If There Is Much In The Window There Should Be More In The Room

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Unknown Vista inside Musical Instruments










Unknown Vista inside Musical Instruments



They say beauty comes from within, and music does so quite literally – most sounds of music are created inside the instruments. Now you can go where few have gone before: inside musical instruments, a concept with an exquisitely-produced campaign by German photographer Björn Ewers & Mona Sibai for the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker.

Different sounds emanate from various melodic mechanisms. While they all have their maker's marks and unique quirks, builds of instruments are standard. So, instead of shooting the entire Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, they’ve chosen to focus on the music more than the musicians in the print ads.

Macro shots taken by Mierswa Kluska  capture the interior of a violin, cello, flute and pipe organ as if they were spacious airy chambers, filled with sunlight breaking from little cracks on the walls. The captured images make you believe that you could actually walk inside them and experience the feeling of mightiness and mystery. In fact, the insides look big enough to hold the symphonic rehearsals!











Visit Björn Ewers for more info.


Sunday, April 13, 2014

The Secret Cabinet - Gabinetto Segreto




 
Satyr and Maenad. Roman fresco from Casa degli Epigrammi in Pompeii.

The Secret Cabinet- Gabinetto Segreto





The term Secret Museum or Secret Cabinet (Gabinetto Segreto) principally refers to the collection of erotic or sexually explicit finds from Pompeii, held in separate galleries in the Naples National Archaeological Museum Naples, Italy, and the former Museo Borbonico.

Naples National Archaeological Museum

The Cabinet of "Obscene Objects" was created in 1817 to bring together about a hundred miscellaneous items which were only to be viewed by important visitors of the male sex on obtaining the relevant authorization from the Ministry.



Giuseppe_Fiorelli


In the prurient climate of restoration in the 1850s it was closed to viewing, but following the unification of Italy it was reopened and the collection was published by Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1866.




After the turn of the century it was dispersed, but it is now being reconstituted and enlarged with some two hundred other items. This cabinet was again closed many years and finally reopened in year 2000 as a show-piece of museographical history.

 


Roman sexuality was a big problem for the 19th-century archaeologists and
curators responsible for excavating and preserving the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Romans and citizens of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum in particular, had a robust appreciation for the erotic in art and everyday objects. 

Fresco of Priapus, Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii. Depicted weighing his enormous erect penis against a bag of gold. Unlike the Greeks, Ancient Romans admired the large penis of Priapus, although they had a sense of humor about it




The enormously well-endowed god Priapus was a common good-luck symbol, seen in everything from frescoes to penis-shaped wind chimes to perky oil lamps. (His huge member supposedly had little to do with sex: It served to scare off thieves.) Stories from mythology painted on walls were full of sexual encounters, secret trysts, and naughty satyrs. In some ways, this erotica was widely accepted on a level that even modern society would have trouble with, let alone Victorian Europe.


The ancient Roman and Greek cultures had a very different attitude about sexuality than successive European cultures, more akin to that of the Kama Sutra. This, of course, was unimaginable to latter day Europeans, who rigidly compartmentalized body, mind and spirit, and to whom any sexuality was sinful and morbid.

foto-vesuvio1 by Giovanni Lattanzi

 

Some of the best artistic expressions of this can be found in the recovered city of Pompeii. 


Pompeii was frozen in time by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., and not unearthed until 1748.  



Pompeii was a seaside resort, devoted to the arts, relaxation, and the pursuit of pleasure.


Charles_III_of_Spain
The looting of Pompeii began in the late 1700s under the direction of Charles of Bourbon, better known as Charles III of Spain, who was after fashionable antiquities for his private collections. 


When Napoleon's brother rolled into town in 1806, the French regime drew up the first organized plans to excavate the city in its entirety, and this process continued when control of Naples reverted to the Bourbons under Ferdinand I.





The excavators were horrified to discover erotic frescoes, mosaics, statuary and phallic votive objects. The moveable erotic artifacts were taken to Naples and kept in seclusion in the Royal Museum.