art, the collections of the museum were dispersed to the Pushkin and the Hermitage Museum. The Hermitage has been reluctant to let its collection go to the museum and Antonova. The Russian Government proposed an online virtual museum, which Antonova rejected, a spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the chances of creating such a museum fall significantly after Piotrovskys disapproval. Antonova later said people who were against the recreation of the museum were adhering to a decree of Stalin, shortly after the controversy, Antonova was fired and replaced by Marina Loshak. Antonova oversaw art collections which were taken by Soviet Union from Germany after World War II
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Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
6.
Museum
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Most large museums are located in major cities throughout the world and more local ones exist in smaller cities, towns and even the countryside. Museums have varying aims, ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public, the goal of serving researchers is increasingly shifting to serving the general public. There are many types of museums, including art museums, natural history museums, science museums, war museums, the city with the largest number of museums is Mexico City with over 128 museums. According to The World Museum Community, there are more than 55,000 museums in 202 countries, the English museum comes from the Latin word, and is pluralized as museums. The first museum/library is considered to be the one of Plato in Athens, however, Pausanias gives another place called Museum, namely a small hill in Classical Athens opposite to the Akropolis. The hill was called Mouseion after Mousaious, a man who used to sing on the hill, the purpose of modern museums is to collect, preserve, interpret, and display items of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance for the education of the public. The purpose can also depend on ones point of view, to a family looking for entertainment on a Sunday afternoon, a trip to a local history museum or large city art museum could be a fun, and enlightening way to spend the day. To city leaders, a healthy museum community can be seen as a gauge of the health of a city. To a museum professional, a museum might be seen as a way to educate the public about the museums mission, Museums are, above all, storehouses of knowledge. In 1829, James Smithsons bequest, that would fund the Smithsonian Institution, stated he wanted to establish an institution for the increase, Museums of natural history in the late 19th century exemplified the Victorian desire for consumption and for order. Gathering all examples of classification of a field of knowledge for research. As American colleges grew in the 19th century, they developed their own natural history collections for the use of their students, while many large museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution, are still respected as research centers, research is no longer a main purpose of most museums. While there is a debate about the purposes of interpretation of a museums collection, there has been a consistent mission to protect. Much care, expertise, and expense is invested in efforts to retard decomposition in aging documents, artifacts, artworks. All museums display objects that are important to a culture, as historian Steven Conn writes, To see the thing itself, with ones own eyes and in a public place, surrounded by other people having some version of the same experience can be enchanting. Museum purposes vary from institution to institution, some favor education over conservation, or vice versa. For example, in the 1970s, the Canada Science and Technology Museum favored education over preservation of their objects and they displayed objects as well as their functions. One exhibit featured a printing press that a staff member used for visitors to create museum memorabilia
7.
Art
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In their most general form these activities include the production of works of art, the criticism of art, the study of the history of art, and the aesthetic dissemination of art. The oldest documented forms of art are visual arts, which include creation of images or objects in fields including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and other visual media. Music, theatre, film, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, until the 17th century, art referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. Art may be characterized in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, during the Romantic period, art came to be seen as a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science. Though the definition of what art is disputed and has changed over time, general descriptions mention an idea of imaginative or technical skill stemming from human agency. The nature of art, and related such as creativity. One early sense of the definition of art is related to the older Latin meaning. English words derived from this meaning include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, however, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology. Several dialogues in Plato tackle questions about art, Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness in the Phaedrus, and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homers great poetic art, in Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, the forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is an imitation of men worse than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation—through narrative or character, through change or no change, Aristotle believed that imitation is natural to mankind and constitutes one of mankinds advantages over animals. The second, and more recent, sense of the art as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art emerged in the early 17th century. The creative arts are a collection of disciplines which produce artworks that are compelled by a drive and convey a message, mood. Art is something that stimulates an individuals thoughts, emotions, beliefs, works of art can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it may be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are considered applied art
8.
Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
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The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is a cathedral in Moscow, Russia, on the northern bank of the Moskva River, a few blocks southwest of the Kremlin. With an overall height of 103 metres, it is the tallest Orthodox Christian church in the world, the current church is the second to stand on this site. The original church, built during the 19th century, took more than 40 years to build and it was destroyed in 1931 on the order of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The demolition was supposed to make way for a colossal Palace of the Soviets to house the countrys legislature, construction started in 1937 but was halted in 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Its steel frame was disassembled the year, and the Palace was never built. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the current church was rebuilt on the site during 1995–2000, the original church was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the 1812 Overture composed by Tchaikovsky, which became internationally famous. It took some time for work on the cathedral to get started. The first finished architectural project, by Aleksandr Lavrentyevich Vitberg, was endorsed by the Tsar in 1817 and it was a flamboyant Neoclassical design full of Freemasonic symbolism. Construction work was begun on the Sparrow Hills, the highest point in Moscow, in the meantime Alexander I was succeeded by his brother Nicholas I. Profoundly Orthodox and patriotic, the new Tsar disliked the Neoclassicism and he commissioned his favorite architect Konstantin Thon to create a new design, taking as his model Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Turkey. Thons Russian Revival design was approved in 1832, a new site closer to the Moscow Kremlin was chosen by the Tsar in 1837. A convent and church on the site had to be relocated, the cathedral took many decades to build, the scaffolding was not taken down until 1860. Its painting was overseen by Evgraf Sorokin, and thereafter some of the best Russian painters continued to embellish the interior for another twenty years, the cathedral was consecrated on 26 May 1883, the day before Alexander III was crowned. Although Tchaikovskys 1812 Overture was written with the completion in mind. The inner sanctum of the church was ringed by a gallery, its walls inlaid with rare sorts of marble, granite. The ground floor of the gallery was a dedicated to the Russian victory over Napoleon. The walls displayed more than 1,000 square metres of Carrara bianca marble plaques listing major commanders, regiments, the second floor of the gallery was occupied by church choirs. The giant dome of the cathedral was gilded using the new technique of electroplating, replacing the older
9.
Sviatoslav Richter
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Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter was a Soviet pianist known for the depth of his interpretations, virtuoso technique, and vast repertoire. He is considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, Richter was born near Zhytomyr, in the Russian Empire. His father, Teofil Danilovich Richter, was a German expatriate pianist, organist and his mother, Anna Pavlovna, was from a landowning family, and at one point had been a pupil of her future husband. In 1918, when Richters parents were in Odessa, the Civil War separated them from their son, and Richter moved in with his aunt Tamara. He lived with her from 1918 to 1921, and it was then that his interest in art first manifested itself, he first became interested in painting, which his aunt taught him. In 1921 the family was reunited, and the Richters moved to Odessa, in early 1920s Richter became interested in music and started studying piano. His father only gave him an education in music, and so did one of his fathers pupils. Even at an age, Richter was an excellent sight-reader and regularly practised with local opera. He developed a passion for opera, vocal and chamber music that found its full expression in the festivals he established in Grange de Meslay, France. At age 15, he started to work at the Odessa Opera, during Richters audition for Neuhaus, Neuhaus apparently whispered to a fellow student, This mans a genius. Early in his career, Richter also tried his hand at composing and he gave up composition shortly after moving to Moscow. Years later, Richter explained this decision as follows, Perhaps the best way I can put it is that I see no point in adding to all the bad music in the world. By the beginning of World War II, Richters parents marriage had failed, because Richters father was a German, he was under suspicion by the authorities and a plan was made for the family to flee the country. Due to her involvement, his mother did not want to leave. In August 1941 his father was arrested and later found guilty of espionage, Richter didnt speak to his mother again until shortly before her death nearly 20 years later in connection with his first US tour. In 1945, Richter met and accompanied in recital the soprano Nina Dorliak, Richter and Dorliak thereafter remained companions until his death, although they never married. She accompanied Richter both in his life and career. She supported him in his last sickness, and died herself a few months later, Richter had a tendency to be private and withdrawn and was not open to interviews
10.
Alexander Pushkin
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Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin was born into Russian nobility in Moscow and his matrilineal great-grandfather was Abram Petrovich Gannibal, who was kidnapped from Eritrea and raised in the household of Peter the Great. Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation from the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. While under the surveillance of the Tsars political police and unable to publish, Pushkin wrote his most famous play. His novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, was serialized between 1825 and 1832, Pushkins father, Sergei Lvovich Pushkin, was descended from a distinguished family of the Russian nobility that traced its ancestry back to the 12th century. Pushkins mother, Nadezhda Ossipovna Gannibal, was descended through her grandmother from German and Scandinavian nobility. She was the daughter of Ossip Abramovich Gannibal and his wife, Abram wrote in a letter to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Greats daughter, that Gannibal was from the town of Lagon. Largely on the basis of a biography by Gannibals son-in-law Rotkirkh. Vladimir Nabokov, when researching Eugene Onegin, cast serious doubt on this origin theory, after education in France as a military engineer, Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually Général en Chef in charge of the building of sea forts and canals in Russia. Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, after school, Pushkin plunged into the vibrant and raucous intellectual youth culture of the capital, Saint Petersburg. In 1820 he published his first long poem, Ruslan and Ludmila, amidst much controversy about its subject, Pushkin gradually became committed to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals. This angered the government, and led to his transfer from the capital in May 1820 and he went to the Caucasus and to Crimea, then to Kamianka and Chișinău, where he became a Freemason. Here he joined the Filiki Eteria, an organization whose purpose was to overthrow Ottoman rule in Greece. He was inspired by the Greek Revolution and when the war against the Ottoman Turks broke out he kept a recording the events of the great national uprising. He stayed in Chișinău until 1823 and wrote two Romantic poems which brought him acclaim, The Captive of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. In 1823 Pushkin moved to Odessa, where he clashed with the government. In Mikhaylovskoye, Pushkin wrote nostalgic love poems which he dedicated to Elizaveta Vorontsova, then Pushkin continued work on his verse-novel Eugene Onegin. In Mikhaylovskoye, in 1825, Pushkin wrote the poem To*** and it is generally believed that he dedicated this poem to Anna Kern, but there are other opinions
11.
Marina Tsvetaeva
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Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917, in an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron were arrested on espionage charges in 1941, and her husband was executed. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a chronicler of her times. Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, the daughter of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of Fine Art at the University of Moscow, Tsvetaevas mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, Ivans second wife, was a concert pianist, highly literate, with German and Polish ancestry. Growing up in considerable comfort, Tsvetaeva would later come to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy. Tsvetaevas two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, were the children of Ivans deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaiskaya, Tsvetaevas only full sister, Anastasia, was born in 1894. The children quarrelled frequently and occasionally violently, there was considerable tension between Tsvetaevas mother and Varvaras children, and Tsvetaevas father maintained close contact with Varvaras family. Tsvetaevas father was kind, but deeply wrapped up in his studies and he was also still deeply in love with his first wife, he would never get over her. Maria Tsvetaeva had had an affair before her marriage, from which she never recovered. Maria Tsvetaeva disapproved of Marinas poetic inclination, she wanted her daughter to become a pianist, in 1902 Tsvetaevas mother contracted tuberculosis. There, away from the constraints of a bourgeois Muscovite life, Tsvetaeva was able for the first time to run free, climb cliffs. There were many Russian émigré revolutionaries residing at that time in Nervi, in June 1904 Tsvetaeva was sent to school in Lausanne. Changes in the Tsvetaev residence led to changes in school, and during the course of her travels she acquired the Italian, French. She gave up the strict musical studies that her mother had imposed and turned to poetry and she wrote With a mother like her, I had only one choice, to become a poet. In 1908, aged 16, Tsvetaeva studied literary history at the Sorbonne, during this time, a major revolutionary change was occurring within Russian poetry, the flowering of the Russian Symbolist movement, and this movement was to colour most of her later work. It was not the theory which was to attract her, but the poetry and her own first collection of poems, Vecherny Albom, self-published in 1910, promoted her considerable reputation as a poet
12.
Millionaire
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A millionaire is an individual whose net worth or wealth is equal to or exceeds one million units of currency. It can also be a person who owns one million units of currency in an account or savings account. Depending on the currency, a level of prestige is associated with being a millionaire, which makes that amount of wealth a goal for some. In countries that use the scale number naming system, a billionaire is someone who has at least a thousand times a million dollars, euros. Many national currencies have, or have had at various times and it is obviously much easier, and less significant, to be a millionaire in those currencies. The purchasing power of a million US dollars in 1850 is equivalent to $28.8 million in 2016, thus a millionaire in Hong Kong or Taiwan, for example, may be merely averagely wealthy, or perhaps less wealthy than average. In 2007 a millionaire in Zimbabwe would have been extremely poor, at the end of 2015, there were estimated to be just over 13 million US$ millionaires or high-net-worth individual in the world. The United States of America had the highest number of HNWIs of any country, while London had the most HNWIs among cities as based on data from the Knight Frank Wealth Report. The word was first used in French in 1719 by Steven Fentiman, and is first recorded in English in a letter of Lord Byron of 1816, then in print in Vivian Grey, a novel of 1826 by Benjamin Disraeli. An earlier English word millionary was used in 1786 by Thomas Jefferson while serving as Minister to France, he wrote, the first American printed use of the word is thought to be in an obituary of New York tobacco manufacturer Pierre Lorillard II in 1843. While statistics regarding financial assets and net worth are presented by household and that is, even though the term statistically refers only to households, common usage is often in reference only to an individual. There are multiple approaches to determining a persons status as a millionaire, one of the two most commonly used measurements is net worth, which counts the total value of all property owned by a household minus the households debts. However, according to the net financial assets measurement used for specific applications, equity in ones principal residence is excluded, as are lifestyle assets, such as the car. Therefore, the above example household would only have net assets of $105,000. Another term used is net investable assets or working capital and these practitioners may use the term millionaire to mean somebody who is free to invest a million units of currency through them as broker. For similar reasons, those who market goods, services, in the real estate bubble up to 2007, average house prices in some U. S. regions exceeded $1 million, but many homeowners owed large amounts to banks holding mortgages on their homes. For this reason there are people in million-dollar homes whose net worth is far short of a million—in some cases the net worth is actually negative. The total amount of money held by millionaires can equal the amount of money held by a far higher number of poor people, forbes and Fortune magazines maintain lists of people based on their net worth and are generally considered authorities on the subject
13.
Philanthropy
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Philanthropy means etymologically, the love of humanity, in the sense of caring, nourishing, developing, and enhancing what it means to be human. In this meaning, it both the benefactor in their identifying and exercising their values, and the beneficiary in their receipt. A person who practices philanthropy is called a philanthropist, Philanthropy has distinguishing features from charity, not all charity is philanthropy, or vice versa, though there is a recognized degree of overlap in practice. The literal, classical definitions and understandings of the term philanthropy derive from its origins in the Greek φιλανθρωπία, the most conventional modern definition is private initiatives, for public good, focusing on quality of life. This combines the social scientific aspect developed in the century with the humanistic tradition. These distinctions have been analyzed by Olivier Zunz, and others, instances of philanthropy commonly overlap with instances of charity, though not all charity is philanthropy, or vice versa. The difference commonly cited is that charity relieves the pains of social problems, the first use of the noun form philanthrôpía came shortly thereafter, in the early Platonic dialogue Euthyphro. Socrates is reported to have said that his out of his thoughts freely to his listeners was his philanthrôpía. In the second century CE, Plutarch used the concept of philanthrôpía to describe superior human beings and this Classically synonymous troika, of philanthropy, the humanities, and liberal education, declined with the replacement of the classical world by Christianity. During the Middle Ages, philanthrôpía was superseded by Caritas charity, selfless love, Philanthropy was modernized by Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s, who is largely credited with preventing the word from being owned by horticulture. Bacon considered philanthrôpía to be synonymous with goodness, which correlated with the Aristotelian conception of virtue, then in the 1700s, an influential lexical figurehead by the name of Samuel Johnson simply defined philanthropy as love of mankind, good nature. This definition still survives today and is cited more gender-neutrally as the love of humanity. However, it was Noah Webster who would more accurately reflect the usage in American English. The precise meaning of philanthropy is still a matter of some contention, nevertheless, there are some working definitions to which the community associated with the field of philanthropic studies most commonly subscribes. The Greeks adopted the love of humanity as an ideal, whose goal was excellence —the fullest self-development, of a body, mind, and spirit. The Platonic Academys philosophical dictionary defined Philanthropy as a state of well-educated habits stemming from love of humanity, just as Prometheus human-empowering gifts rebelled against the tyranny of Zeus, philanthropic was also associated with freedom and democracy. Both Socrates and the laws of Athens were described as philanthropic and democratic, gradually there emerged a non-religious agricultural infrastructure based on peasant farming organized into manors, which were, in turn, organized for law and order by feudalism. Francis Bacon in 1592 wrote in a letter that his vast contemplative ends expressed his philanthropic, Henry Cockeram, in his English dictionary, cited philanthropy as a synonym for humanity—thus reaffirming the Classical formulation
14.
Roman Klein
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Roman Ivanovich Klein, born Robert Julius Klein, was a Russian architect and educator, best known for his Neoclassical Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Klein, an eclectic, was one of the most prolific architects of his period, roman Klein was born in Moscow into a German merchant family of Ivan Makarovich Klein. Klein returned to Moscow in 1885, worked as architect at local firms. Most of Kleins professional career revolved around the 16-year Pushkin Museum project and his knowledge of Greek and Byzantine classics was evident, however, the University also wanted perfection in other historical interiors and sent Klein on two overseas study tours. Klein employed Vladimir Shukhov for structural engineering of ceilings and sunroofs, Ivan Rerberg, the museum was generally complete by 1907, finishing works and expansions lasted to 1912. Klein was in demand among Moscow businessmen expanding their retail. He completed such high-profile buildings like Neo-Gothic TsUM department store in Petrovka Street, Klein also completed a number of banks and office blocks in Kitai-gorod and other districts of Moscow. Less known is his prodigious input to industrial architecture, Klein was the architect for Moscow industrialists like Giroud, Huebner. His lesser customers ranged from country farms and breweries to Moscow first aircraft plant, most of these buildings, with few exceptions, were later rebuilt or demolished. He designed numerous Orthodox, Lutheran and Catholic churches in Moscow and other cities, as a private architect to Shelaputin family, he completed various Shelaputin Schools. Modern critics place Kleins talent below his contemporaries like Fyodor Schechtel or Lev Kekushev, all his work belong to eclecticism, which was normal for 1880s but completely outdated by the 1900s. This may be interpreted as either loyalty to his personal style, Klein had his limitations, but his immense academic background and drawing skills allowed him to imitate styles like Victorian architecture or Russian Revival. His buildings like Nekrasov House are sometimes listed as Art Nouveau, after 1905, when public discarded Art Nouveau, his neoclassical skills put him in the middle of Neoclassical Revival of 1905-1914. Klein, a businessman, possessed excellent skills in educating and managing people. His architectural firm trained dozens of architects who excelled in Art Nouveau, industrial architecture, Neoclassical revival, Klein treated these internships as his own educational work, not just hiring labor. He advocated finding out the unique, individual features of an architect, and bringing up his own creative conscience. In the 1900s, Klein was active in preservationism movement, performing surveys of historical buildings and he took part in the architectural competitions of the early 1920s, side by side with the new generation of avant-garde architects. Roman Klein died in 1924 and is interred at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Lefortovo District. 236-253
15.
Vladimir Shukhov
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He is also the inventor of the first cracking method. Besides the innovations he brought to the oil industry and the construction of bridges and buildings. These forms, based on non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry, are known today as hyperboloids of revolution, Shukhov developed not only many varieties of light-weight hyperboloid towers and roof systems, but also the mathematics for their analysis. Shukhov is particularly reputed for his designs of hyperboloid towers such as the Shukhov Tower. Vladimir Shukhov was born in a town of Graivoron, Belgorod uezd and his father Grigory Ivanovich Shukhov was a minor government official, promoted for his efforts in the Crimean War. For a while, Grigory served as Mayor of Graivoron and later as an administrator in Warsaw, in 1864 Vladimir entered Saint Petersburg gymnasium from which he graduated with distinction in 1871. During his high school years he showed mathematical talents, once demonstrating to his classmates, the teacher praised his skills but he failed the grade for violating the textbooks guidelines. After graduating from the gymnasium, Shukhov entered the Imperial Moscow Technical School, in which his teachers included Pafnuty Chebyshev, Aleksey Letnikov, in the beginning of the year 1876 Shukhov graduated from school with distinction and a Gold Medal. Chebyshev offered him a job as a lecturer in mathematics at the Imperial Moscow Technical School, during his stay in the US, Shukhov came to know a Russian-American entrepreneur, Alexander Veniaminovich Bari who also worked on the organization of the Fair. In 1877 Shukhov returned to Russia and joined the office of the Warsaw–Vienna railroad. Within several months, Shukhovs frustration with standard and routine engineering made him abandon the office, on his coming to Russia in 1877, Bari persuaded Shukhov to give up his medical education and to assume the office of Chief Engineer in a new company specializing in innovative engineering. Shukhov worked with Bari at this company until the October Revolution and their works revolutionized many areas of civil engineering, ship engineering, and oil industry. The thermal cracking method, the Shukhov cracking process, was patented by Vladimir Shukhov in 1891, Shukhov always found time for a passionate hobby – photography. The photographic works of Shukhov opened new trends ahead of their flourishing of Fine art photography and he made photos in various genres, reporting, city landscape, portrait, constructivism. About two thousand photos and negatives made by Shukhov have survived until this day, after the October Revolution Shukhov decided to stay in the Soviet Union despite having received alluring job offers from around the world. Many signal Soviet engineering projects of the 1920s were associated with his name, in 1919 he framed his slogan, We should work independently from politics. The buildings, boilers, beams would be needed and so would we, in the later 1930s during the Great Purge he retired from engineering work but was not arrested or persecuted. Shukov died on 2 February 1939 in Moscow and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery and his many honours included the Lenin Prize and the title of Hero of Labour
16.
Ivan Rerberg
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Ivan Ivanovich Rerberg was a Russian civil engineer, architect and educator active in Moscow in 1897–1932. Rerbergs input to present-day Moscow include Kiyevsky Rail Terminal, Central Telegraph building, Rerberg, a fourth member in a dynasty of engineers, was credited with innovative approach to structural frames and despised the title of an architect, always signing his drafts Engineer Rerberg. Rerbergs father, Ivan Fyodorovich Rerberg, was an engineer who became executive director of Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod railroad. Founder of Rerberg dynasty came to Russia from Denmark in Petrine period, ivans elder brother, Fyodor, became a painter. Ivan was educated in a Cadet Corps, was commissioned into military engineers, by this time he had solid practical experience in building dams and roads. In the same year he dropped out of service and joined the construction team of Kharkov locomotive works. In 1887, Rerberg was hired by Roman Klein as Kleins deputy for engineering on the site of Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Rerberg worked on the site for 12 years and was awarded an honorary title of its lifetime architect. Simultaneously Rerberg managed other projects of Kleins firm — Muir & Mirrielees department store, Moscow State University expansion, Devichye Pole clinics, in 1906—1909 Rerberg, still an associate of Klein, was gradually switching to independent work. In 1906 he won a contest for the first stage of an apartment building in Meshchansky District funded by the estate of the late G. G. Solodovnikov. The second stage was designed by Marian Peretyatkovich, construction was managed by Traugott Bardt who completed the project in 1909 and this building was styled in a mix of Victorian architecture and Art Nouveau, all subsequent work by Rerberg belonged to the school of Russian neoclassical revival. In March 1909 Peretyatkovich and Rerberg teamed together to design the Northern Insurance buildings in Kitai-Gorod, Peretyatkovich soon left Moscow, and final, as-build, exterior of the building was shaped by Rerberg alone. This modernized neoclassicism project, completed in 1911, also employed Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky, Rerbergs career peaked in the five years that preceded World War I. He designed private residences, hospitals, colleges, a high school and his last work conceived before World War I, Kievsky Rail Terminal, was substantially completed in 1917, interiors were completed in 1920—1921. In the period of economic collapse that accompanied the Civil War in Russia, in 1921—1923 he supervised emergency works on reinforcement of Bolshoi Theater foundations that were flooded by a wash from underground Neglinnaya River. Rerberg published proposals for a renovation of Bolshoy, and these were slowly implemented under his supervision until Rerbergs death. Rerbergs draft was authorized in March 1926, and the building was completed in 1927, Rerberg used reinforced concrete frame and moved all staircases outside of main building shell, this resulted in unusually spacious and well-lit open space offices, new to Moscow construction. Later, the space taken by equipment was reduced in favor of offices
17.
Dmitry Medvedev
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Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is a Russian politician who is the current Prime Minister. From 2008 to 2012, Medvedev served as the third President of Russia, born to a family of academics, Medvedev graduated from the Leningrad State University Law Department in 1987. Medvedev defended his dissertation in 1990, and worked as a docent at his alma mater, now renamed the Saint Petersburg State University, Medvedevs political career began as the Election Campaign Manager, and later as an adviser of the St. Petersburg Mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. During this time, Medvedev befriended Vladimir Putin, in November 1999, Medvedev was hired by the Russian Presidential Administration, where he worked as the Deputy Chief of Staff. In the 2000 Russian Presidential Elections, Medvedev was Putins Campaign Manager, on 14 November 2005, Medvedev was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister, and was tasked with overseeing National Priority Projects. Medvedev worked as the Chairman of Gazproms Board of Directors, a post that he held until 2008, Medvedevs candidacy was backed by the popular outgoing President, Vladimir Putin, thus giving a significant boost to his popularity. The 2008 Presidential election, held on 2 March 2008, was won by Medvedev with 70. 28% of the popular vote, and he was inaugurated on 7 May 2008. Medvedev did not run for a term as President, and therefore was appointed Prime Minister by President Vladimir Putin. On 26 May 2012, Medvedev was appointed to be the Leader of United Russia Party, during Medvedevs tenure, Russia emerged victorious in the Russo-Georgian War, and recovered from the Great Recession. Medvedev launched a campaign, and initiated a substantial law enforcement reform. Dmitry Medvedev was born on 14 September 1965 in Leningrad, in the Soviet Union and his father, Anatoly Afanasyevich Medvedev, was a chemical engineer teaching at the Leningrad State Institute of Technology. Dmitrys mother, Yulia Veniaminovna Medvedeva, studied languages at Voronezh University, later, she would also work as a tour guide at Pavlovsk Palace. The Medvedevs lived in a 40 m² apartment at 6 Bela Kun Street in the Kupchino Municipal Okrug of Leningrad, Dmitry was his parents only child. The Medvedevs were regarded as Soviet intelligentsia family of the time and his maternal grandparents were Ukrainians, whose surname was Kovalev, originally Koval. Medvedev traces his roots to the Belgorod region. As a child, Medvedev was bookish and studious, described by his first grade teacher Vera Smirnova as a dreadful why-asker, after school, he would spend some time playing with his friends before hurrying home to work on his assignments. In the third grade, Medvedev studied the ten-volume Small Soviet Encyclopedia belonging to his father, in the second and third grades, he showed interest in dinosaurs and memorized primary Earths geologic development periods, from the Archean up to the Cenozoic. In the fourth and fifth grades, he demonstrated interest in chemistry, conducting elementary experiments, in grade seven, adolescent curiosity blossomed through Svetlana Linnik, his future wife, studying at the same school in a parallel class
18.
Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank
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Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, OM, HonFREng is a British architect whose company, Foster + Partners, maintains an international design practice famous for high-tech architecture. He is one of Britains most prolific architects of his generation, in 1999, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture. In 2009, Foster was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in the Arts category, in 1994, he received the AIA Gold Medal. Foster was born to Robert Foster and Lilian Smith in 1935 in Reddish, Stockport and they moved, soon after his birth, two miles to 4 Crescent Grove in Levenshulme, Manchester, which they rented for fourteen shillings a week, Foster has no recollection of Reddish. He attended Burnage Grammar School for Boys in Burnage, in a Guardian interview in 1999, Foster said he always felt different at school and was bullied and he retired into the world of books. He considered himself quiet and awkward in his early years often making faux pas and he was fascinated with engineering and the process of designing. He says that caused him to pursue a career designing buildings, specific interests included aircraft, a hobby he maintains today, and trains, generated by viewing passing trains on the railway outside his terraced home during his childhood. Fosters father convinced him to take the exam for Manchester Town Halls trainee scheme which he passed in 1951. A colleague, Mr Cobbs son, was studying architecture and his interest led to Foster considering a career in architecture. After working in the Manchester City Treasurers office, Foster completed his National Service in 1953 serving in the Royal Air Force, Foster returned to Manchester, not wanting to return to the town hall as his parents wished and unsure of which path to follow. Foster was searching for an away from his working-class roots which led to the alienation of his parents. Foster took a job as assistant to a manager with John Bearshaw and Partners. The staff advised him, that if he wished to become an architect, he should prepare a portfolio of drawings using the perspective, Bearshaw was so impressed with the drawings that he promoted the young Foster to the drawing department of the practice. In 1956 Foster won a place at the University of Manchester School of Architecture and he combined these with self-tuition via visits to the local library in Levenshulme. Foster took a keen interest in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, Foster won the Henry Fellowship to the Yale School of Architecture, where he met future business partner Richard Rogers and earned his masters degree. Vincent Scully encouraged Foster and Rogers to travel in America for a year, after returning to the UK in 1963 he set up an architectural practice as Team 4 with Rogers and the sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman. Georgie was the one of the team that had passed her RIBA exams allowing them to set up in practice on their own. Team 4 quickly earned a reputation for industrial design
19.
Painting
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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
20.
Sculpture
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Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts, a wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded, or cast. However, most ancient sculpture was painted, and this has been lost. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, India and China, the Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith, the revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelos David. Relief is often classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief sculpture may also decorate steles, upright slabs, usually of stone, techniques such as casting, stamping and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work, many of these allow the production of several copies. The term sculpture is used mainly to describe large works. The very large or colossal statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity, another grand form of portrait sculpture is the equestrian statue of a rider on horse, which has become rare in recent decades. The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the head, showing just that, or the bust, small forms of sculpture include the figurine, normally a statue that is no more than 18 inches tall, and for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin. Sculpture is an important form of public art, a collection of sculpture in a garden setting can be called a sculpture garden. One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in form of association with religion. Cult images are common in cultures, though they are often not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art. The actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were rather small. The same is true in Hinduism, where the very simple. Some undoubtedly advanced cultures, such as the Indus Valley civilization, appear to have had no monumental sculpture at all, though producing very sophisticated figurines, the Mississippian culture seems to have been progressing towards its use, with small stone figures, when it collapsed. Other cultures, such as ancient Egypt and the Easter Island culture, from the 20th century the relatively restricted range of subjects found in large sculpture expanded greatly, with abstract subjects and the use or representation of any type of subject now common. Today much sculpture is made for intermittent display in galleries and museums, small sculpted fittings for furniture and other objects go well back into antiquity, as in the Nimrud ivories, Begram ivories and finds from the tomb of Tutankhamun
21.
Drawing
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Drawing is a form of visual art in which a person uses various drawing instruments to mark paper or another two-dimensional medium. A drawing instrument releases small amount of material onto a surface, the most common support for drawing is paper, although other materials, such as cardboard, plastic, leather, canvas, and board, may be used. Temporary drawings may be made on a blackboard or whiteboard or indeed almost anything, the medium has been a popular and fundamental means of public expression throughout human history. It is one of the simplest and most efficient means of communicating visual ideas, the wide availability of drawing instruments makes drawing one of the most common artistic activities. In addition to its artistic forms, drawing is frequently used in commercial illustration, animation, architecture, engineering. A quick, freehand drawing, usually not intended as a work, is sometimes called a sketch. An artist who practices or works in technical drawing may be called a drafter, Drawing is one of the major forms of expression within the visual arts. It is generally concerned with the marking of lines and areas of tone onto paper/other material, traditional drawings were monochrome, or at least had little colour, while modern colored-pencil drawings may approach or cross a boundary between drawing and painting. In Western terminology, drawing is distinct from painting, even though similar media often are employed in both tasks, dry media, normally associated with drawing, such as chalk, may be used in pastel paintings. Drawing may be done with a medium, applied with brushes or pens. Drawing is often exploratory, with emphasis on observation, problem-solving. Drawing is also used in preparation for a painting, further obfuscating their distinction. Drawings created for these purposes are called studies, there are several categories of drawing, including figure drawing, cartooning, doodling, free hand and shading. There are also many drawing methods, such as drawing, stippling, shading, the surrealist method of entopic graphomania. A quick, unrefined drawing may be called a sketch, in fields outside art, technical drawings or plans of buildings, machinery, circuitry and other things are often called drawings even when they have been transferred to another medium by printing. Drawing as a Form of Communication Drawing is one of the oldest forms of human expression and these drawings, known as pictograms, depicted objects and abstract concepts. The sketches and paintings produced in prehistoric times were eventually stylised and simplified, Drawing in the Arts Drawing is used to express ones creativity, and therefore has been prominent in the world of art. Throughout much of history, drawing was regarded as the foundation for artistic practise, initially, artists used and reused wooden tablets for the production of their drawings
22.
Salon d'Automne
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The Salon dAutomne, or Société du Salon dautomne, is an annual art exhibition held in Paris, France since 1903. During the Salons early years, established such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir threw their support behind the new exhibition. Foreign artists are well represented. The Salon dAutomne also boasts the presence of a politician and patron of the arts and this was the idea behind Jourdains dream of opening a new Salon des Refusés in the late 1890s, and realized in the opening the Salon dAutomne in 1903. Providing a venue where artists could be recognized, while wrestling the public out of its complacency were, to Jourdain. The platform of the Salon dAutomne was based on an open admission, jurors were members of society itself, not members of the Academy, the state, or official art establishments. Refused exhibition space in the Grand Palais, the first Salon dAutomne was held in the poorly lit and it was backed financially by Jansen. While Rodin applauded the endeavor, and submitted drawings, he refused to join doubting it would succeed, notwithstanding, the first Salon dAutomne, which included works by Matisse, Bonnard and other progressive artists, was unexpectedly successful, and was met with wide critical acclaim. Even Paul Signac, president of the Salon des Indépendants, never forgave Jourdain for having founded a rival salon, what he had not predicted was a retaliation that threatened the future of the new salon. Carolus-Duran threatened to ban from his Société established artists who might consider exhibiting at the Salon dAutomne, retaliating in defense of Jourdain, Eugène Carrière issued a statement that if forced to choose, he would join the Salon dAutomne and resign from the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The valuable publicity generated by the articles on the controversy worked in favor of the Salon dAutomne. Thus, Eugène Carrière saved the burgeoning salon, Henri Marcel, sympathetic to the Salon dAutomne, became director of the Beaux-Arts, and assured it would take place at the prestigious Grand Palais the following year. The success of the Salon dAutomne was not, however, due to such controversy, success was due to the tremendous impact of its exhibitions on both the art world and the general public, extending from 1903 to the outset of the First World War. He soon became known as a staunch critic of traditionalism and a fervent proponent of Modernism, yet even for him. The first Salon dAutumne exhibition opened 31 October 1903 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris in Paris, Albert Gleizes exhibited two paintings, Vieux moulin à Montons-Villiers and Le matin à Courbevoie. A room at the 1904 Salon dAutome was dedicated to Paul Cézanne, with works, including various portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, flowers, landscapes. Another room presented works of Puvis de Chavannes, with 44 works, and another was dedicated to Odilon Redon with 64 works, including paintings, drawings and lithographs. Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec too were represented in separate rooms with 35 and 28 works respectively, Vauxcelles described their work with the phrase Donatello chez les fauves, contrasting the orgy of pure tones with a Renaissance-style sculpture that shared the room with them
23.
Byzantine art
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Byzantine art is the name for the artistic products of the Eastern Roman Empire, as well as the nations and states that inherited culturally from the empire. A number of states contemporary with the Byzantine Empire were culturally influenced by it, after the fall of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 1453, art produced by Eastern Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman Empire was often called post-Byzantine. Byzantine art never lost sight of this classical heritage, the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was adorned with a large number of classical sculptures, although they eventually became an object of some puzzlement for its inhabitants. And indeed, the art produced during the Byzantine Empire, although marked by periodic revivals of an aesthetic, was above all marked by the development of a new aesthetic. The most salient feature of new aesthetic was its abstract. The nature and causes of this transformation, which took place during late antiquity, have been a subject of scholarly debate for centuries. Giorgio Vasari attributed it to a decline in skills and standards. Although this point of view has been revived, most notably by Bernard Berenson. Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski, writing in the early 20th century, were all responsible for the revaluation of late antique art. Riegl saw it as a development of pre-existing tendencies in Roman art. In any case, the debate is purely modern, it is clear that most Byzantine viewers did not consider their art to be abstract or unnaturalistic, religious art was not, however, limited to the monumental decoration of church interiors. One of the most important genres of Byzantine art was the icon, an image of Christ, the illumination of manuscripts was another major genre of Byzantine art. The most commonly illustrated texts were religious, both scripture itself and devotional or theological texts, secular texts were also illuminated, important examples include the Alexander Romance and the history of John Skylitzes. Small ivories were also mostly in relief, Byzantine ceramics were relatively crude, as pottery was never used at the tables of the rich, who ate off silver. Two events were of importance to the development of a unique. First, the Edict of Milan, issued by the emperors Constantine I and Licinius in 313, allowed for public Christian worship, second, the dedication of Constantinople in 330 created a great new artistic centre for the eastern half of the Empire, and a specifically Christian one. Major Constantinopolitan churches built under Constantine and his son, Constantius II, included the foundations of Hagia Sophia. The next major building campaign in Constantinople was sponsored by Theodosius I, the most important surviving monument of this period is the obelisk and base erected by Theodosius in the Hippodrome
24.
Mosaic
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A mosaic is a piece of art or image made from the assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It is often used in art or as interior decoration. Most mosaics are made of small, flat, roughly square, pieces of stone or glass of different colors, some, especially floor mosaics, are made of small rounded pieces of stone, and called pebble mosaics. Others are made of other materials, mosaics have a long history, starting in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. Pebble mosaics were made in Tiryns in Mycenean Greece, mosaics with patterns and pictures became widespread in classical times, Early Christian basilicas from the 4th century onwards were decorated with wall and ceiling mosaics. Mosaic fell out of fashion in the Renaissance, though artists like Raphael continued to practise the old technique, Roman and Byzantine influence led Jews to decorate 5th and 6th century synagogues in the Middle East with floor mosaics. Mosaic was widely used on buildings and palaces in early Islamic art, including Islams first great religious building, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Mosaic went out of fashion in the Islamic world after the 8th century, modern mosaics are made by professional artists, street artists, and as a popular craft. Many materials other than stone and ceramic tesserae may be employed, including shells, glass. The earliest known examples of made of different materials were found at a temple building in Abra, Mesopotamia. They consist of pieces of colored stones, shells and ivory, excavations at Susa and Chogha Zanbil show evidence of the first glazed tiles, dating from around 1500 BC. However, mosaic patterns were not used until the times of Sassanid Empire, mythological subjects, or scenes of hunting or other pursuits of the wealthy, were popular as the centrepieces of a larger geometric design, with strongly emphasized borders. Pliny the Elder mentions the artist Sosus of Pergamon by name, describing his mosaics of the left on a floor after a feast. Both of these themes were widely copied, most recorded names of Roman mosaic workers are Greek, suggesting they dominated high quality work across the empire, no doubt most ordinary craftsmen were slaves. Splendid mosaic floors are found in Roman villas across North Africa, in such as Carthage. The tiny tesserae allowed very fine detail, and an approach to the illusionism of painting, often small panels called emblemata were inserted into walls or as the highlights of larger floor-mosaics in coarser work. The normal technique was opus tessellatum, using larger tesserae, which was laid on site, there was a distinct native Italian style using black on a white background, which was no doubt cheaper than fully coloured work. In Rome, Nero and his architects used mosaics to cover surfaces of walls and ceilings in the Domus Aurea, built 64 AD
25.
Icon
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An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, from Eastern Christianity and certain Eastern Catholic churches. The most common subjects include Christ, Mary, saints and/or angels, icons may also be cast in metal, carved in stone, embroidered on cloth, painted on wood, done in mosaic or fresco work, printed on paper or metal, etc. Comparable images from Western Christianity are generally not described as icons, Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that the creation of Christian images dates back to the very early days of Christianity, and there is has been a continuous tradition since then. The icons of later centuries can be linked, often closely, to images from the 5th century onwards, there was enormous destruction of images during the Byzantine Iconoclasm of 726-842, although this did settle for good the question of the appropriateness of images. Since then icons have had a continuity of style and subject. At the same time there has been change and development, Christian tradition dating from the 8th century identifies Luke the Evangelist as the first icon painter. Aside from the legend that Pilate had made an image of Christ and he relates that King Abgar of Edessa sent a letter to Jesus at Jerusalem, asking Jesus to come and heal him of an illness. In this version there is no image, further legends relate that the cloth remained in Edessa until the 10th century, when it was taken to Constantinople. It went missing in 1204 when Crusaders sacked Constantinople, but by then numerous copies had firmly established its iconic type. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honouring these images, after the manner of the Gentiles. And he called him and said, Lycomedes, what do you mean by this matter of the portrait, can it be one of thy gods that is painted here. For I see that you are living in heathen fashion. Later in the passage John says, But this that you have now done is childish and imperfect, at least some of the hierarchy of the Christian churches still strictly opposed icons in the early 4th century. At the Spanish non-ecumenical Synod of Elvira bishops concluded, Pictures are not to be placed in churches, so that they do not become objects of worship and adoration. to our religion. After the emperor Constantine I extended official toleration of Christianity within the Roman Empire in 313 and this period of Christianization probably saw the use of Christian images became very widespread among the faithful, though with great differences from pagan habits. Robin Lane Fox states By the early century, we know of the ownership of private icons of saints. 480-500, we can be sure that the inside of a saints shrine would be adorned with images and votive portraits, when Constantine himself apparently converted to Christianity, the majority of his subjects remained pagans
26.
Italian art
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Since ancient times, Greeks, Etruscans and Celts have inhabited the south, centre and north of the Italian peninsula respectively. Ancient Rome finally emerged as the dominant Italian and European power, Italy retained its artistic dominance into the 17th century with Mannerism and the Baroque, and cultural tourism became a major prop to an otherwise faltering economy. In the 18th century Neoclassicism originated in Rome, but this was the last such Italian-born style that spread to all Western art, Italian art has influenced several major movements throughout the centuries and has produced several great artists, including painters, architects and sculptors. Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the largest number of any country in the world, Etruscan bronze figures and a terracotta funerary reliefs include examples of a vigorous Central Italian tradition which had waned by the time Rome began building her empire on the peninsula. The Etruscan paintings that have survived to modern times are mostly wall frescoes from graves and these are the most important example of pre-Roman figurative art in Italy known to scholars. The frescoes consist of painting on top of fresh plaster, so that when the plaster is dried the painting part of the plaster and an integral part of the wall. Colours were made from stones and minerals in different colours that ground up and mixed in a medium, from the mid 4th century BC chiaroscuro began to be used to portray depth and volume. Sometimes scenes of life are portrayed, but more often traditional mythological scenes. The concept of proportion does not appear in any surviving frescoes, one of the best-known Etruscan frescoes is that of Tomb of the Lioness at Tarquinia. The Etruscan were responsible for constructing Romes earliest monumental buildings, Roman temples and houses were closely based on Etruscan models. Elements of Etruscan influence in Roman temples included the podium and the emphasis on the front at the expense of the three sides. Large Etruscan houses were grouped around a hall in much the same way as Roman town Large houses were later built around an atrium. The influence of Etruscan architecture gradually declined during the republic in the face of influences from elsewhere, Etruscan architecture was itself influenced by the Greeks, so that when the Romans adopted Greek styles, it was not a totally alien culture. During the 2nd century BC, the flow of these works, by the end of the republic, when Vitruvius wrote his treatise on architecture, Greek architectural theory and example were dominant. With the expansion of the empire, Roman architecture spread over a wide area, in many areas elements of style were influenced by local tastes, particularly decoration, but the architecture remained recognizably Roman. Styles of vernacular architecture were influenced to varying degrees by Roman architecture, by the 1st century AD, Rome had become the biggest and most advanced city in the world. The ancient Romans came up with new technologies to improve the citys sanitation systems, roads and they developed a system of aqueducts that piped freshwater into the city, and they built sewers that removed the citys waste. The wealthiest Romans lived in houses with gardens
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Trieste
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Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a strip of Italian territory lying between the Adriatic Sea and Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city. It is also located near Croatia some further 30 kilometres south, Trieste is located at the head of the Gulf of Trieste and throughout history it has been influenced by its location at the crossroads of Latin, Slavic, and Germanic cultures. In 2009, it had a population of about 205,000 and it is the capital of the autonomous region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trieste was one of the oldest parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. In the 19th century, it was the most important port of one of the Great Powers of Europe, as a prosperous seaport in the Mediterranean region, Trieste became the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the fin de siècle period at the end of the 19th century it emerged as an important hub for literature, Trieste underwent an economic revival during the 1930s, and Trieste was an important spot in the struggle between the Eastern and Western blocs after the Second World War. Today, the city is in one of the richest regions of Italy, Roman authors also transliterated the name as Tergestum. Modern names of the city include, Italian, Trieste, Slovene, Trst, German, Triest, Hungarian, Trieszt, Croatian, Trst, Serbian, Трст/Trst, Trieste lies in the northernmost part of the high Adriatic in northeastern Italy, near the border with Slovenia. The city lies on the Gulf of Trieste, built mostly on a hillside that becomes a mountain, Triestes urban territory lies at the foot of an imposing escarpment that comes down abruptly from the Karst Plateau towards the sea. The karst landforms close to the city reach an elevation of 458 metres above sea level and it lies on the borders of the Italian geographical region, the Balkan Peninsula, and the Mitteleuropa. The territory of Trieste is composed of different climate zones depending on the distance from the sea. The average temperatures are 5.4 °C in January and 23.3 °C in July, the climatic setting of the city is humid subtropical climate. On average, humidity levels are low, while only two months receive slightly less than 60 mm of precipitation. Trieste along with the Istrian peninsula has evenly distributed rainfall above 1,000 mm in total, snow occurs on average 0 –2 days per year. Temperatures are very mild - lows below zero are somewhat rare, winter maxima are lower than in typical Mediterranean zone with quite high minima. Summer is very warm with maxima about 28 °C and lows above 20 °C, the absolute maximum of the last fifty years is 37.2 °C in 2003, whereas the absolute minimum is −14.6 °C in 1956. Since the second millennium BC, the location was an inhabited site, originally an Illyrian settlement, the Veneti entered the region in the 10th-9th c. BC and seem to have given the town its name, Tergeste, still later, the town was later captured by the Carni, a tribe of the Eastern Alps, before becoming part of the Roman republic in 177 BC during the Istrian War
28.
Hermitage Museum
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The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums in the world, it was founded in 1754 by Catherine the Great and has open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of only a small part is on permanent display. The collections occupy a complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace. Apart from them, the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya, the museum has several exhibition centers abroad. The Hermitage is a state property. Since July 1992, the director of the museum has been Mikhail Piotrovsky, of the six buildings in the main museum complex, five, namely the Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage, New Hermitage and Hermitage Theatre, are open to the public. The entrance ticket for foreign tourists more than the fee paid by citizens of Russia. However, entrance is free of charge the first Thursday of every month for all visitors, the museum is closed on Mondays. The entrance for visitors is located in the Winter Palace. A hermitage is the dwelling of a hermit or recluse, the word derives from Old French hermit, ermit hermit, recluse, from Late Latin eremita, from Greek eremites, literally people who live alone, which is in turn derived from ἐρημός, desert. Originally, the building housing the collection was the Small Hermitage. Today, the Hermitage Museum encompasses many buildings on the Palace Embankment, apart from the Small Hermitage, the museum now also includes the Old Hermitage, the New Hermitage, the Hermitage Theatre, and the Winter Palace, the former main residence of the Russian tsars. In recent years, the Hermitage has expanded to the General Staff Building on the Palace Square facing the Winter Palace, the Western European Art collection includes European paintings, sculpture, and applied art from the 13th to the 20th centuries. It is displayed, in about 120 rooms, on the first, drawings and prints are displayed in temporary exhibitions. Since 1940, the Egyptian collection, dating back to 1852 and it serves as a passage to the exhibition of Classical Antiquities. A modest collection of the culture of Ancient Mesopotamia, including a number of Assyrian reliefs from Babylon, Dur-Sharrukin, the collection of Classical Antiquities occupies most of the ground floor of the Old and New Hermitage buildings. Its floor is made of a marble mosaic imitating ancient tradition, while the stucco walls
29.
Rumyantsev Museum
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The Rumyantsev Museum was Moscows first public museum. It evolved from the art collection and library of Count Nikolay Rumyantsev. The Rumyantsev collection was opened to the public in 1831. It occupied the Rumyantsev House on English Quay in St. Petersburg, the museums library was its most valuable part, since 1845 affiliated with the Imperial Public Library. It was coveted by the city of Moscow which had no library of its own. It was Prince Vladimir Odoevsky who suggested to transfer the library to Moscow and his suggestion was approved by the Council of Ministers in 1861. The Pashkov House opposite the Moscow Kremlin was acquired to house the Rumyantsev Museum, St. Petersburgers did not welcome the relocation but were powerless to prevent it. Alexander II of Russia donated the enormous painting The Appearance of Christ before the People for the opening of the museum, once relocated to Moscow, the Rumyantsev collection was further augmented by valuable bequests, including Sontsovs cabinet of ancient coins. The Rumyantsev Museum was split into the departments of painting, engraving, numismatics, another department, known as the Dashkov Museum, was established after the All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition of 1867. It was an important centre of ethnography displaying items collected by Yuri Lisyansky, Ivan Krusenstern, the Soviets decided to shut down the museum in 1924
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Dmitry Rovinsky
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Dmitry Aleksandrovich Rovinsky was an art historian and compiler of reference albums on Russian portraits and engravings of the 18th to 19th centuries. He was an member of the Academy of Science and Academy of Arts. Dmitry Aleksandrovich Rovinsky was born into the family of a Moscow policeman, after graduating from a law college he started his service in Moscow, taking various legal posts. From 1870 till the end of his life he served as the Senator of the Criminal Cassation Department, from the 1840s he took a great interest in collecting engravings, including the luboks. His fundamental works on the history of Russian gravure and lubok were the first ones of the kind and his historical and bibliographical treatises, rich in actual data were highly estimated by art critics and have kept up their significance till date. Being the publisher of his own works, Dmitry Rovinsky paid a great attention to polygraphic processes and printed books on excellent paper, with superb design, etc. Rovinsky signed away some of his assets to establish prizes for the best illustrated books for common folks, the best research work on art archeology and the best painting, in turn. Rovinsky’s unique collection of etchings and other art works, as well his library were legated to the Hermitage Museum, Rumyantsev’s Museum, the Public Library, Dmitry Rovinsky died on 23 June 1895 in Bad Wildungen, Waldeck, Germany. The Rovinsky Collection for a Russian Iconography was published in 2006 in German with a comprehensive commentary, hermann Goltz, Alles von Zarin und Teufel. Die gesamten Rovinskij-Materialien für eine Russische Ikonographie
31.
Rembrandt
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Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a Dutch draughtsman, painter, and printmaker. A prolific and versatile master across three media, he is considered one of the greatest visual artists in the history of art. Having achieved youthful success as a painter, Rembrandts later years were marked by personal tragedy. Yet his etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high, Rembrandts portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible are regarded as his greatest creative triumphs. His self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and his reputation as the greatest etcher in the history of the medium was established in his lifetime, and never questioned since. Few of his paintings left the Dutch Republic whilst he lived, but his prints were circulated throughout Europe, because of his empathy for the human condition, he has been called one of the great prophets of civilization. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born on 15 July 1606 in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic and he was the ninth child born to Harmen Gerritszoon van Rijn and Neeltgen Willemsdochter van Zuijtbrouck. His family was quite well-to-do, his father was a miller, religion is a central theme in Rembrandts paintings and the religiously fraught period in which he lived makes his faith a matter of interest. His mother was Roman Catholic, and his father belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, unlike many of his contemporaries who traveled to Italy as part of their artistic training, Rembrandt never left the Dutch Republic during his lifetime. He opened a studio in Leiden in 1624 or 1625, which he shared with friend, in 1627, Rembrandt began to accept students, among them Gerrit Dou in 1628. In 1629, Rembrandt was discovered by the statesman Constantijn Huygens, as a result of this connection, Prince Frederik Hendrik continued to purchase paintings from Rembrandt until 1646. He initially stayed with an art dealer, Hendrick van Uylenburgh, Saskia came from a good family, her father had been a lawyer and the burgemeester of Leeuwarden. When Saskia, as the youngest daughter, became an orphan, Rembrandt and Saskia were married in the local church of St. Annaparochie without the presence of Rembrandts relatives. In the same year, Rembrandt became a burgess of Amsterdam and he also acquired a number of students, among them Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck. In 1635 Rembrandt and Saskia moved into their own house, renting in fashionable Nieuwe Doelenstraat, in 1639 they moved to a prominent newly built house in the upscale Breestraat, today known as Jodenbreestraat in what was becoming the Jewish quarter, then a young upcoming neighborhood. The mortgage to finance the 13,000 guilder purchase would be a cause for later financial difficulties. Rembrandt should easily have been able to pay the house off with his income, but it appears his spending always kept pace with his income. It was there that Rembrandt frequently sought his Jewish neighbors to model for his Old Testament scenes, in 1640, they had a second daughter, also named Cornelia, who died after living barely over a month
32.
State Historical Museum
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The State Historical Museum of Russia is a museum of Russian history wedged between Red Square and Manege Square in Moscow. Its exhibitions range from relics of prehistoric tribes that lived on the territory of present-day Russia, the total number of objects in the museums collection comes to millions. The place where the now stands was formerly occupied by the Principal Medicine Store. Several rooms in that building housed royal collections of antiquities, other rooms were occupied by the Moscow University, founded by Mikhail Lomonosov in 1755. The museum was founded in 1872 by Ivan Zabelin, Aleksey Uvarov and several other Slavophiles interested in promoting Russian history, the board of trustees, composed of Sergey Solovyov, Vasily Klyuchevsky, Uvarov and other leading historians, presided over the construction of the museum building. After a prolonged competition the project was handed over to Vladimir Osipovich Shervud, the present structure was built based on Sherwoods neo-Russian design between 1875 and 1881. The first 11 exhibit halls officially opened in 1883 during a visit from the Tsar, then in 1894 Tsar Alexander III became the honorary president of the museum and the following year,1895, the museum was renamed the Tsar Alexander III Imperial Russian History Museum. Its interiors were decorated in the Russian Revival style by such artists as Viktor Vasnetsov, Henrik Semiradsky. During the Soviet period the murals were proclaimed gaudy and were plastered over, the museum went through a painstaking restoration of its original appearance between 1986 and 1997. The library boasts the manuscripts of the Chludov Psalter, Svyatoslavs Miscellanies, Mstislav Gospel, Yuriev Gospel, the museums coin collection alone includes 1.7 million coins, making it the largest in Russia. In 1996, the number of all articles in the collection reached 4,373,757. A branch of the museum is housed in the Romanov Chambers Zaryadye, in 1934 The Museum of Womens Emancipation at the Novodevichy Convent became part of the State Historical Museum. Some of the churches and other buildings are still affiliated with the State Historical Museum. Official website Photo Google Maps satellite photo
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Western Europe
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Western Europe, or West Europe, is the region comprising the western part of Europe. Below, some different geographic and geopolitical definitions of the term are outlined, prior to the Roman conquest, a large part of Western Europe had adopted the newly developed La Tène culture. This cultural and linguistic division was reinforced by the later political east-west division of the Roman Empire. The division between these two was enhanced during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages by a number of events, the Western Roman Empire collapsed, starting the Early Middle Ages. By contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire, mostly known as the Greek or Byzantine Empire, survived, in East Asia, Western Europe was historically known as taixi in China and taisei in Japan, which literally translates as the Far West. The term Far West became synonymous with Western Europe in China during the Ming dynasty, the Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci was one of the first writers in China to use the Far West as an Asian counterpart to the European concept of the Far East. In his writings, Ricci referred to himself as Matteo of the Far West, the term was still in use in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Post-war Europe would be divided into two spheres, the West, influenced by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc. With the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided by the Iron Curtain, behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Although some countries were neutral, they were classified according to the nature of their political. This division largely defined the popular perception and understanding of Western Europe, the world changed dramatically with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. The Federal Republic of Germany peacefully absorbed the German Democratic Republic, COMECON and the Warsaw Pact were dissolved, and in 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Several countries which had part of the Soviet Union regained full independence. Although the term Western Europe was more prominent during the Cold War, it remains much in use, in 1948 the Treaty of Brussels was signed between Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It was further revisited in 1954 at the Paris Conference, when the Western European Union was established and it was declared defunct in 2011, after the Treaty of Lisbon, and the Treaty of Brussels was terminated. When the Western European Union was dissolved, it had 10 member countries, six member countries, five observer countries. The CIA divides Western Europe into two smaller subregions, regional voting blocs were formed in 1961 to encourage voting to various UN bodies from different regional groups. The European Union is an economic and political union of 28 member states that are located primarily in Europe, some Western and Northern European countries of Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein are members of EFTA, though cooperating to varying degree with the European Union
34.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
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Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
36.
Peter Paul Rubens
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Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish/Netherlandish draughtsman and painter. He is widely considered as the most notable artist of Flemish Baroque art school, the catalogue of his works by Michael Jaffé lists 1,403 pieces, excluding numerous copies made in his workshop. His commissioned works were mostly history paintings, which included religious and mythological subjects and he painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house and he also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the royal entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not overly detailed and he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. For altarpieces he painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. Rubens was born in the city of Siegen to Jan Rubens and he was named in honour of Saint-Peter and Paul, because he was born on their solemnety. His father, a Calvinist, and mother fled Antwerp for Cologne in 1568, after increased religious turmoil and persecution of Protestants during the rule of the Spanish Netherlands by the Duke of Alba. Jan Rubens became the adviser of Anna of Saxony, the second wife of William I of Orange. Following Jan Rubens imprisonment for the affair, Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577, the family returned to Cologne the next year. In 1589, two years after his fathers death, Rubens moved with his mother Maria Pypelincks to Antwerp, religion figured prominently in much of his work and Rubens later became one of the leading voices of the Catholic Counter-Reformation style of painting. In Antwerp, Rubens received a Renaissance humanist education, studying Latin, by fourteen he began his artistic apprenticeship with Tobias Verhaeght. Subsequently, he studied under two of the leading painters of the time, the late Mannerist artists Adam van Noort. Much of his earliest training involved copying earlier works, such as woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger. Rubens completed his education in 1598, at time he entered the Guild of St. Luke as an independent master. In 1600 Rubens travelled to Italy and he stopped first in Venice, where he saw paintings by Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, before settling in Mantua at the court of Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga. The colouring and compositions of Veronese and Tintoretto had an effect on Rubenss painting. With financial support from the Duke, Rubens travelled to Rome by way of Florence in 1601, there, he studied classical Greek and Roman art and copied works of the Italian masters
37.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir, was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has said that Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau. He was the father of actor Pierre Renoir, filmmaker Jean Renoir and he was the grandfather of the filmmaker Claude Renoir, son of Pierre. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, in 1841 and his father, Léonard Renoir, was a tailor of modest means, so in 1844, Renoirs family moved to Paris in search of more favorable prospects. The location of their home, in rue d’Argenteuil in central Paris, although the young Renoir had a natural proclivity for drawing, he exhibited a greater talent for singing. His talent was encouraged by his teacher, Charles Gounod, who was the choir-master at the Church of St Roch at the time. However, due to the financial circumstances, Renoir had to discontinue his music lessons. Although Renoir displayed a talent for his work, he tired of the subject matter. The owner of the factory recognized his apprentice’s talent and communicated this to Renoir’s family, following this, Renoir started taking lessons to prepare for entry into Ecole des Beaux Arts. When the porcelain factory adopted mechanical reproduction processes in 1858, Renoir was forced to other means to support his learning. Before he enrolled in art school, he also painted hangings for overseas missionaries, in 1862, he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet, at times, during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Renoir had his first success at the Salon of 1868 with his painting Lise with a Parasol, although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition was slow in coming, partly as a result of the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War. This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a change of subjects. Renoir was inspired by the style and subject matter of modern painters Camille Pissarro. Although the critical response to the exhibition was largely unfavorable, Renoirs work was well received. That same year, two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London, hoping to secure a livelihood by attracting portrait commissions, Renoir displayed mostly portraits at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. He contributed a diverse range of paintings the next year when the group presented its third exhibition, they included Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette
38.
Pablo Picasso
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Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, also known as Pablo Picasso, was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his years, painting in a naturalistic manner through his childhood. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, Picassos work is often categorized into periods. Much of Picassos work of the late 1910s and early 1920s is in a neoclassical style and his later work often combines elements of his earlier styles. Ruiz y Picasso were included for his father and mother, respectively, born in the city of Málaga in the Andalusian region of Spain, he was the first child of Don José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. His mother was of one quarter Italian descent, from the territory of Genoa, though baptized a Catholic, Picasso would later on become an atheist. Picassos family was of middle-class background and his father was a painter who specialized in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game. For most of his life Ruiz was a professor of art at the School of Crafts, Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age. According to his mother, his first words were piz, piz, a shortening of lápiz, from the age of seven, Picasso received formal artistic training from his father in figure drawing and oil painting. Ruiz was an academic artist and instructor, who believed that proper training required disciplined copying of the masters. His son became preoccupied with art to the detriment of his classwork, the family moved to A Coruña in 1891, where his father became a professor at the School of Fine Arts. On one occasion, the father found his son painting over his sketch of a pigeon. In 1895, Picasso was traumatized when his sister, Conchita. After her death, the moved to Barcelona, where Ruiz took a position at its School of Fine Arts. Picasso thrived in the city, regarding it in times of sadness or nostalgia as his true home, Ruiz persuaded the officials at the academy to allow his son to take an entrance exam for the advanced class. This process often took students a month, but Picasso completed it in a week, the student lacked discipline but made friendships that would affect him in later life. His father rented a room for him close to home so he could work alone, yet he checked up on him numerous times a day. Picassos father and uncle decided to send the young artist to Madrids Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, at age 16, Picasso set off for the first time on his own, but he disliked formal instruction and stopped attending classes soon after enrolment
39.
Henri Matisse
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Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is primarily as a painter. Although he was labelled a Fauve, by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the Nord department in northern France and he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as an administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered a kind of paradise as he described it. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, initially he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Chardin was one of the painters Matisse most admired, as an art student he made copies of four of Chardins paintings in the Louvre, in 1896 and 1897, Matisse visited the Australian painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of van Gogh and he later said Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me. In 1896 Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, with the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre, the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean and Pierre, Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse. In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, Matisse immersed himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, in Cézannes sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse found his main inspiration. Many of Matisses paintings from 1898 to 1901 make use of a Divisionist technique he adopted after reading Paul Signacs essay and his paintings of 1902–03, a period of material hardship for the artist, are comparatively somber and reveal a preoccupation with form. Having made his first attempt at sculpture, a copy after Antoine-Louis Barye, in 1899, he devoted much of his energy to working in clay, fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910
40.
Karl Bryullov
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Karl Pavlovich Bryullov, also transliterated Briullov or Briuloff and referred to by his friends as The Great Karl, was a Russian painter. He is regarded as a key figure in transition from the Russian neoclassicism to romanticism, Karl Bryullov was born on December, 12th,1799 in St. Petersburg, in a family of the academician, the woodcarver and engraver Pavel Ivanovich Briullo who was of Huguenot descent. He felt drawn to Italy from his early years, despite his education at the Imperial Academy of Arts, Bryullov never fully embraced the classical style taught by his mentors and promoted by his brother, Alexander Bryullov. His best-known work, The Last Day of Pompeii, is a vast composition compared by Pushkin and Gogol to the best works of Rubens and it created a sensation in Italy and established Bryullov as one of the finest European painters of his day. An anecdote concerning Bryullov appeared in Leo Tolstoys essay Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves. while he was working on the plafond of St Isaacs Cathedral, his health suddenly deteriorated. Following advice of his doctors, Bryullov left Russia for Madeira in 1849 and he died in the village of Manziana near Rome and is buried at the Cimitero Acattolico there. List of Russian artists Paintings by Bryullov Karl - high res Online gallery of Briullov paintings Brullovs paintings at the Russian Art Gallery Karl Brulloff
41.
Utamaro
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Kitagawa Utamaro was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings and he also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects. Little is known of Utamaros life and his work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties with exaggerated, elongated features. He produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few artists to achieve fame throughout Japan in his lifetime. In 1804 he was arrested and manacled for fifty days for making illegal prints made depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Utamaros work reached Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the European Impressionists, particularly with his use of partial views and his emphasis on light and shade, the reference to the Japanese influence among these artists often refers to the work of Utamaro. Ukiyo-e art flourished in Japan during the Edo period from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the artform took as its primary subjects courtesans, kabuki actors, and others associated with the ukiyo floating world lifestyle of the pleasure districts. Alongside paintings, mass-produced woodblock prints were a form of the genre. Ukiyo-e art was aimed at the townspeople at the bottom of the social scale. Its audience, themes, aesthetics, and mass-produced nature kept it from consideration as serious art, in the mid-eighteenth century, full-colour nishiki-e prints became common. They were printed by using a number of woodblocks, one for each colour. Towards the close of the century there was a peak in both quality and quantity of the work. Kiyonaga was the pre-eminent portraitist of beauties during the 1780s, and the tall, graceful beauties in his work had a influence on Utamaro. Shunshō of the Katsukawa school introduced the ōkubi-e large-headed picture in the 1760s and he and other members of the Katsukawa school, such as Shunkō, popularized the form for yakusha-e actor prints, and popularized the dusting of mica in the backgrounds to produce a glittering effect. Little is known of Utamaros life and he was born Kitagawa Ichitarō in c. 1753. As an adult, he was known by the given names Yūsuke, early accounts have given his birthplace as Kyoto, Osaka, Yoshiwara in Edo, or Kawagoe in Musashi Province, none of these places has been verified. Apparently, Utamaro married, although little is known about his wife, there are, however, many prints of tender and intimate domestic scenes featuring the same woman and child over several years of the childs growth among his works. Sometime during his childhood Utamaro came under the tutelage of Sekien, Sekien, although trained in the upper-class Kanō school of Japanese painting, had become in middle age a practitioner of ukiyo-e and his art was aimed at the townspeople in Edo
42.
Hokusai
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Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. He was influenced by Sesshū Tōyō and other styles of Chinese painting, born in Edo, Hokusai is best known as author of the woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji which includes the internationally iconic print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Hokusai created the Thirty-Six Views both as a response to a travel boom and as part of a personal obsession with Mount Fuji. It was this series, specifically The Great Wave print and Fine Wind, Clear Morning, as historian Richard Lane concludes, Indeed, if there is one work that made Hokusais name, both in Japan and abroad, it must be this monumental print-series. While Hokusais work prior to this series is important, it was not until this series that he gained broad recognition. Hokusais date of birth is unclear, but is stated as the 23rd day of the 9th month of the 10th year of the Hōreki era to an artisan family, in the Katsushika district of Edo. It is believed his father was the mirror-maker Nakajima Ise, who produced mirrors for the shogun and his father never made Hokusai an heir, so it is possible that his mother was a concubine. Hokusai began painting around the age of six, perhaps learning from his father, Hokusai was known by at least thirty names during his lifetime. While the use of names was a common practice of Japanese artists of the time. Hokusais name changes are so frequent, and so related to changes in his artistic production and style. At 14, he worked as an apprentice to a wood-carver, until the age of 18, Shunshō was an artist of ukiyo-e, a style of wood block prints and paintings that Hokusai would master, and head of the so-called Katsukawa school. Ukiyo-e, as practiced by artists like Shunshō, focused on images of the courtesans, after a year, Hokusais name changed for the first time, when he was dubbed Shunrō by his master. It was under this name that he published his first prints, during the decade he worked in Shunshōs studio, Hokusai was married to his first wife, about whom very little is known except that she died in the early 1790s. He married again in 1797, although this second wife died after a short time. He fathered two sons and three daughters with two wives, and his youngest daughter Sakae, also known as Ōi, eventually became an artist. Upon the death of Shunshō in 1793, Hokusai began exploring other styles of art and he was soon expelled from the Katsukawa school by Shunkō, the chief disciple of Shunshō, possibly due to studies at the rival Kanō school. This event was, in his own words, inspirational, What really motivated the development of my style was the embarrassment I suffered at Shunkōs hands. Hokusai also changed the subjects of his works, moving away from the images of courtesans, instead, his work became focused on landscapes and images of the daily life of Japanese people from a variety of social levels
43.
Hiroshige
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Utagawa Hiroshige, also Andō Hiroshige, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. Hiroshige is best known for his landscapes, such as the series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō, and for his depictions of birds and flowers. The subjects of his work were atypical of the genre, whose typical focus was on beautiful women, popular actors. For scholars and collectors, Hiroshiges death marked the beginning of a decline in the ukiyo-e genre. Hiroshiges work came to have an influence on Western painting towards the close of the 19th century as a part of the trend in Japonism. Western artists closely studied Hiroshiges compositions, and some, such as van Gogh, Hiroshige was born in 1797 in the Yayosu Quay section of the Yaesu area in Edo. He was of a background, and was the great-grandson of Tanaka Tokuemon. Hiroshiges grandfather, Mitsuemon, was an instructor who worked under the name Sairyūken. Hiroshiges father, Genemon, was adopted into the family of Andō Jūemon, Hiroshige went through several name changes as a youth, Jūemon, Tokubē, and Tetsuzō. He had three sisters, one of whom died when he was three and his mother died in early 1809, and his father followed later in the year, but not before handing his fire warden duties to his twelve-year-old son. He was charged with prevention of fires at Edo Castle, a duty that left him leisure time. Not long after his parents deaths, perhaps at around fourteen, Hiroshige—then named Tokutarō— began painting and he sought the tutelage of Toyokuni of the Utagawa school, but Toyokuni had too many pupils to make room for him. A librarian introduced him instead to Toyohiro of the same school, by 1812 Hiroshige was permitted to sign his works, which he did under the art name Hiroshige. In 1823, he resigned his post as warden, though he still acted as an alternate. He declined an offer to succeed Toyohiro upon the death in 1828. It was not until 1829–1830 that Hiroshige began to produce the landscapes he has come to be known for and he also created an increasing number of bird and flower prints about this time. An invitation to join a procession to Kyoto in 1832 gave Hiroshige the opportunity to travel along the Tōkaidō route that linked the two capitals. He sketched the scenery along the way, and when he returned to Edo he produced the series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, which contains some of his best-known prints
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