Art: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 6

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WonderArchitecture

The Alhambra, the hilltop palace and fortress of the Nasrid sultans of Granada in Spain, is threaded with channels, pools and fountains that cool its courtyards, mirror its buildings and water the Generalife gardens beside it.

The Nasrids, the last Muslim dynasty in Spain, ruled Granada from 1238 to 1492. Their founder, Muhammad I, began the palace complex, and water reached the dry hilltop through the Acequia Real, the Royal Channel, which draws on the Darro River several kilometres upstream and runs by gravity along the hillside. The Generalife, a summer palace with terraced gardens, was built in the early fourteenth century. In the Court of the Lions, from the later fourteenth century, twelve marble lions carry a fountain whose water runs out in four channels, echoing the Islamic image of paradise as a garden watered by four rivers. Some of the original channels still water the gardens today.

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DriveTrade

The Medici Bank, founded in Florence in 1397, became one of the most powerful banks in fifteenth-century Europe, and its profits paid for the Medici family's political power and its patronage of artists such as Donatello and Botticelli.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank, and much of its profit came from handling the finances of the popes. The Church banned charging interest, so the bank earned money through bills of exchange: a merchant paid in one city and was repaid in another currency elsewhere, and the exchange rate hid the bank's fee. Under Giovanni's son Cosimo it had branches in cities including Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London. Later managers lent heavily to rulers who could not repay, such as Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and branches closed one by one. The bank finally collapsed in 1494, the year the Medici were driven out of Florence.

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WonderBiography

Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born British architect, became in 2004 the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. Her sharply angled and flowing forms, first explored in paintings, widened what contemporary buildings could look like.

For years Hadid was called a 'paper architect': her competition entries, such as The Peak, a club planned for a Hong Kong hillside that she won in 1983, drew wide praise but were not built. She worked out her ideas in large paintings that bent perspective on purpose, treating a building less as a fixed box than as a set of forces in motion. Her first completed building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1993. As computer modelling caught up with her drawings, projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012) and the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics, showed her flowing forms at full scale. She died in 2016.

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WonderArchitecture

The Sagrada Família in Barcelona is the basilica Antoni Gaudí worked on from 1883 until his death in 1926, and it is still being built. Its tree-like columns and forms taken from nature are his, and the Nativity façade and crypt completed in his lifetime are on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Gaudí took over the project in 1883 from the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar and turned a conventional neo-Gothic church into something new. For an earlier church he had studied arches with hanging chains: a chain hung from two points sags into a natural curve, and turned upside down that curve gives the shape in which a stone arch carries its load purely by compression. He also used ruled surfaces, curved shapes such as hyperboloids that can be built entirely from straight lines, which made complex stonework easier to cut. As an 'expiatory' church, built as an act of atonement, it is paid for by donations and today largely by visitors' tickets, one reason it has taken so long. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it as a basilica in 2010. Gaudí is buried in its crypt.

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WonderArchaeology

Blombos Cave, on South Africa's southern coast, has yielded a 100,000-year-old kit for mixing ochre, a red earth pigment, as well as later shell beads and pieces of ochre engraved with patterns: early signs of planning and symbolic thought.

The cave lies in a coastal cliff about 300 kilometres east of Cape Town and has been excavated since 1991 by a team led by the archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood. In 2011 the team reported two abalone shells used as containers about 100,000 years ago: people had ground ochre and mixed it with crushed bone, charcoal and other ingredients to make a pigment paste, a recipe that needs several planned steps. Layers from about 75,000 years ago hold pierced beads made from small snail shells, once strung and worn, and pieces of ochre engraved with cross-hatched lines. In 2018 the team described a small stone flake with a cross-hatched pattern drawn in ochre crayon, about 73,000 years old, the oldest drawing known anywhere.

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WonderArchaeology

The Pazyryk carpet, made some 2,300 to 2,500 years ago and preserved in a frozen tomb in Siberia's Altai Mountains, is the oldest known carpet with a knotted pile, the soft surface of a rug.

The Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko found it in 1949 in barrow 5 at Pazyryk, a burial mound of the horse-riding nomads of the Altai. Robbers had broken into the tomb in ancient times; water seeped in through their tunnel and froze, and the ice kept felt, wood, textiles and the carpet intact. Rudenko dated the burials to the fifth century BC; later work places this group of barrows in the fourth to third centuries BC. The carpet is about two metres square and holds around 1.25 million knots, with borders of horsemen and deer around a central field. Scholars still argue over where it was woven, with Persia, Armenia and Central Asia all proposed. It is kept at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

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WonderArchaeology

The Lewis chessmen, carved mostly from walrus ivory in the twelfth century and found on a Scottish island in 1831, turn chess into a cast of kings, worried-looking queens, bishops, knights and warriors biting their shields.

The pieces were found in 1831 in the parish of Uig on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, together with plain discs for another board game and a belt buckle. They were probably carved between about 1150 and 1200, most often thought to be in Trondheim, Norway, when the Hebrides were under Norwegian rule, and they seem to come from several incomplete sets, perhaps a merchant's stock. The warriors biting their shields are berserkers, fighters of Norse legend who worked themselves into a battle frenzy. The queens resting a hand on their cheek probably meant calm and wisdom, not worry. The British Museum holds 82 objects and the National Museum of Scotland 11. In 2019 a warder (the equivalent of a rook), unrecognised for decades in an Edinburgh family's home, sold at auction for £735,000.

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WonderReligion & Belief

The Trundholm Sun Chariot, made in Denmark about 3,400 years ago, is a bronze horse on wheels pulling a bronze disc that is gilded on one side. It seems to show the sun being drawn across the sky.

A farmer ploughing a peat bog on the Trundholm moor, in north-west Zealand, turned up the chariot in 1902. In 1998 archaeologists and metal detectorists went back to the spot and recovered 21 more pieces, including parts of the wheels. Bronze Age Scandinavians left no writing, so the object itself is the main clue to their beliefs. Many archaeologists read the two faces of the disc as day and night: the bright side is shown as the sun travels from east to west by day, the dark side as it returns unseen by night. The chariot is dated to about 1400 BCE and is kept at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

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WonderArchaeology

The Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, a figure with a human body and a cave lion's head carved from mammoth ivory, is one of the oldest known sculptures. It was made in what is now Germany some 35,000 to 41,000 years ago.

The geologist Otto Völzing found the first fragments on 25 August 1939 in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in southern Germany. The Second World War broke out a week later, and the pieces lay forgotten in the Museum Ulm for about thirty years, until the archaeologist Joachim Hahn sorted more than 200 fragments and saw a figure with human and animal features emerge. New pieces found in the cave in later decades, including tiny fragments sifted from its soil in 2008, were added in later restorations. The last, finished in 2013, brought the figure to 31.1 centimetres. Carbon dating of the layer where it lay gives an age of 35,000 to 41,000 years. It was carved with flint tools and is on show in the Museum Ulm.

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WonderArchitecture

The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in 670 and largely rebuilt in 836, is one of the oldest mosques in the Islamic world. Its courtyard, columned prayer hall and square minaret became a model for mosques across North Africa.

The Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi chose the site when he founded the city of Kairouan in 670. The mosque was rebuilt several times, and most of what stands today dates from the reconstruction ordered by Emir Ziyadat Allah I in 836. Its prayer hall is hypostyle, meaning the roof rests on rows of columns: 414 of them, in marble, granite and porphyry, taken from ancient sites such as Carthage, so their shafts and capitals vary. The 31.5-metre minaret, rising in three stages from a square base, is thought to be the oldest minaret still standing. The mosque became a model for later mosques across the Maghreb, the part of North Africa west of Egypt, and is part of Kairouan's World Heritage Site.

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StillnessArchitecture

A mashrabiya is a projecting window enclosed by a carved wooden lattice, common in old Arab towns. The screen breaks up glare, lets breezes through and allows people inside to watch the street without being seen.

The earliest evidence of the mashrabiya in its present form comes from 12th-century Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs. It spread to Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, Arabia and beyond, reached its peak under the Ottomans, and goes by other names: shanashil in Iraq, rawashin in Jeddah. The lattice is usually finer at the bottom and more open at the top, so air moves fast above head height and gently lower down, and jars of water placed in the window cooled the breeze by evaporation as it passed over them. Privacy mattered too: the household could follow life in the street while staying out of sight. Mashrabiyas fell out of use in the 20th century, but architects now study them again as a way to cool buildings without machines.

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WonderArchitecture

Muqarnas is a form of Islamic architectural decoration made of tiers of small niches, stacked like a honeycomb. It bridges the corners where a square room meets a round dome, and crowns doorways and vaults.

Western writers have often called muqarnas 'stalactite' or 'honeycomb' vaulting. The earliest surviving examples are simple three-part corner niches beneath domes, such as those in the Arab-Ata Mausoleum at Tim in Uzbekistan (977–978) and the Gonbad-e Qabus tower in Iran (1006–1007). The oldest complete muqarnas dome known to modern scholars crowned the Imam Dur Mausoleum at Samarra in Iraq, finished in 1090. Historians still debate whether the technique began in north-eastern Iran or in Abbasid Iraq. Built of brick and plaster, carved stone or wood, it spread across the Islamic world: Seljuk builders in Anatolia set it over great stone gateways, and in Spain it fills the ceilings of the Alhambra.

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WonderDesign

Girih tiles are a set of five shapes that medieval Islamic craftsmen used to plan the interlaced star-and-line patterns on walls and domes. Some of their 15th-century patterns come close to a kind of order mathematicians only described in the 1970s.

Girih is Persian for 'knot'. Each of the five tiles, a decagon, a pentagon, an elongated hexagon, a bowtie and a rhombus, carries decorative lines. Laid edge to edge, the lines join into continuous bands, so a maker could build a vast design from a few pieces. In 2007 the physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt showed that some patterns, notably on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan (1453), come close to quasicrystalline order: an arrangement that is highly regular yet never repeats itself exactly, like the Penrose tilings that mathematicians described in the 1970s. The craftsmen reached it through geometry and practice, centuries before anyone had the mathematics to describe it.

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WonderDesign

The Valentine was a portable typewriter launched by the Italian firm Olivetti in 1969. Its glossy red plastic body slid into a matching case with a handle. Designed by Ettore Sottsass with Perry King, it turned a piece of office equipment into a colourful personal object.

Olivetti presented the Valentine on Valentine's Day 1969. Inside was the proven mechanism of the company's Lettera 32 portable; what was new was the body of tough, coloured ABS plastic and a case that became part of the design rather than just a box. At a time when most typewriters were black, grey or beige, it was meant to feel like a personal belonging, not office furniture. Olivetti hoped to sell millions, but sales reached only a few tens of thousands. Even so, it became a design classic, held today by MoMA in New York and the V&A and Design Museum in London. Sottsass, who later founded the Memphis group of designers, came to resent being remembered mainly for this one red machine.

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WonderTrade

In the Kula ring of Papua New Guinea's Massim islands, partners sail between islands to exchange shell valuables: red necklaces travel clockwise around the ring and white armbands anticlockwise. No one keeps them for good; each is passed on and carries the story of those who held it.

The necklaces are called soulava and the armbands mwali. A participant receives one from a partner on one island and, after a time, passes it on to a partner on another, so the same objects keep circling for generations; famous pieces have their own names and histories. The Polish-born anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski lived in the Trobriand Islands during the First World War and described the Kula in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), one of the founding books of modern fieldwork. He showed that it was not barter: prestige came from taking part, from generosity and from being trusted with valued pieces, while ordinary trade in goods went on alongside the ceremonial exchange. The Kula still continues today.

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WonderTrade

Jingdezhen, in China's Jiangxi province, has been one of the world's great porcelain centres for centuries. Song Yingxing's 1637 encyclopaedia says a single piece passed through “seventy-two hands” before it was finished, and that even this left out the finer details.

Kaolin, the white clay that porcelain needs, is named after Gaoling, a village near Jingdezhen where it was dug for the city's kilns. The town took its present name in 1004 from the Jingde reign of a Song emperor, and from 1369 the Ming court ran imperial kilns there. Song Yingxing's Tiangong Kaiwu, often translated as The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, described the farming and crafts of his day. His “seventy-two hands” reflects how finely the work was divided among specialists who prepared the clay, shaped, painted, glazed and fired each piece. Blue-and-white ware from Jingdezhen was exported across Asia and to Europe, and inspired Iznik tiles and Delft pottery. Topkapı Palace in Istanbul holds more than ten thousand pieces of Chinese porcelain, many of them from Jingdezhen.

Song Yingxing, Tiangong Kaiwu (1637)Read card

WonderMusic

The mbira is a musical instrument of the Shona people of Zimbabwe: a row of metal keys fixed to a wooden board, plucked with the thumbs and a forefinger. Players repeat short interlocking patterns, and listeners hear new melodies emerge from within them.

A typical mbira dzavadzimu, “mbira of the ancestral spirits”, has 22 to 28 keys. For performance it is often placed inside a large hollow gourd called a deze, which makes it louder, and bottle caps or shells fixed to it add a buzzing sound. Among the Shona the mbira is played at all-night gatherings called bira, where families call on the spirits of their ancestors, as well as at celebrations and concerts. In the late 1950s the English music researcher Hugh Tracey began making a simplified version, the kalimba, which carried the sound around the world. In 2020 UNESCO listed the art of making and playing the mbira in Zimbabwe and Malawi as intangible cultural heritage.

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StillnessMusic

The duduk is an Armenian wind instrument made of apricot wood and played through a broad double reed, which gives it a warm, soft, voice-like tone. It is usually played in pairs: one musician carries the melody while the other holds a steady background note.

Its Armenian name, tsiranapogh, means “apricot pipe”. The background note, called the dam, never breaks because its player uses circular breathing: breathing in through the nose while pushing air out from the cheeks. Duduk music is heard at weddings, in folk songs and at funerals alike. Its best-known master, Djivan Gasparyan (1928–2021), took it to audiences around the world, and his playing can be heard in film scores such as Gladiator. UNESCO proclaimed Armenian duduk music a masterpiece of intangible heritage in 2005 and added it to its list in 2008. Related double-reed instruments are played across the region, such as the Turkish mey and the Azerbaijani balaban.

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WonderMusic

In throat singing from Tuva, a Russian republic in southern Siberia, one singer produces two sounds at once: a low, steady hum and, above it, a high whistling melody. The singer makes it by shaping the mouth and throat to bring out overtones hidden in the voice.

Every sung note is really a bundle of tones: the main pitch plus fainter, higher ones called overtones, which give each voice its colour. Throat singers learn to move the tongue and lips so precisely that single overtones ring out as a separate melody. The general term is khöömei; sygyt is a whistling style and kargyraa a very deep, growling one. Tuvans, a Turkic-speaking people, link these sounds with the landscape of herding life, imitating wind, rivers and animals. Groups such as Huun-Huur-Tu took the music to world stages from the 1990s. The physicist Richard Feynman spent years trying to travel to Tuva, a quest told in the book Tuva or Bust!

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StillnessMusic

Arirang is Korea's best-known folk song, sung in the North, in the South and by Koreans abroad. It exists in about 60 versions and some 3,600 variations, all sharing a refrain close to “Arirang, arirang, arariyo”, while the verses change with each singer and region.

Nobody knows exactly what the word “arirang” means. Many versions tell of crossing a mountain pass, and the verses often speak of parting, longing and hard work, though others are playful. The version most people know spread through Na Woon-gyu's 1926 silent film Arirang, made under Japanese rule and regarded as the first Korean nationalist film. Because the song belongs to both Koreas, it has served as a shared anthem: at the opening of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, athletes from North and South marched in together as it played. UNESCO added South Korea's Arirang to its intangible heritage list in 2012 and North Korea's in 2014, so the same song appears on the list twice.

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StillnessMusic

Qawwali is the devotional music of the Sufis of South Asia. A lead singer sings a line of poetry, a chorus answers, and handclaps, harmonium and drums build the repetition up until the whole gathering is swept along together.

Qawwali grew up at Sufi shrines and gatherings in South Asia, where music is meant to draw listeners closer to God. The tradition is usually traced to the poet and musician Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) of Delhi. The words are Sufi poems in Urdu, Persian, Punjabi or Hindi. The lead singer may dwell on a single line for minutes, shifting its emphasis and improvising around it, while the chorus repeats it and the audience responds. In the twentieth century the Sabri Brothers and, above all, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan took qawwali to concert halls around the world; Nusrat's work with Western musicians in the 1990s brought it a global audience.

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DriveMusic

Taiko, Japanese ensemble drumming, took root in North America through Japanese American groups formed in California from the late 1960s. They built drums from whatever they could find, including wine barrels, and made playing together a way of building community.

In Japan, taiko simply means drum. The style of large, choreographed drum ensembles, called kumi-daiko, took shape after the Second World War, notably with Daihachi Oguchi's group from 1951. In 1968 Seiichi Tanaka founded the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, and in 1969 members of Senshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles formed Kinnara Taiko, making affordable drums from wine barrels. For many Japanese Americans whose families had been interned during the war, taiko became a way to claim their heritage in public. North America now has hundreds of taiko groups.

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WonderMusic

Mugham, the classical music of Azerbaijan, is largely improvised. Instead of a fixed score, the singer and players follow a mode, a set of notes with its own melodic paths and mood, and shape each performance anew.

A classic mugham trio has a singer, called a khanende, who often keeps time on a frame drum (the gaval or daf), accompanied by the tar, a long-necked lute, and the kamancha, a bowed fiddle. The performers move through a series of sections within the mode, rising gradually in pitch towards a climax, and the singer usually chooses classical poetry by poets such as Fuzuli. The tradition shares roots with Persian and Turkish makam music. UNESCO proclaimed Azerbaijani mugham a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, and the International Mugham Centre opened in Baku in 2008.

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StillnessMusic

Morna is the slow, melancholy song of Cabo Verde, sung in the islands' Creole to guitar, violin and cavaquinho, a small four-string guitar. Its lyrics keep returning to departure, distance and longing, shaped by island life and generations of emigration.

Cabo Verde is a group of Atlantic islands off West Africa, settled by the Portuguese and by enslaved Africans. Poverty and drought have long driven its people to emigrate, and by many estimates more Cabo Verdeans now live abroad than on the islands. Morna's central feeling is sodade, a Creole word related to the Portuguese saudade: the ache for people and places far away. The poet Eugénio Tavares (1867–1930) and the composer B. Leza shaped its classic form. From the late 1980s the singer Cesária Évora, known as the 'Barefoot Diva', made morna known around the world. UNESCO added morna to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019.

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