James Lucas

Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

There is a rule in Florence that has not been broken in over five hundred years: nothing in the city may be built taller than a dome finished in 1436.

The dome belongs to the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and it is the work of Filippo Brunelleschi.

When you look at a photograph of Florence and notice that its skyline seems strangely, impossibly intact, you are not imagining it...

The city has protected that view, by custom and by law, since the Renaissance. To this day, no building in Florence is permitted to rise higher than the cupola.

What it guards is one of the most astonishing structures ever built. When Brunelleschi began in 1420, no one in Europe knew how to raise a dome that wide. The technology had been lost with the Romans. The cathedral had stood for decades with a hole in its roof, because the span was considered impossible to cover, and the city had essentially gambled that someone would one day work out how.

Brunelleschi built it without the wooden scaffolding everyone assumed was necessary, laying over four million bricks in a self-supporting double shell, one dome inside another, in a herringbone pattern that let each ring hold itself up as it rose.

Six centuries later, it remains the largest masonry dome in the world. Nothing built since, in brick and stone, has surpassed it.

The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who was born in Florence, once explained what that means to him. "When I feel depression creeping in," he said, "I return to Florence to gaze at Brunelleschi's dome. If human genius was able to achieve something so great, then I too can and must try to create, to act, to live."

That is what a skyline can be when a city decides that beauty is worth protecting...

I write a weekly newsletter for over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us for free at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible:

https://t.co/hgJUdR0jlx

Thanks for reading.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Tolkien once revealed that the Shire wasn’t pure fantasy.

In a letter from 1955 he described it as:

“more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee.”

The most beloved world in fantasy was built from ordinary English countryside memories.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Gaudí knew his masterpiece would not be finished in his lifetime and, when asked when it would be done, he reportedly said: “My client is not in a hurry.”

Today Pope Leo XIV has blessed the recently completed central tower of the Sagrada Família.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

A light show honoring Antoni Gaudí has just lit up Sagrada Família.

It felt like the tallest church in the world, for a moment, let its impossible beauty be seen by its creator.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

@JeremyTate41 Gaudí would be proud

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

A light show honoring Antoni Gaudí has just lit up Sagrada Família.

It felt like the tallest church in the world, for a moment, let its impossible beauty be seen by its creator.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Tolkien once revealed that the Shire wasn’t pure fantasy.

In a letter from 1955 he described it as:

“more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee.”

The most beloved world in fantasy was built from ordinary English countryside memories.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

A thalassophile from the Greek thalassa meaning sea and philos meaning loving is someone who feels deeply drawn to and connected with the sea

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

There is a rule in Florence that has not been broken in over five hundred years: nothing in the city may be built taller than a dome finished in 1436.

The dome belongs to the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and it is the work of Filippo Brunelleschi.

When you look at a photograph of Florence and notice that its skyline seems strangely, impossibly intact, you are not imagining it...

The city has protected that view, by custom and by law, since the Renaissance. To this day, no building in Florence is permitted to rise higher than the cupola.

What it guards is one of the most astonishing structures ever built. When Brunelleschi began in 1420, no one in Europe knew how to raise a dome that wide. The technology had been lost with the Romans. The cathedral had stood for decades with a hole in its roof, because the span was considered impossible to cover, and the city had essentially gambled that someone would one day work out how.

Brunelleschi built it without the wooden scaffolding everyone assumed was necessary, laying over four million bricks in a self-supporting double shell, one dome inside another, in a herringbone pattern that let each ring hold itself up as it rose.

Six centuries later, it remains the largest masonry dome in the world. Nothing built since, in brick and stone, has surpassed it.

The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who was born in Florence, once explained what that means to him. "When I feel depression creeping in," he said, "I return to Florence to gaze at Brunelleschi's dome. If human genius was able to achieve something so great, then I too can and must try to create, to act, to live."

That is what a skyline can be when a city decides that beauty is worth protecting...

I write a weekly newsletter for over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us for free at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible:

https://t.co/hgJUdR0jlx

Thanks for reading.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

The Irish Redhead Convention was a three-day annual festival in Crosshaven, Ireland, first held in 2010, celebrating redheads and their unique traits. It ended in 2016.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Lake Como, Italy

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

@megalmer That's the second tallest building in Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, which stands at 94 meters (308 feet) tall.

Florence Cathedral reaches 114.5 meters (376 feet).

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

There is a rule in Florence that has not been broken in over five hundred years: nothing in the city may be built taller than a dome finished in 1436.

The dome belongs to the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and it is the work of Filippo Brunelleschi.

When you look at a photograph of Florence and notice that its skyline seems strangely, impossibly intact, you are not imagining it...

The city has protected that view, by custom and by law, since the Renaissance. To this day, no building in Florence is permitted to rise higher than the cupola.

What it guards is one of the most astonishing structures ever built. When Brunelleschi began in 1420, no one in Europe knew how to raise a dome that wide. The technology had been lost with the Romans. The cathedral had stood for decades with a hole in its roof, because the span was considered impossible to cover, and the city had essentially gambled that someone would one day work out how.

Brunelleschi built it without the wooden scaffolding everyone assumed was necessary, laying over four million bricks in a self-supporting double shell, one dome inside another, in a herringbone pattern that let each ring hold itself up as it rose.

Six centuries later, it remains the largest masonry dome in the world. Nothing built since, in brick and stone, has surpassed it.

The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who was born in Florence, once explained what that means to him. "When I feel depression creeping in," he said, "I return to Florence to gaze at Brunelleschi's dome. If human genius was able to achieve something so great, then I too can and must try to create, to act, to live."

That is what a skyline can be when a city decides that beauty is worth protecting...

I write a weekly newsletter for over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us for free at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible:

https://t.co/hgJUdR0jlx

Thanks for reading.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Greece still uses the same design on its 1€ coins that was used 2500 years ago in Athens.

The Athenian tetradrachm showed Athena’s head on the front and, on the back, an owl, the symbol of Athens, along with an olive sprig and a crescent moon.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

@KriderJackie Nothing compares to the Eternal City

https://t.co/opaIwV0psJ

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Sunset in Rome

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

@mamboitaliano__ Egypt is full of unbelievable wonders. Check out this article for a deeper dive:

https://t.co/n5XlMEViar

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Look at the size of this statue of Ramses II

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

@PhillippWeyers One of the greatest poems of all time. I wrote about the Ozymandias Colossus here:

https://t.co/qLmjQWYKlV

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

@Grappoli_d_Ira The Anatomical Machines are mind-blowing

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

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:

https://t.co/hgJUdR0jlx

Thanks for reading.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

@mamboitaliano__ Thank you so much Mambo!