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Silk Roads: Paths for the Faithful

Apr 12, 2026 / terry / No comments

The Silk Roads were overland routes connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea, which allowed the trading of silk, paper, gold, jewels, horses, and other goods. These began during the 2^nd Century BCE at the time of the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Dynasty in the East. The Silk Roads remained active until the 15^th Century CE, when they were largely replaced by maritime trading routes. At present they are mainly used for archeological research and tourism. The illustration shows a modern camel caravan in the desert near Dunhuang. As well as trade goods, the Silk Roads facilitated the movement of religious ideas. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Christianity, and Islam followed the Silk Roads into China. Mithraism, Manichaeism and Islam spread into Europe.

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Painting, Poetry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Abbasid Caliphate, Buddhism, Central Asia, Church of the East, Dunhuang, Gandhara, Han Dynasty, James Elroy Flecker, Judaism, Manichaeism, Mithraism, Roman Empire, Samarkand, Sogdians, Tang dynasty, Tauroctony, Zoroastrianism

Shambhala: Mountain Sanctuary

Feb 10, 2026 / terry / No comments

Shambhala is a mythical kingdom described in the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism as a place of sanctuary. Paintings show the kingdom isolated from the rest of the world by a ring of mountains. At the center of the kingdom is the capital Kalapa, itself surrounded by another ring of mountains. The palace of the king has roofs of solid gold and is adorned with pearls and other jewels. Outside the capital, rivers divide the kingdom into eight regions arranged like the petals of a lotus flower. Each of these regions contains 12 principalities, so that 96 princes pay allegiance to the king of Shambhala. The illustration shows a Tibetan painting of Shambhala from the 19^th Century in the Musée Guimet. Many travellers have tried unsuccessfully to find Shambhala. It remains a spiritual rather than physical place.

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Painting, Philosophy, Politics, Religion / Tags: Akbar the Great, Annexation of Tibet, Cultural Revolution, Dalai Lama, James Hilton, Lake Manasarovar, Lhasa, Lost Horizon, Mount Kailash, Nicholas Roerich, Red Guards, Shangri La, Spread of Buddhism, Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism, tourism

Robert Davidson: Serigraphs

May 24, 2025 / terry / 2 comments

Robert Davidson, one of Canada’s greatest artists, is one of the Haida people, whose ancestral territories are in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia and the southern half of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. His Haida name is G̲uud San Glans, which means “Eagle of the Dawn.” Davidson is a talented carver of argillite, jewelry and totem poles, a creator of striking masks, and a master of silkscreen printing (serigraphy).

Category: Architecture, Art, Ethics, History, Painting, Poetry, Sculpture / Tags: Bentwood Box, Bill Reid, Charles Edenshaw, cultural genocide, Haida Gwaii, Haida people, Masset, potlatch, Raven, Skidegate, Smallpox epidemic, Thunderbird, Totem Poles

Ely Cathedral: The Ship of the Fens

Mar 5, 2025 / terry / No comments

Ely Cathedral was originally situated on a low island in the middle of the Fens, a region of marshland in eastern England lying inland of the Wash. Because of the flatness of the surrounding land the cathedral could be seen from great distances, appearing as the “Ship of the Fens.” The marshes were drained in the 17^th Century, but it is still easy to imagine the building floating above the waters: the embodiment of Auden’s image of the English cathedrals:

Luxury liners laden with souls,
Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
(Auden, 1936, p 43; also McDiarmid, 1978, p 292)

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Photography, Poetry, Psychiatry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Augustine of Canterbury, Cathedral, Dissolution of the monasteries, Ethelreda, Gothic, Henry VIII, Lady Chapel, Normans, Philip Larkin, Reformation, Richard Goodrich, Romanesque, Saxons, Sean Henry, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wynne, W. H Auden

Frank Lloyd Wright: the Prairie Home

Feb 25, 2025 / terry / No comments

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was one of the great forces in modern architecture. In the early years of the 20^th Century, he designed many beautiful houses in a characteristic style that later defined the Prairie School of Architecture. This post comments on some of these houses.

Category: Architecture, Art, Sculpture / Tags: Darwin Martin House, Falliingwater, Form follows Function, Froebel Blocks, Little House Wayzata, Louis Sullivan, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nike of Samothrace, Ornamentation, Prairie Home, Robie House, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Usonian Houses

The Moissac Portal: Masterpiece of Romanesque Sculpture

Nov 27, 2024 / terry / One comment

n the 9^th and 10^th Centuries CE, Europe began to awaken from the has come to be known as the Dark Ages. Imposing churches were erected and many of these were decorated with sculptures. This new style of art and architecture, thought to be derived from that of the Roman Empire, has been called “Romanesque.” The sculpture from this time is full of a tremendous vitality and marked by a rich imagination. Some of the most impressive examples adorn the portal of the Abbaye de Saint Pierre in Moissac in southwestern France.

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Language, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Abbaye Saint Pierre de Moissac, Ansquitil, Apocalypse, Apostle Paul, Bosom of Abraham, Christ in Majesty, Dives and Lazarus, Durand de Bredon, Flight to Egypt, Gospels, Jeremiah, John of Patmos, Moissac, Monastery, Revelation, Romanesque, Twenty-four Elders, Tympanum

Le Corbusier: The Measurement of Man

Oct 13, 2024 / terry / No comments

Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was a Swiss-born architect, painter and urban planner. He is generally considered as one of the main forces in the development of modernist architecture. UNESCO has designated 17 of his building projects as “world heritage sites,” more than any other architect. In the 1940s Le Corbusier developed a system of measurements called the Modulor to assist in the fitting buildings to human beings. The first building to be constructed using the Modulor was the Unité d’Habitation, a striking and innovative residential building in Marseille, begun in 1947 and completed in 1952. In recent years, Le Corbusier has been criticized for his antisemitism and his fascist leanings. These critiques do not detract from the importance of his work but do explain how his buildings sometimes seem inhuman.

Category: Architecture, History, Politics / Tags: Antisemitism, Brutalism, Chandigarh, Communal Housing, Domino Plan, Fascism, Fibonacci, Golden Ratio, Jane Jacobs, Le Modulor, Leonardo da Vinci, Plan Voisin, Reinforced Concrete, Ronchamp, Unité d’Habitation

Tessellations

Feb 19, 2024 / terry / 2 comments

Tessellation is “a collection of shapes [tiles] that fit together without gaps or overlap to cover the infinite mathematical plane” (Fathauer, 2021). Most tilings are “periodic,” in the sense that the pattern repeats itself when “translated” (shifted without rotation). In the 1970s Roger Penrose described several sets of tiles that could cover the plane aperiodically. The search then began for the “einstein” (one stone) – a single tile that could cover the plane aperiodically. In March of 2023, Smith, Myers, Kaplan & Goodman-Strauss described a tile, commonly known as the “hat” that covered the plane aperiodically. However, to do so, this tile had to be occasionally turned over (to make its mirror image). Subsequently in May of 2023, the same authors reported another tile that could cover the plane aperiodically without any need for mirror images. This tile was called the “spectre.” This posting briefly reviews these recent developments in a style more visual than verbal.

Category: Architecture, Art, Chemistry, Mathematics, Painting, Physics / Tags: Aperiodic Tiling, Crystallography, Dan Schechtman, David Smith, Islamic Design, M. C. Escher, Penrose Tiling, Quasicrystals, Roger Penrose, Tiling

History, Myth and Fiction

Jan 1, 2024 / terry / 2 comments

This post describes some of the events that occurred in Ronda, a town in southern Spain, during the summer of 1936. After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Anarchists quickly took control of the town, and murdered many supporters of the Nationalist cause. Two months later, advancing Nationalist forces captured Ronda, and drove most of its people from their homes. Those that refused to leave suffered bloody reprisals. These events quickly became mythic rather than historic. In one story, the Anarchists had murdered the town’s Falangists by having them beaten to death in the town’s plaza and then thrown into the canyon that cuts through the center of the town. Ernest Hemingway recounted this version in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, most historians now agree that this never happened.

Category: Architecture, Ethics, Film, History, Photography, Poetry, Politics, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Ernest Hemingway, Falangists, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hugh Thomas, John Donne, Nationalists, Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Republican, Ronda, Second Spanish Republic, Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Holocaust

The Cathars

Feb 11, 2023 / terry / 3 comments

The Cathars

From the 12^th to 15^th Centuries groups of people called the Cathars lived quietly in various regions of Western Europe – Northern Italy, the Rhineland and, most especially, Southern France. They followed the moral teachings of Jesus, forsaking worldly goods and loving one another, but they did not believe in the basic theology of Christianity. They considered that the world was evil, that human beings were spirits imprisoned in the flesh, and that the soul could only be set free at death if one had lived a life of purity. The Catholic Church considered these beliefs heretical, and in 1208 Pope Innocent III called for a crusade to eradicate the heresy. Named after the inhabitants of the city of Albi which had a flourishing Cathar population, the Albigensian Crusade lasted from 1209 until 1229. After years of terrible violence and cruelty, most of those who professed Cathar beliefs were dead. All that now remains of these peaceful people are the ruins of the hilltop castles in which they sought refuge.

Category: Architecture, Art, Ethics, History, Literature, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Albi, Arnaut Daniel, Bogomils, Carcassonne, Cathars, Crusades, Dominicans, Dualism, Heresy, Innocent III, Langudoc, Peyrepertuse, Simon de Montfort, Toulouse, Troubadours

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