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This is the largest monastic library on Earth. It’s hidden in an Austrian mountain valley and is believed to have inspired the design of the iconic library in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, but you’ve probably never even heard of it... Completed in 1776 within the Benedictine monastery Admont...

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James Lucas

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87,080 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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There is a room in Málaga that was built to be the closest thing on earth to standing inside heaven. It is called the camarín of the Virgin of Victory, and it is hidden at the top of a tower inside the Santuario de la Victoria. To reach it, you climb and the ascent is the entire point... The building you are climbing through was completed in 1700, and it was designed as a single argument made in stone. At the bottom lies a crypt: a black chamber crowded with white plaster skeletons, a meditation on death and the brevity of life. From there a staircase rises, and as you climb it the light grows stronger and the imagery changes from bones to saints. The architects of the time understood this ascent as the soul's own journey, the dark crypt as the stage of penitence, the staircase as the stage of spiritual progress, and the room at the very top as the final stage: the union of the soul with the divine. That room at the top is the camarín, and its dome is one of the most extraordinary interiors in Spain... Every surface is covered in white and gold plasterwork. There is no empty space anywhere. The Baroque called this horror vacui, the horror of the void: the conviction that a space meant to represent heaven should not contain a single bare patch of stone. Out of that plasterwork emerge angels, flowers, birds, and mirrors. The mirrors are not decoration alone. They catch the light pouring in through the windows of the drum and throw it around the chamber, so that the gold seems to move and the whole room appears to shimmer and breathe. This wonder was built by people who believed that if you wanted to show a human being what heaven might feel like, you did not describe it to them. You built a room, and you let them climb into it... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.
0:13

There is a room in Málaga that was built to be the closest thing on earth to standing inside heaven. It is called the camarín of the Virgin of Victory, and it is hidden at the top of a tower inside the Santuario de la Victoria. To reach it, you climb and the ascent is the entire point... The building you are climbing through was completed in 1700, and it was designed as a single argument made in stone. At the bottom lies a crypt: a black chamber crowded with white plaster skeletons, a meditation on death and the brevity of life. From there a staircase rises, and as you climb it the light grows stronger and the imagery changes from bones to saints. The architects of the time understood this ascent as the soul's own journey, the dark crypt as the stage of penitence, the staircase as the stage of spiritual progress, and the room at the very top as the final stage: the union of the soul with the divine. That room at the top is the camarín, and its dome is one of the most extraordinary interiors in Spain... Every surface is covered in white and gold plasterwork. There is no empty space anywhere. The Baroque called this horror vacui, the horror of the void: the conviction that a space meant to represent heaven should not contain a single bare patch of stone. Out of that plasterwork emerge angels, flowers, birds, and mirrors. The mirrors are not decoration alone. They catch the light pouring in through the windows of the drum and throw it around the chamber, so that the gold seems to move and the whole room appears to shimmer and breathe. This wonder was built by people who believed that if you wanted to show a human being what heaven might feel like, you did not describe it to them. You built a room, and you let them climb into it... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

James Lucas

69,389 views • 4 months ago

One of the oldest cities in Spain is split in two by a 120 meter gorge. In the 18th century, a bridge was built across it. Hidden inside that bridge is a prison cell whose window opens onto the drop... The city is called Ronda, in the mountains of Andalusia, and it has been continuously inhabited since prehistoric times. The Romans called it Arunda. The Moors held it for seven centuries. In 1966, the Spanish state declared its historic centre a national heritage site. The gorge that cuts it in two is called El Tajo. On one side stands the old Moorish quarter, La Ciudad, with roots in the 8th century. On the other stands the newer town, El Mercadillo, built outside the medieval walls when Ronda outgrew them. For most of the city's history, the only way between them was a long descent to the river below, and a long climb back up. In 1735, King Philip V of Spain ordered a bridge to span the chasm. The first attempt collapsed in 1741, killing about fifty people. A second project began in 1759 under the Spanish architect José Martín de Aldehuela. It took thirty-four years. The bridge was finally inaugurated in 1793. It is 98 meters tall, made of solid stone, and it has never moved. Above the central arch, the architects built a chamber of about sixty square metres. For most of the bridge's history, this chamber served as a prison. The prisoners could see the river through a small barred window in the floor of their world. Ernest Hemingway visited Ronda repeatedly in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, and the most harrowing chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls — the village massacre Pilar describes, with men beaten by their neighbors and pushed off a cliff — was likely set in this town... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.
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One of the oldest cities in Spain is split in two by a 120 meter gorge. In the 18th century, a bridge was built across it. Hidden inside that bridge is a prison cell whose window opens onto the drop... The city is called Ronda, in the mountains of Andalusia, and it has been continuously inhabited since prehistoric times. The Romans called it Arunda. The Moors held it for seven centuries. In 1966, the Spanish state declared its historic centre a national heritage site. The gorge that cuts it in two is called El Tajo. On one side stands the old Moorish quarter, La Ciudad, with roots in the 8th century. On the other stands the newer town, El Mercadillo, built outside the medieval walls when Ronda outgrew them. For most of the city's history, the only way between them was a long descent to the river below, and a long climb back up. In 1735, King Philip V of Spain ordered a bridge to span the chasm. The first attempt collapsed in 1741, killing about fifty people. A second project began in 1759 under the Spanish architect José Martín de Aldehuela. It took thirty-four years. The bridge was finally inaugurated in 1793. It is 98 meters tall, made of solid stone, and it has never moved. Above the central arch, the architects built a chamber of about sixty square metres. For most of the bridge's history, this chamber served as a prison. The prisoners could see the river through a small barred window in the floor of their world. Ernest Hemingway visited Ronda repeatedly in the years before and after the Spanish Civil War, and the most harrowing chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls — the village massacre Pilar describes, with men beaten by their neighbors and pushed off a cliff — was likely set in this town... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

James Lucas

69,363 views • 4 months ago

The Colosseum had a retractable roof, operated by a crew of sailors, almost 2000 years before any modern stadium. It was called the velarium: an enormous awning of canvas and rope that could be drawn across the open top of the arena to shade fifty thousand spectators from the Roman sun. It was so large and so complex that ordinary labourers could not manage it. The Romans brought in sailors from the imperial fleet, men who spent their lives handling rigging and sail, and stationed them at the top of the structure to extend and retract the canvas as the day moved. A building that has stood, roofless to our eyes, for centuries was in fact designed to be covered. That is the pattern with the Colosseum: almost everything about it was way more advanced than it looks today... Construction began around 72 AD under the emperor Vespasian. Once completed, it was the largest amphitheater in the Roman world: an elliptical structure of stone, concrete, and travertine, 189 meters long, rising as high as a modern fifteen story building. It could hold around 50,000 people and the staircases allowed that entire crowd to enter and leave with a speed that modern stadium designers still study. Beneath the arena floor lay the hypogeum, a hidden labyrinth of tunnels, cells, and machinery. Animals and gladiators waited there in the dark. Numerous trap doors opened in the wooden floor above them, and through hidden lifts and ramps a lion, a leopard, or an armed man could rise into the daylight as if from nowhere, in front of tens of thousands of people. The Romans knew that they had built something that would outlast them so completely that the Colosseum became, for the people who came after, a measure of the world's own endurance. In the 8th century, an epigram attributed to the Venerable Bede offered a prophecy that has never lost its allure: "As long as the Colosseum stands, so shall Rome; when the Colosseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, so falls the world." If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.
0:14

The Colosseum had a retractable roof, operated by a crew of sailors, almost 2000 years before any modern stadium. It was called the velarium: an enormous awning of canvas and rope that could be drawn across the open top of the arena to shade fifty thousand spectators from the Roman sun. It was so large and so complex that ordinary labourers could not manage it. The Romans brought in sailors from the imperial fleet, men who spent their lives handling rigging and sail, and stationed them at the top of the structure to extend and retract the canvas as the day moved. A building that has stood, roofless to our eyes, for centuries was in fact designed to be covered. That is the pattern with the Colosseum: almost everything about it was way more advanced than it looks today... Construction began around 72 AD under the emperor Vespasian. Once completed, it was the largest amphitheater in the Roman world: an elliptical structure of stone, concrete, and travertine, 189 meters long, rising as high as a modern fifteen story building. It could hold around 50,000 people and the staircases allowed that entire crowd to enter and leave with a speed that modern stadium designers still study. Beneath the arena floor lay the hypogeum, a hidden labyrinth of tunnels, cells, and machinery. Animals and gladiators waited there in the dark. Numerous trap doors opened in the wooden floor above them, and through hidden lifts and ramps a lion, a leopard, or an armed man could rise into the daylight as if from nowhere, in front of tens of thousands of people. The Romans knew that they had built something that would outlast them so completely that the Colosseum became, for the people who came after, a measure of the world's own endurance. In the 8th century, an epigram attributed to the Venerable Bede offered a prophecy that has never lost its allure: "As long as the Colosseum stands, so shall Rome; when the Colosseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, so falls the world." If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

James Lucas

408,492 views • 4 months ago

I will never forget the first time I walked into St Peter's Basilica... None of it is painted. Everything overhead that appears to be a fresco is a mosaic: millions of small glass tiles, cut and set into place by hand. Michelangelo pierced the drum with sixteen windows, and beneath them runs a band of text, black on gold: TU ES PETRUS ET SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM. "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." From the floor it reads like an ordinary inscription but each of those letters is two metres tall... Above the windows the dome divides into sixteen segments, and within them six tiers of figures rise in rings: the popes buried in the basilica, then Christ, the Virgin Mary, St John the Baptist and the Apostles, then angels carrying the instruments of the Passion, then the faces of cherubim and seraphim. Above all of them, a blue sky scattered with gold stars, and at the summit, in the lantern, God the Father. The man who designed it, Giuseppe Cesari, was a painter. Between 1603 and 1612 he produced sixty-five life-size cartoons setting out the whole scheme, and every one of them was then translated into glass by mosaicists. The reason is actually pretty unglamorous. The basilica was damp, and candle smoke and incense from centuries of liturgy were eating the pictures alive. So the Vatican began converting the building into glass, dome by dome, and from the end of the 1600s the painted altarpieces too, one at a time. By the basilica's own reckoning, around ten thousand square metres of mosaic. The workshop that did all of this is still open: twelve artists work in the Vatican Mosaic Studio today, cutting tesserae by hand in nearly 28,000 shades and fixing them with a linseed-oil stucco whose recipe has been in use for four centuries. Earlier this year its director, Paolo Di Buono, described the work: "We have the idea that we are working for something that is almost eternal."
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I will never forget the first time I walked into St Peter's Basilica... None of it is painted. Everything overhead that appears to be a fresco is a mosaic: millions of small glass tiles, cut and set into place by hand. Michelangelo pierced the drum with sixteen windows, and beneath them runs a band of text, black on gold: TU ES PETRUS ET SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM. "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." From the floor it reads like an ordinary inscription but each of those letters is two metres tall... Above the windows the dome divides into sixteen segments, and within them six tiers of figures rise in rings: the popes buried in the basilica, then Christ, the Virgin Mary, St John the Baptist and the Apostles, then angels carrying the instruments of the Passion, then the faces of cherubim and seraphim. Above all of them, a blue sky scattered with gold stars, and at the summit, in the lantern, God the Father. The man who designed it, Giuseppe Cesari, was a painter. Between 1603 and 1612 he produced sixty-five life-size cartoons setting out the whole scheme, and every one of them was then translated into glass by mosaicists. The reason is actually pretty unglamorous. The basilica was damp, and candle smoke and incense from centuries of liturgy were eating the pictures alive. So the Vatican began converting the building into glass, dome by dome, and from the end of the 1600s the painted altarpieces too, one at a time. By the basilica's own reckoning, around ten thousand square metres of mosaic. The workshop that did all of this is still open: twelve artists work in the Vatican Mosaic Studio today, cutting tesserae by hand in nearly 28,000 shades and fixing them with a linseed-oil stucco whose recipe has been in use for four centuries. Earlier this year its director, Paolo Di Buono, described the work: "We have the idea that we are working for something that is almost eternal."

James Lucas

73,288 views • 2 months ago

Imagine carving a single block of marble until the veil becomes so thin that the stone itself turns transparent. Antonio Canova, one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived, saw this statue and said he would have given 10 years of his life to have made it... It is called the Veiled Christ, and it has been called the most beautiful sculpture in the world. It sits in the Cappella Sansevero in Naples, a single block of marble carved in 1753 into the body of the dead Christ, lying beneath a shroud so thin and so perfectly rendered that, beneath it, you can see the swelling of the veins, the hollow of the closed eyes and the wound in the side. Prince Raimondo di Sangro had first hired a famous sculptor, Antonio Corradini, to carve it. Corradini died with nothing finished but a small terracotta sketch. The prince then handed the commission to a young and almost unknown Neapolitan named Giuseppe Sanmartino, and what Sanmartino produced was so far beyond what anyone expected that people refused to believe it was carved at all... The veil, they said, could not be marble. It had to be a real cloth that the prince, a notorious alchemist, had somehow turned to stone with a secret chemical process. The legend has never fully died, and Raimondo di Sangro did everything to deserve it. He was the head of the Neapolitan Masonic lodge, a polyglot who read Arabic and Hebrew, an inventor who built an "eternal flame" from chemicals of his own making. In the crypt beneath the chapel he kept two of his strangest creations: the "anatomical machines," two full human skeletons wrapped in astonishingly detailed reproductions of the entire human circulatory system, every artery and vein. For two centuries people believed he had somehow petrified the bodies of two living servants. Modern study has shown the skeletons are real, but the vascular systems were made by human hands. There is one more legend: it is said that when the Veiled Christ was finished, the prince had Sanmartino blinded, so that he could never create anything so beautiful again. It is almost certainly not true. But people have repeated it for two hundred and fifty years, because they needed an explanation for how a thing like this could exist, and be made only once, by a man almost no one had heard of, and never be equalled by anyone since... I write a weekly newsletter for over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible: Thanks for reading.
0:15

Imagine carving a single block of marble until the veil becomes so thin that the stone itself turns transparent. Antonio Canova, one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived, saw this statue and said he would have given 10 years of his life to have made it... It is called the Veiled Christ, and it has been called the most beautiful sculpture in the world. It sits in the Cappella Sansevero in Naples, a single block of marble carved in 1753 into the body of the dead Christ, lying beneath a shroud so thin and so perfectly rendered that, beneath it, you can see the swelling of the veins, the hollow of the closed eyes and the wound in the side. Prince Raimondo di Sangro had first hired a famous sculptor, Antonio Corradini, to carve it. Corradini died with nothing finished but a small terracotta sketch. The prince then handed the commission to a young and almost unknown Neapolitan named Giuseppe Sanmartino, and what Sanmartino produced was so far beyond what anyone expected that people refused to believe it was carved at all... The veil, they said, could not be marble. It had to be a real cloth that the prince, a notorious alchemist, had somehow turned to stone with a secret chemical process. The legend has never fully died, and Raimondo di Sangro did everything to deserve it. He was the head of the Neapolitan Masonic lodge, a polyglot who read Arabic and Hebrew, an inventor who built an "eternal flame" from chemicals of his own making. In the crypt beneath the chapel he kept two of his strangest creations: the "anatomical machines," two full human skeletons wrapped in astonishingly detailed reproductions of the entire human circulatory system, every artery and vein. For two centuries people believed he had somehow petrified the bodies of two living servants. Modern study has shown the skeletons are real, but the vascular systems were made by human hands. There is one more legend: it is said that when the Veiled Christ was finished, the prince had Sanmartino blinded, so that he could never create anything so beautiful again. It is almost certainly not true. But people have repeated it for two hundred and fifty years, because they needed an explanation for how a thing like this could exist, and be made only once, by a man almost no one had heard of, and never be equalled by anyone since... I write a weekly newsletter for over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible: Thanks for reading.

James Lucas

66,541 views • 4 months ago

In 2003, a significant discovery was made in the Sakya Monastery in Tibet. An ancient library containing a vast collection of 84,000 secret manuscripts was uncovered. These manuscripts, which are over 1,000 years old, are stored on traditional stacks measuring 60 meters in length and 10 meters in height. This extraordinary find offers a unique window into the history and culture of the region. The Sakya Monastery, founded in 1073 by Konchok Gyelpo, is one of the most important centers of Tibetan Buddhism. The discovery of this ancient library within its walls has provided a wealth of information and insight into the development of this religious tradition and the history of the region.
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In 2003, a significant discovery was made in the Sakya Monastery in Tibet. An ancient library containing a vast collection of 84,000 secret manuscripts was uncovered. These manuscripts, which are over 1,000 years old, are stored on traditional stacks measuring 60 meters in length and 10 meters in height. This extraordinary find offers a unique window into the history and culture of the region. The Sakya Monastery, founded in 1073 by Konchok Gyelpo, is one of the most important centers of Tibetan Buddhism. The discovery of this ancient library within its walls has provided a wealth of information and insight into the development of this religious tradition and the history of the region.

Historic Vids

10,058,928 views • 2 years ago

I know what you're thinking. It's not AI. But I get why it looks impossible… The Apennine Colossus rises 11 metres from the grounds of the Villa Demidoff at Pratolino, north of Florence. It was completed between 1579 and 1580 by the Flemish sculptor Giambologna, commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, as the centrepiece of one of the most extravagant Renaissance gardens ever made. The giant is a personification of the Apennine Mountains. Scholars believe Giambologna drew on Ovid's Metamorphoses, in particular the description of a mountain-like Atlas, when he designed the figure. The Colossus emerges from the landscape as if he had always been there, his body merging with rock and moss, stalactites forming his beard, his hair dissolving into stone. With his left hand he crushes the head of a sea monster, from whose open mouth water pours into the pond below. To the people who first encountered him, he did not seem like a statue. He seemed alive. The giant was engineered, through a hidden network of water pipes, to sweat and weep. In winter, icicles formed across his body. In summer, water cascaded from his head into the gardens below. But the most extraordinary thing about the Apennine Colossus is what is inside him... Across three levels, the giant contains a network of chambers. On the ground floor sits a cave-grotto with an octagonal fountain dedicated to the Greek sea goddess Thetys. On the upper level is a room large enough to hold a small orchestra. And in the head there's a private chamber with slits cut into the eyes and ears, and a fireplace whose smoke escaped through the giant's nostrils. Francesco I de' Medici used to sit inside the head and fish through one of the eye slits into the pond below. According to the architectural historian Philip Steadman, "at night he would have torches lit, so the eyes glowed." A century later, around 1690, the sculptor Giovan Battista Foggini added a dragon to the back of the Colossus. The dragon's belly contained a fire chamber. Its neck and head served as the chimney. The smoke rose from the dragon's mouth. A giant that weeps. That breathes smoke through stone nostrils. That has a concert hall in its chest and a fishing room behind its eyes. The Renaissance produced many things that seem almost impossible today. This may be the one that should not even have been imaginable... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.
0:17

I know what you're thinking. It's not AI. But I get why it looks impossible… The Apennine Colossus rises 11 metres from the grounds of the Villa Demidoff at Pratolino, north of Florence. It was completed between 1579 and 1580 by the Flemish sculptor Giambologna, commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, as the centrepiece of one of the most extravagant Renaissance gardens ever made. The giant is a personification of the Apennine Mountains. Scholars believe Giambologna drew on Ovid's Metamorphoses, in particular the description of a mountain-like Atlas, when he designed the figure. The Colossus emerges from the landscape as if he had always been there, his body merging with rock and moss, stalactites forming his beard, his hair dissolving into stone. With his left hand he crushes the head of a sea monster, from whose open mouth water pours into the pond below. To the people who first encountered him, he did not seem like a statue. He seemed alive. The giant was engineered, through a hidden network of water pipes, to sweat and weep. In winter, icicles formed across his body. In summer, water cascaded from his head into the gardens below. But the most extraordinary thing about the Apennine Colossus is what is inside him... Across three levels, the giant contains a network of chambers. On the ground floor sits a cave-grotto with an octagonal fountain dedicated to the Greek sea goddess Thetys. On the upper level is a room large enough to hold a small orchestra. And in the head there's a private chamber with slits cut into the eyes and ears, and a fireplace whose smoke escaped through the giant's nostrils. Francesco I de' Medici used to sit inside the head and fish through one of the eye slits into the pond below. According to the architectural historian Philip Steadman, "at night he would have torches lit, so the eyes glowed." A century later, around 1690, the sculptor Giovan Battista Foggini added a dragon to the back of the Colossus. The dragon's belly contained a fire chamber. Its neck and head served as the chimney. The smoke rose from the dragon's mouth. A giant that weeps. That breathes smoke through stone nostrils. That has a concert hall in its chest and a fishing room behind its eyes. The Renaissance produced many things that seem almost impossible today. This may be the one that should not even have been imaginable... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

James Lucas

92,197 views • 5 months ago

There is a keyhole in Rome that lets you see three countries at once... It sits in a green door at the top of the Aventine Hill. Press one eye to the lock, and the dome of St Peter's Basilica appears at the end of a long corridor of laurel hedges, framed perfectly inside a circle of metal barely an inch wide. The dome is a kilometer and a half away, but through the keyhole it looks impossibly close. As if you could reach through and touch it. The door belongs to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the only order from the Crusades that still exercises sovereignty today. The villa behind the door has extraterritorial status and it's treated as separate from the surrounding Italian territory. This is why one keyhole holds three sovereign jurisdictions. The garden in front of you is the territory of the Order of Malta — not a country in the conventional sense, but a sovereign subject of international law, with its own passports, ambassadors, and a permanent observer seat at the United Nations. The land between the garden and the dome is Italy. The dome itself stands inside the Vatican. Three sovereignties in one glance... None of this was an accident. In 1765, the Venetian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi was commissioned to redesign the priory. He laid out the gardens, planted the laurels, and aligned everything toward the distant dome of Michelangelo's masterpiece. He was building a telescope made of trees. When he died in 1778, he was buried inside the church behind the door, a few steps from the keyhole that became his most famous design...
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There is a keyhole in Rome that lets you see three countries at once... It sits in a green door at the top of the Aventine Hill. Press one eye to the lock, and the dome of St Peter's Basilica appears at the end of a long corridor of laurel hedges, framed perfectly inside a circle of metal barely an inch wide. The dome is a kilometer and a half away, but through the keyhole it looks impossibly close. As if you could reach through and touch it. The door belongs to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the only order from the Crusades that still exercises sovereignty today. The villa behind the door has extraterritorial status and it's treated as separate from the surrounding Italian territory. This is why one keyhole holds three sovereign jurisdictions. The garden in front of you is the territory of the Order of Malta — not a country in the conventional sense, but a sovereign subject of international law, with its own passports, ambassadors, and a permanent observer seat at the United Nations. The land between the garden and the dome is Italy. The dome itself stands inside the Vatican. Three sovereignties in one glance... None of this was an accident. In 1765, the Venetian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi was commissioned to redesign the priory. He laid out the gardens, planted the laurels, and aligned everything toward the distant dome of Michelangelo's masterpiece. He was building a telescope made of trees. When he died in 1778, he was buried inside the church behind the door, a few steps from the keyhole that became his most famous design...

James Lucas

245,684 views • 5 months ago

At first glance, it just looks like a stunning painting. Then you step back and realize you’re looking at one of the most impossibly detailed works of art you’ve ever seen... Around 1620, in Antwerp, an unnamed Flemish painter set out to gather the city’s most famous artworks into a single piece, but what he ultimately chose to do with it will never cease to amaze me. Now held at the National Gallery in London, this painting is called Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures, and it is, technically speaking, one of the most vertiginous acts of illusionism in the Western canon. Eleven richly dressed men — artists, dealers, collectors, the cognoscenti of the title — move through a vast imagined gallery, discussing and inspecting its contents. But the figures are almost beside the point. What stops you are the walls. From floor to ceiling, they are covered with meticulous miniature copies of real works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters, mostly from Antwerp, assembled as an ideal gathering of the finest things the city had to offer. Paintings within a painting. A museum compressed into a canvas. This is what scholars call a Kunstkammer, or "cabinet of curiosities", and the genre carried real social weight. To collect art in the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age was a declaration, not merely a pleasure. The cognoscenti shown here are pretentious by design: richly dressed, surrounded by coins, medals, and Persian rugs. Every object is a signal of wealth. And then — almost invisible, sitting on the windowsill at the edge of the composition — there is the monkey. The picture celebrates the pleasures of collecting and the erudition of art appreciation. But the monkey, a traditional symbol of the foolishness of human endeavors, sits there as a reminder of the frivolity and ultimate futility of buying expensive things. He is mocking them... these men so devoted to hoarding precious objects, when perhaps their hours might have been spent on something less perishable. It is one of the most elegant acts of subversion in art history: a painter who spent months lovingly reproducing the work of other painters, in obsessive miniature detail, and then placed a fool's emblem in the corner to ask whether any of it matters... It is simultaneously a love letter to art and an indictment of what happens when love turns into possession. The cognoscenti in the room are not wrong to find beauty worth pursuing, but they have perhaps confused the pursuit with the trophy. Four hundred years later, the monkey is still watching and the question it asks has not changed: are you here for the beauty, or for the proof that the beauty is yours? -- -- -- I wrote about this and 5 other impossible masterpieces in today's article. You can read it here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.
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At first glance, it just looks like a stunning painting. Then you step back and realize you’re looking at one of the most impossibly detailed works of art you’ve ever seen... Around 1620, in Antwerp, an unnamed Flemish painter set out to gather the city’s most famous artworks into a single piece, but what he ultimately chose to do with it will never cease to amaze me. Now held at the National Gallery in London, this painting is called Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures, and it is, technically speaking, one of the most vertiginous acts of illusionism in the Western canon. Eleven richly dressed men — artists, dealers, collectors, the cognoscenti of the title — move through a vast imagined gallery, discussing and inspecting its contents. But the figures are almost beside the point. What stops you are the walls. From floor to ceiling, they are covered with meticulous miniature copies of real works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters, mostly from Antwerp, assembled as an ideal gathering of the finest things the city had to offer. Paintings within a painting. A museum compressed into a canvas. This is what scholars call a Kunstkammer, or "cabinet of curiosities", and the genre carried real social weight. To collect art in the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age was a declaration, not merely a pleasure. The cognoscenti shown here are pretentious by design: richly dressed, surrounded by coins, medals, and Persian rugs. Every object is a signal of wealth. And then — almost invisible, sitting on the windowsill at the edge of the composition — there is the monkey. The picture celebrates the pleasures of collecting and the erudition of art appreciation. But the monkey, a traditional symbol of the foolishness of human endeavors, sits there as a reminder of the frivolity and ultimate futility of buying expensive things. He is mocking them... these men so devoted to hoarding precious objects, when perhaps their hours might have been spent on something less perishable. It is one of the most elegant acts of subversion in art history: a painter who spent months lovingly reproducing the work of other painters, in obsessive miniature detail, and then placed a fool's emblem in the corner to ask whether any of it matters... It is simultaneously a love letter to art and an indictment of what happens when love turns into possession. The cognoscenti in the room are not wrong to find beauty worth pursuing, but they have perhaps confused the pursuit with the trophy. Four hundred years later, the monkey is still watching and the question it asks has not changed: are you here for the beauty, or for the proof that the beauty is yours? -- -- -- I wrote about this and 5 other impossible masterpieces in today's article. You can read it here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

James Lucas

31,107 views • 4 months ago

Winston Churchill once said that "we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us." There is a building in Rome that may be the most literal example of what he meant... It's called the Vittoriano, or the Altar of the Fatherland, and it stands at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, which has been a centre of Roman civic and religious life for more than two and a half thousand years. Italy had been a unified country for only twenty-four years when construction began. Before 1861, the peninsula had been a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, papal lands and foreign provinces. The new nation was, in the words of the Italian statesman Massimo d'Azeglio, a state without a people: "We have made Italy. All that remains is to make Italians." The country existed on paper but it did not yet exist in the imagination of its citizens. In 1880, the government held a competition for a national monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of the unified country. Five years later, the young architect Giuseppe Sacconi won with a design that proposed nothing less than a new sacred centre for the nation. It was inaugurated on 4 June 1911, on the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. It is 135 metres wide and 81 metres tall at the wings of the bronze quadrigas crowning its roof. Every surface is faced in brilliant white Botticino marble. Two enormous chariots of Victory ride along the skyline. In 1921, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was installed at the base of the monument, with an eternal flame for the unidentified Italian dead of the First World War. Italian presidents regularly lay wreaths there during major state ceremonies. Locals colloquially call it the "Wedding Cake" or the "Typewriter", and architectural critics dismiss its scale and its unapologetic neoclassicism. The mockery has become part of how Italians know it. But underneath the jokes is a monument built for one of the most consequential moments in modern European history... Italy spent centuries divided between foreign powers and rival kingdoms. The Vittoriano commemorates the long struggle by which it became one nation. It is, in the end, the altar of the country itself. If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the wonders of the past. You can join us here: I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.
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Winston Churchill once said that "we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us." There is a building in Rome that may be the most literal example of what he meant... It's called the Vittoriano, or the Altar of the Fatherland, and it stands at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, which has been a centre of Roman civic and religious life for more than two and a half thousand years. Italy had been a unified country for only twenty-four years when construction began. Before 1861, the peninsula had been a patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, papal lands and foreign provinces. The new nation was, in the words of the Italian statesman Massimo d'Azeglio, a state without a people: "We have made Italy. All that remains is to make Italians." The country existed on paper but it did not yet exist in the imagination of its citizens. In 1880, the government held a competition for a national monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of the unified country. Five years later, the young architect Giuseppe Sacconi won with a design that proposed nothing less than a new sacred centre for the nation. It was inaugurated on 4 June 1911, on the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. It is 135 metres wide and 81 metres tall at the wings of the bronze quadrigas crowning its roof. Every surface is faced in brilliant white Botticino marble. Two enormous chariots of Victory ride along the skyline. In 1921, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was installed at the base of the monument, with an eternal flame for the unidentified Italian dead of the First World War. Italian presidents regularly lay wreaths there during major state ceremonies. Locals colloquially call it the "Wedding Cake" or the "Typewriter", and architectural critics dismiss its scale and its unapologetic neoclassicism. The mockery has become part of how Italians know it. But underneath the jokes is a monument built for one of the most consequential moments in modern European history... Italy spent centuries divided between foreign powers and rival kingdoms. The Vittoriano commemorates the long struggle by which it became one nation. It is, in the end, the altar of the country itself. If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the wonders of the past. You can join us here: I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

James Lucas

40,330 views • 4 months ago

God created the world in seven days, but it took Michelangelo four years to depict it on this remarkable ceiling.... To any visitor of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, two features become immediately and undeniably apparent: 1) the ceiling is really high up, and 2) there are a lot of paintings up there. Because of this, the centuries have handed down to us an image of Michelangelo lying on his back, wiping sweat and plaster from his eyes as he toiled away year after year, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, begrudgingly completing a commission that he never wanted to accept in the first place. Fortunately for Michelangelo, this is probably not true. But that does nothing to lessen the fact that the frescoes, which take up the entirety of the vault, are among the most important paintings in the world. Michelangelo began to work on the frescoes for Pope Julius II in 1508, replacing a blue ceiling dotted with stars. Originally, the pope asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with a geometric ornament, and place the twelve apostles in spandrels around the decoration. Michelangelo proposed instead to paint the Old Testament scenes now found on the vault, divided by the fictive architecture that he uses to organize the composition. The narrative begins at the altar and is divided into three sections. In the first three paintings, Michelangelo tells the story of The Creation of the Heavens and Earth; this is followed by The Creation of Adam and Eve and the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden; finally is the story of Noah and the Great Flood. Ignudi, or nude youths, sit in fictive architecture around these frescoes and they are accompanied by prophets and sibyls (ancient seers who, according to tradition, foretold the coming of Christ) in the spandrels. In the four corners of the room, in the pendentives, one finds scenes depicting the Salvation of Israel. Although the most famous of these frescoes is without a doubt, The Creation of Adam, reproductions of which have become ubiquitous in modern culture for its dramatic positioning of the two monumental figures reaching towards each other, not all of the frescoes are painted in this style. In fact, the first frescoes Michelangelo painted contain multiple figures, much smaller in size, engaged in complex narratives. This can best be exemplified by his painting of The Deluge. In this fresco, Michelangelo has used the physical space of the water and the sky to separate four distinct parts of the narrative. On the right side of the painting, a cluster of people seeks sanctuary from the rain under a makeshift shelter. On the left, even more people climb up the side of a mountain to escape the rising water. Centrally, a small boat is about to capsize because of the unending downpour. And in the background, a team of men work on building the arc—the only hope of salvation. Up close, this painting confronts the viewer with the desperation of those about to perish in the flood and makes one question God’s justice in wiping out the entire population of the earth, save Noah and his family, because of the sins of the wicked. Unfortunately, from the floor of the chapel, the use of small, tightly grouped figures undermines the emotional content and makes the story harder to follow. 🎥© lockette (IG) #archaeohistories
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God created the world in seven days, but it took Michelangelo four years to depict it on this remarkable ceiling.... To any visitor of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, two features become immediately and undeniably apparent: 1) the ceiling is really high up, and 2) there are a lot of paintings up there. Because of this, the centuries have handed down to us an image of Michelangelo lying on his back, wiping sweat and plaster from his eyes as he toiled away year after year, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, begrudgingly completing a commission that he never wanted to accept in the first place. Fortunately for Michelangelo, this is probably not true. But that does nothing to lessen the fact that the frescoes, which take up the entirety of the vault, are among the most important paintings in the world. Michelangelo began to work on the frescoes for Pope Julius II in 1508, replacing a blue ceiling dotted with stars. Originally, the pope asked Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with a geometric ornament, and place the twelve apostles in spandrels around the decoration. Michelangelo proposed instead to paint the Old Testament scenes now found on the vault, divided by the fictive architecture that he uses to organize the composition. The narrative begins at the altar and is divided into three sections. In the first three paintings, Michelangelo tells the story of The Creation of the Heavens and Earth; this is followed by The Creation of Adam and Eve and the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden; finally is the story of Noah and the Great Flood. Ignudi, or nude youths, sit in fictive architecture around these frescoes and they are accompanied by prophets and sibyls (ancient seers who, according to tradition, foretold the coming of Christ) in the spandrels. In the four corners of the room, in the pendentives, one finds scenes depicting the Salvation of Israel. Although the most famous of these frescoes is without a doubt, The Creation of Adam, reproductions of which have become ubiquitous in modern culture for its dramatic positioning of the two monumental figures reaching towards each other, not all of the frescoes are painted in this style. In fact, the first frescoes Michelangelo painted contain multiple figures, much smaller in size, engaged in complex narratives. This can best be exemplified by his painting of The Deluge. In this fresco, Michelangelo has used the physical space of the water and the sky to separate four distinct parts of the narrative. On the right side of the painting, a cluster of people seeks sanctuary from the rain under a makeshift shelter. On the left, even more people climb up the side of a mountain to escape the rising water. Centrally, a small boat is about to capsize because of the unending downpour. And in the background, a team of men work on building the arc—the only hope of salvation. Up close, this painting confronts the viewer with the desperation of those about to perish in the flood and makes one question God’s justice in wiping out the entire population of the earth, save Noah and his family, because of the sins of the wicked. Unfortunately, from the floor of the chapel, the use of small, tightly grouped figures undermines the emotional content and makes the story harder to follow. 🎥© lockette (IG) #archaeohistories

Archaeo - Histories

16,175 views • 1 month ago

Monastery of Mor Augin (St. Augin), an ancient Syriac Orthodox Monastery, on the southern slope of Mount Izlo, located in area of Nsibin, southeastern, Türkiye. This historic site introduced monastic living to Mesopotamia and is still a significant pilgrimage destination for Syriac Orthodox Christians. It symbolizes the lasting impact of early Christian monastic practices. The monastery was founded in the first half of 4th Century AD, by Saint Awgin, a monk from El Kulzom, Egypt. Mor Augin came with 70 of his disciples to preach Christianity in Mardin Province which was controlled by Sasanian Empire. It had more than 350 monks in those periods and was one of the main spiritual centres in Mount Izlo and Turabdin. In 20th Century, there were more than 20 monks in the monastery. In 1915, Sayfo the monks witnessed the destruction of Syriac villages in the plains below. The monastery was also affected by violence. The last monk passed away in 1968. Due to persecution of Christians in Turkey, SURYOYE had to flee to Europe and other countries and few others moved to nearby villages in area of Turabdin. Saint Mor Augin is the traditional founder of Syriac monasticism. He originated from Qluzma in Egypt, and started off as a pearl diver who gave pearls to the poor and needy. In mid-life he decided to become a monk at the monastery of St. Pachomius, and from there he and his brotherhood, the holy 70 ancestors, set off to Bethnahrin (Mesopotamia), settling in the region of Mount Izlo. The remains of the monastery dedicated to his name still stands on the slopes of Mount Izlo, overlooking the Mesopotamian plain. His name testifies his success and his glory because it is translated as “the good man” (Bar Hebreus, vol. 1, 1872-1877, p. 85ff). As Mor Augin was a great and respectable monk, his word and achievement was known even in Byzantium (Constantinople) and by the Emperor Constantine. He said: “These three warriors are known in our kingdom: Antonius in Egypt, Illarion at the coast and Mor Augin who moved out of Egypt and come and settled down in your region and enlightened it. We plead and beg of him that he prays for us in front of Our Lord, so that we and our kingdom will be protected and safe.” (Tale of Saint Mor Augin). He’s called “Second Christ” in the Syriac tradition owning to the miraculous deeds he did. This certainly does not mean an equality between the both of them, rather it expresses the particularly tight succession of Mor Augin. Mor Augin and his companions filled and decorated the whole east with monasteries and churches, from Egypt to the border of Persia. In 363 AD, Saint Mor Augin passed away at a great age and advanced to the kingdom of heaven. “His body was buried in the cave underneath his monastery’s southern altar. His holy relics are kept till today in the monastery. May his prayers be with us” (P. Behnam, 1908, p- 18f). Patriarch of Antioch, H.H. Ignatius Zakka I, appointed Fr. Joachim Raban as the abbot of Mor Augin Monastery in April 2010. With the help of the Rabans and other employees of Mor Gabriel Monastery and SURYOYE in Europe, Fr. Joachim has restored some of the Monastery buildings. Restoration of buildings e.g. the main church and vital parts of the monastery are still ongoing till this day. 🎥© l.ianour (IG) #archaeohistories
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Monastery of Mor Augin (St. Augin), an ancient Syriac Orthodox Monastery, on the southern slope of Mount Izlo, located in area of Nsibin, southeastern, Türkiye. This historic site introduced monastic living to Mesopotamia and is still a significant pilgrimage destination for Syriac Orthodox Christians. It symbolizes the lasting impact of early Christian monastic practices. The monastery was founded in the first half of 4th Century AD, by Saint Awgin, a monk from El Kulzom, Egypt. Mor Augin came with 70 of his disciples to preach Christianity in Mardin Province which was controlled by Sasanian Empire. It had more than 350 monks in those periods and was one of the main spiritual centres in Mount Izlo and Turabdin. In 20th Century, there were more than 20 monks in the monastery. In 1915, Sayfo the monks witnessed the destruction of Syriac villages in the plains below. The monastery was also affected by violence. The last monk passed away in 1968. Due to persecution of Christians in Turkey, SURYOYE had to flee to Europe and other countries and few others moved to nearby villages in area of Turabdin. Saint Mor Augin is the traditional founder of Syriac monasticism. He originated from Qluzma in Egypt, and started off as a pearl diver who gave pearls to the poor and needy. In mid-life he decided to become a monk at the monastery of St. Pachomius, and from there he and his brotherhood, the holy 70 ancestors, set off to Bethnahrin (Mesopotamia), settling in the region of Mount Izlo. The remains of the monastery dedicated to his name still stands on the slopes of Mount Izlo, overlooking the Mesopotamian plain. His name testifies his success and his glory because it is translated as “the good man” (Bar Hebreus, vol. 1, 1872-1877, p. 85ff). As Mor Augin was a great and respectable monk, his word and achievement was known even in Byzantium (Constantinople) and by the Emperor Constantine. He said: “These three warriors are known in our kingdom: Antonius in Egypt, Illarion at the coast and Mor Augin who moved out of Egypt and come and settled down in your region and enlightened it. We plead and beg of him that he prays for us in front of Our Lord, so that we and our kingdom will be protected and safe.” (Tale of Saint Mor Augin). He’s called “Second Christ” in the Syriac tradition owning to the miraculous deeds he did. This certainly does not mean an equality between the both of them, rather it expresses the particularly tight succession of Mor Augin. Mor Augin and his companions filled and decorated the whole east with monasteries and churches, from Egypt to the border of Persia. In 363 AD, Saint Mor Augin passed away at a great age and advanced to the kingdom of heaven. “His body was buried in the cave underneath his monastery’s southern altar. His holy relics are kept till today in the monastery. May his prayers be with us” (P. Behnam, 1908, p- 18f). Patriarch of Antioch, H.H. Ignatius Zakka I, appointed Fr. Joachim Raban as the abbot of Mor Augin Monastery in April 2010. With the help of the Rabans and other employees of Mor Gabriel Monastery and SURYOYE in Europe, Fr. Joachim has restored some of the Monastery buildings. Restoration of buildings e.g. the main church and vital parts of the monastery are still ongoing till this day. 🎥© l.ianour (IG) #archaeohistories

Archaeo - Histories

38,298 views • 2 years ago

In 1499, Michelangelo overheard people crediting his greatest work to someone else. He snuck into St. Peter's at night and carved his name on the sculpture. He regretted it immediately and never signed anything again for the rest of his life... He was 24 years old. The year before, a French cardinal had paid him 450 gold ducats to sculpt a statue for his own tomb. The contract had one strange clause: it had to be "the most beautiful work of marble in Rome, one that no living artist could better." Michelangelo had never completed a major public commission. He accepted anyway... He carved for two years from a single block of Carrara marble that he later called the most perfect stone he ever worked. What he produced was the Pietà: the body of Christ, lifeless, across the lap of his mother. When it was unveiled, visitors refused to believe a 24-year-old Florentine had made it. They credited the work to a more famous Lombard sculptor. So according to Vasari, Michelangelo slipped into the basilica with a chisel and carved his name in Latin across the sash running between Mary's breasts: MICHAELANGELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTINUS FACIEBAT. "Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Florentine, made this." Then he vowed never to sign another work. He kept that vow. Through the David. Through the Sistine Chapel. Through the dome of St. Peter's. Through 65 more years of work, until he died at 88. Not one of them bears his name. What I can never quite get over is that he was only 23 when he started. A young man who believed he could carve the most beautiful object on earth. And then he did... If you enjoyed this, I write a newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the wonder and beauty of the past, one story at a time. You can join us here: History is more beautiful than we remember.
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In 1499, Michelangelo overheard people crediting his greatest work to someone else. He snuck into St. Peter's at night and carved his name on the sculpture. He regretted it immediately and never signed anything again for the rest of his life... He was 24 years old. The year before, a French cardinal had paid him 450 gold ducats to sculpt a statue for his own tomb. The contract had one strange clause: it had to be "the most beautiful work of marble in Rome, one that no living artist could better." Michelangelo had never completed a major public commission. He accepted anyway... He carved for two years from a single block of Carrara marble that he later called the most perfect stone he ever worked. What he produced was the Pietà: the body of Christ, lifeless, across the lap of his mother. When it was unveiled, visitors refused to believe a 24-year-old Florentine had made it. They credited the work to a more famous Lombard sculptor. So according to Vasari, Michelangelo slipped into the basilica with a chisel and carved his name in Latin across the sash running between Mary's breasts: MICHAELANGELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTINUS FACIEBAT. "Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Florentine, made this." Then he vowed never to sign another work. He kept that vow. Through the David. Through the Sistine Chapel. Through the dome of St. Peter's. Through 65 more years of work, until he died at 88. Not one of them bears his name. What I can never quite get over is that he was only 23 when he started. A young man who believed he could carve the most beautiful object on earth. And then he did... If you enjoyed this, I write a newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the wonder and beauty of the past, one story at a time. You can join us here: History is more beautiful than we remember.

James Lucas

753,113 views • 5 months ago

In 1401, the cathedral chapter of Seville met to decide what to build on the ruins of the city's mosque. According to tradition, this is what they agreed: "Let us build a church so beautiful and so great that those who see it finished will think we were mad." It took more than a century, and when it was finished it was the largest cathedral on earth, and it is still the largest Gothic cathedral in the world... The minaret of the old mosque was left standing and turned into the bell tower, the Giralda. It has no staircase. Inside are thirty-five wide ramps, built so the muezzin could ride a horse to the top to call the city to prayer. People have been climbing them for hundreds of years. And inside the cathedral stands what its own archives call the largest altarpiece in Christendom: a wall of carved wood and gold nearly thirty metres high, telling the life of Christ. The Flemish sculptor who began it, Pieter Dancart, worked on it until he died. It took almost a hundred years to finish. Not one of the men who said that sentence in 1401 lived to see the building completed... We can build anything we want now, but as poet Heinrich Heine once said: "In those days men had convictions, we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral."
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In 1401, the cathedral chapter of Seville met to decide what to build on the ruins of the city's mosque. According to tradition, this is what they agreed: "Let us build a church so beautiful and so great that those who see it finished will think we were mad." It took more than a century, and when it was finished it was the largest cathedral on earth, and it is still the largest Gothic cathedral in the world... The minaret of the old mosque was left standing and turned into the bell tower, the Giralda. It has no staircase. Inside are thirty-five wide ramps, built so the muezzin could ride a horse to the top to call the city to prayer. People have been climbing them for hundreds of years. And inside the cathedral stands what its own archives call the largest altarpiece in Christendom: a wall of carved wood and gold nearly thirty metres high, telling the life of Christ. The Flemish sculptor who began it, Pieter Dancart, worked on it until he died. It took almost a hundred years to finish. Not one of the men who said that sentence in 1401 lived to see the building completed... We can build anything we want now, but as poet Heinrich Heine once said: "In those days men had convictions, we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral."

James Lucas

70,158 views • 2 months ago

This is the only existing footage of Mark Twain. It was filmed in 1909, and within a year, he was gone... The man walking there, in the white suit with the cigar, and sitting outside at a table with his two daughters, is Samuel Clemens, the legendary writer the world knew as Mark Twain. By 1909 he was one of the most famous men alive. The footage was shot by Thomas Edison himself, who visited Twain at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Connecticut. It is in black and white, it flickers with age, and it is the only known film of Twain ever made. The father of American literature has been gone for more than a century, but here, for a few flickering seconds, he is still alive.
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This is the only existing footage of Mark Twain. It was filmed in 1909, and within a year, he was gone... The man walking there, in the white suit with the cigar, and sitting outside at a table with his two daughters, is Samuel Clemens, the legendary writer the world knew as Mark Twain. By 1909 he was one of the most famous men alive. The footage was shot by Thomas Edison himself, who visited Twain at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Connecticut. It is in black and white, it flickers with age, and it is the only known film of Twain ever made. The father of American literature has been gone for more than a century, but here, for a few flickering seconds, he is still alive.

James Lucas

452,043 views • 3 months ago

Plato said your soul comes from a star, and returns to it when you die. 🌟 This idea runs through almost 2,000 years of philosophy, and it keeps coming back to the same shape: the sphere. Before Plato, Parmenides described ultimate reality as a perfect sphere, balanced equally from the center in every direction. Empedocles believed that when the universe is fully united by Love, it becomes one single sphere. He called it the Sphairos. Then came Plato. In the Timaeus, the creator makes the universe a sphere, the most perfect of all shapes. It has no eyes, no ears, no hands, because nothing exists outside it to see or touch. It is a living being, complete in itself. The stars are made mostly of fire, round like the universe itself. Plato calls them visible gods. And here's the part almost nobody talks about: the creator assigns every soul to its own star. Live well, and after death your soul returns home to it. ✨ Even your head, Plato says, is round because it copies the shape of the cosmos. The part of you that holds the divine is shaped like an orb. In the Symposium, he tells another story. The first humans were round, with four arms, four legs and two faces. Why round? Because they came from the sun, the earth and the moon. Zeus split them in two, and we've been searching for our other half ever since. Cicero picked up the thread. In the Dream of Scipio, human souls come from the eternal fires we call stars, which are round, spherical and animated by divine minds. The virtuous, he wrote, return to the Milky Way. The later Platonists went even further. They taught that the soul travels inside a luminous vehicle, the augoeides, meaning "radiant" or "star-like." Iamblichus said this vehicle is spherical. Proclus said the soul descends in a perfectly spherical body of light, picking up layers of the four elements on its way down. Your physical body is just a coat worn over an orb of light. Over the centuries, this body of light picked up other names: the body of glory, the celestial body. If you read my last post about the glorified body, that should sound familiar. 👀 The idea never died. Around 1320, Dante writes the Paradiso. In the heaven of Saturn, he sees "a hundred little spheres." They were souls. 🌕
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Plato said your soul comes from a star, and returns to it when you die. 🌟 This idea runs through almost 2,000 years of philosophy, and it keeps coming back to the same shape: the sphere. Before Plato, Parmenides described ultimate reality as a perfect sphere, balanced equally from the center in every direction. Empedocles believed that when the universe is fully united by Love, it becomes one single sphere. He called it the Sphairos. Then came Plato. In the Timaeus, the creator makes the universe a sphere, the most perfect of all shapes. It has no eyes, no ears, no hands, because nothing exists outside it to see or touch. It is a living being, complete in itself. The stars are made mostly of fire, round like the universe itself. Plato calls them visible gods. And here's the part almost nobody talks about: the creator assigns every soul to its own star. Live well, and after death your soul returns home to it. ✨ Even your head, Plato says, is round because it copies the shape of the cosmos. The part of you that holds the divine is shaped like an orb. In the Symposium, he tells another story. The first humans were round, with four arms, four legs and two faces. Why round? Because they came from the sun, the earth and the moon. Zeus split them in two, and we've been searching for our other half ever since. Cicero picked up the thread. In the Dream of Scipio, human souls come from the eternal fires we call stars, which are round, spherical and animated by divine minds. The virtuous, he wrote, return to the Milky Way. The later Platonists went even further. They taught that the soul travels inside a luminous vehicle, the augoeides, meaning "radiant" or "star-like." Iamblichus said this vehicle is spherical. Proclus said the soul descends in a perfectly spherical body of light, picking up layers of the four elements on its way down. Your physical body is just a coat worn over an orb of light. Over the centuries, this body of light picked up other names: the body of glory, the celestial body. If you read my last post about the glorified body, that should sound familiar. 👀 The idea never died. Around 1320, Dante writes the Paradiso. In the heaven of Saturn, he sees "a hundred little spheres." They were souls. 🌕

Open Minded Approach

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