Forget about Madonna in “Evita”. No single musical project dedicated to telling the life story of a despot’s wife has featured as many stars as Fatboy Slim and David Byrne’s new concept album with accompanying book, DVD, and other materials, “Here Lies Love” (as least, none that we know of). The tale of Imelda Marcos’ rise to fame and ... Read More »
A fascinating little piece in the New York Times today looks at the once-contentious relationship between the Renaissance arts scenes of Florence and Rome through two current exhibitions just a few neighborhoods away from each other in Manhattan. While Rome is represented in one corner by the Morgan Museum & Library’s Rome After Raphael exhibition, which features a slew ... Read More »
After the Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda in Europe, was subjected to hyper-magnification, it has been discovered that two letters were painted onto each of the mysterious woman’s eyes. In the right eye, the letters LV are visible, which can be presumed refer to the artist’s initials, Leonardo da Vinci. In the left eye are letters much more intriguing, ... Read More »
Leonardo da Vinci was an impatient genius who often went after projects with unbridled voracity only to abandon them when new ideas caught his attention. Or in the case of the fresco, Battle of Anghiari, when irritating difficulties presented themselves. In 1504, Leonardo was commissioned to paint a fresco in the Hall of Five Hundred in the Palazzo ... Read More »
Musica dei Popoli means music of the people in Italian and every year, for the past 30 years, this music festival has striven to bring folk music from around the world to Florence, into a culture that can be quite insular. Hosted by the Florentine Center for Folk Traditions, this festival is one of the most popular on ... Read More »
Best known for holding a treasure trove of World Heritage monuments from the early Christian, Byzantine Era, Ravenna has small town charm packed centuries of history. It’s beauty has inspired poetry and literature so it is fitting that here is where Dante Alighieri (of Dante’s Inferno) was buried in 1321 after being exiled from Florence. Read More »
The company that captured a high-res version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper three years ago is back at it again, this time at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. HAL9000, a company specializing in art photography, has created new multi-billion-pixel images of Bacchus by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci, Eleanor of ... Read More »
Splendour in the Grass is Australia’s largest, Winter festival, taking place from July 30th to August 1st, and is so popular that in past years, tickets have sold out in a matter of hours with scalped tickets going for over $3,000 on Ebay. This year, the line-up is once again worthy of desperate measures as the festival welcomes a ... Read More »
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