Jason Alexander

[Fascinating History @Fascinate_Hist]

It took about 140 years to finish the Duomo in Florence.

The original architects knew they wouldn’t live to see the dome rise, yet they laid the stone anyway.

When you believe in eternity, you build things differently.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Reminder: Germany has more castles than the United States has McDonald's.

This is one is my favorite. Owned by the same family for 33 generations.

[Mina Shohdy @XMinaShohdy]

Sicilian Baroque is a visual universe that pushes the boundaries of human imagination and thereby demonstrates a unique Italian artistic excellence.

The Church of Jesus at Casa Professa in Palermo.

[Muse @xmuse_]

How does someone look at a block of stone and end up with THIS? It blows my mind!

Massive, theatrical, and carved from a single block of marble.

And yeah, the cliché 'carved from a single block of marble' is 100% earned here. This sculpture is about 3.7 meters tall and has nine figures packed into one insane composition.

So, wow. Imagine taking one raw block and ending up with this.

Before I get into who the figures are, let me say this first. The Farnese Bull is one of the most spectacular sculptures ever recovered from antiquity. Like truly!!

It is a Roman copy from the Severan period, around AD 222 to 235, based on a lost Hellenistic masterpiece by the Rhodian sculptors Apollonius and Tauriscus.

And honestly — damn, the ancient Greeks were something else. It’s a tragedy that so much of their genius vanished, but thankfully the Romans copied enough for us to still witness the grandeur of their imagination.

In my opinion, they’ll never be surpassed. The leap they brought to art is unmatched, and I’ll die on that hill.

Back to the sculpture.

It shows the myth of Dirce, punished by the twins Amphion and Zethus for tormenting their mother, Antiope. They are tying Dirce to a raging bull, the exact second before everything explodes.

The whole composition is insanely dynamic: twisting bodies, straining muscles, flying drapery. It’s late Hellenistic theatricality at its peak.

It is basically Baroque before the Baroque even existed. Centuries before Bernini and the rest. Violent diagonals, spirals, emotional overload, a scene frozen at maximum intensity.

Baroque sculptors made pieces meant to be walked around.

The Farnese Bull does that almost two thousand years earlier. No front, no back, just a full 360-degree storm of figures.

It really is Baroque before Baroque was even a thing.

[𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀 @Old_But_Gold50s]

More people need to know that ancient Roman engineering was so precise, their aqueducts still produce clear water to this very day - 2,000 years later.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Imagine being able to make stone translucent.

Giovanni Strazza possessed that extraordinarily rare skill. His bust of the Virgin Mary, executed in flawless Carrara marble, is one of the most impressive feats by any sculptor.

Strazza's "wet drapery" technique continued the legacy of previous Italian sculptors like Giuseppe Sanmartino, who produced mind-bending veils from marble a century earlier — the famous "Veiled Christ" is a canonical example.

The tradition also dates back to much earlier sculptors known for carving intricate folds, in particular Renaissance artists like Michelangelo and ancient masters from Greece's Hellenistic period.

But in the mid-19th century, Strazza took the technique to its extreme. The subtle layered effect he achieved allows the viewer to easily discern Mary's facial features from the delicate veil, and at the same time creates the illusion of total weightlessness.

How he created something so soft and fluid from solid stone, using only basic hand tools, is a mystery.

[Waken Minds 𓂀 @wakenminds]

Men without degrees built this.

[ChatterSpout ♠️ @chatterspout]

@TaraBull Hmm. This is what I caught.

[Waken Minds 𓂀 @wakenminds]

"you need a degree to build a house"

Men without degrees 500 years ago:

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The Church of St Edward, Stow-on-the-Wold in England is a medieval parish church originally built in the 11th–13th centuries

📹 bookedbyalice7

[Ian Miles Cheong @ianmiles]

Scientists at Drexel University have found a way to roll an advanced material called MXene into microscopic tubes thinner than a strand of hair, and the result could lead to faster-charging batteries and more responsive electronics.

In its usual flat, stacked form, the material slows down the movement of the charged particles batteries depend on. Rolling it into tiny tubes opens clear pathways that let those particles move far more easily, improving conductivity and performance.

The researchers also produced the material in usable quantities rather than tiny lab samples, an important step toward real-world manufacturing. One version even showed superconductivity in a flexible form, something not achieved with this material before, pointing toward possible uses in quantum computing.

Batteries that charge faster, more sensitive sensors, smart fabrics and possibly quantum technology down the line may benefit from this discovery.

Source: Drexel University, published in the journal Advanced Materials.

[LeoDaVinciWave @LeoDaVinciWave]

This is the emerald-toned grand staircase of the Maison Mystique boutique hotel in Khao Yai, Thailand, designed by Fearn Kate.

[LeoDaVinciWave @LeoDaVinciWave]

19th-century first-class luxury: Inside a lavish Pullman Palace Car, where only premium passengers enjoyed hotel-style comfort on the rails."

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

The most famous painting of the ancient Greek philosophers is full of hidden portraits of Renaissance artists.

The figure of Plato is Leonardo da Vinci. The brooding man writing alone on the marble block is Michelangelo. And in the corner, looking straight out at you, is the painter himself...

It is called the School of Athens, and Raphael painted it on the wall of the Pope's private apartments in the Vatican between 1509 and 1511. He was in his mid-twenties.

Across a vast painted hall, he gathered more than fifty of the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists of the ancient world into a single imagined gathering that never happened.

At the very center, beneath a soaring archway placed at the vanishing point so your eye is pulled straight to them, stand the two men who divided Western thought between them. On the left is Plato, white-haired, pointing one finger up toward the heavens, holding his book the Timaeus. Beside him is his student Aristotle, holding his Ethics and reaching his hand out flat toward the earth. In a single gesture, Raphael captured the whole argument: Plato pointing to the world of ideas above, Aristotle to the physical world in front of us.

But the genius of the fresco is in its faces. Raphael had almost no ancient portraits to work from, so he did something audacious: he painted some of the philosophers of antiquity using the features of the artists of his own age...

Plato was given the face of Leonardo da Vinci, then an old man, whom Raphael revered. The melancholy figure seated alone in the foreground, leaning on a block of marble and lost in thought, is widely believed to be Michelangelo, who was at that very moment painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling a short walk away. Raphael cast him as Heraclitus, the philosopher known for his solitary temperament. The mathematician Euclid, bent over a compass to teach a cluster of students, was given the face of the architect Bramante, the man then designing the new St. Peter's Basilica.

And on the far right edge, in a dark cap, one young man looks directly out of the fresco and meets the eye of anyone standing in front of it. That is Raphael, placing himself among the greatest minds in history...

Raphael died in 1520 at the age of 37. He was buried in the Pantheon, an honor rarely accorded to an artist, and his epitaph, written by Pietro Bembo, reads: “Here lies Raphael, by whom Nature feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died, feared she would die with him.”

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.

[The Best @TheBestqueenx]

When your government tells you; "we're all in the same boat!"

[Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno]

Security Footage Captures Brave Horse Protecting Woman During Earthquake

[Culture Explorer @CultureExploreX]

A civilization that could carve this into a door treated beauty as a public duty.

Stand before the door of Duomo di Milano long enough, and the modern world begins to look painfully soulless.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Iliad (Troy) trailer made by Grok Imagine 1.5, which was just released

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Historical icons brought back to life by AI

[🎞️ Hashem Al-Ghaili]

[Mind Dynamo @MindDynamo]

Don't go to sleep without saying these 4 things to God