Meeting Benches World art in all forms

Invisible Cities / by Italo Calvino > “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” When you open the book, you can discover that the writer changed the way we read, also discovering what is possible in the …

Venice, city of corruption, sickness and decay? Not Only. Venice has also played a crucial role in the development of opera (perhaps more than you might expect). That city has been home to countless opera premieres, and for some of Italian operatic composers (Claudio Monteverdi and Antonio Vivaldi, Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi). Rossini’s Otello is set entirely in Venice. …

Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance. From the Renaissance era, both secular and sacred music survives in quantity. Renaissance music is music written in Europe during the Renaissance and has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600. The exchange …

In her right hand she holds a posy of roses and she holds her other hand over her genitals. She stares straight at the viewer. Its an oil painting on canvas – physically small (119 x 165 cm) – sumptuously realized by Titian Vecellio in 1538. By the time he executed this work, Titian was established as the leading master …

Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475/1564) was an Italian Renaissance painter, but also sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. He is considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Leonardo da Vinci. CELESTIAL LOVE …

JOHN THOMAS BIGGERS – John Thomas Biggers was an African-American muralist and studied African myths and legends. He was drawn to the creation stories of a matriarchal deistic system. Biggers is an artist whose strong portrayals of African-American life, combine images of his childhood, his travels in Africa and his feeling, about growing up black in America. He was born …

BLACK RIDERS CAME FROM THE SEA > Black riders came from the sea. There was clang and clang of spear and shield, and clash and clash of hoof and heel, wild shouts and the wave of hair, in the rush upon the wind. Thus the ride of sin. http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Poems-Stephen-Crane/dp/0801491304

A Romance is an 1850 work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, where you can know Hester Prynne, she bears an illegitimate child. It was June 1642, in the Puritan town of Boston, when a crowd gathers to witness the punishment of a young woman found guilty of adultery. The Hawthorne’s compelling novel, of the callous …

DEATH > Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves, and Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, and I had put away my labor, and my leisure too, for his civility. We passed the school, where children strove at recess, in the ring. We passed the fields of …

She was caught between her entitled taste for luxury and her yearning for true love. “She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.” Lily Bart, the beautiful and intelligent heroine of this novel, slowly slithers down the rungs of the New …

Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright > It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe it don’t matter, anyhow an’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe if you don’t know by now, when your rooster crows at the break of dawn. Look out your window and I’ll be gone, you’re the reason …

ONE ART > The art of losing isn’t hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, …

DADDY – You do not do, you do not do any more, black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time. Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, ghastly statue with one gray toe, big …