By Patrick Hunt – Sometimes there are portraits that are so gripping you cannot move on for a long time. As a prelude I spend time in Bergen, Norway, every year and my visits always include the Kode Bergen Art Museum, especially the collection in the four white buildings along […]
Author: patrick
Gérôme’s Bathsheba with Ironic Tragedy
By Patrick Hunt – Seldom has ancient literature been so psychologically riveting as the biblical peripety of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel II and following to the conclusion of the book with David’s diminished end. King David’s multiple mistakes with Bathsheba – adultery and the requested murder of her […]
Spanish Azulejos Moorish Revival Tiles at the Alfonso XIII Hotel, Seville
By Patrick Hunt – One of the most beautiful and rightly famous distinctively-designed theme hotels in the world is the Alfonso III of Seville, expressly built for the Iberoamerican Exposition of 1929 under the direct sponsorship of Spain’s King Alfonso XIII in Neo-Mudéjar Style of Moorish Revival in the late […]
Music in Vermeer: A Selection of Brilliance in The Music Lesson and The Guitar Player
By Patrick Hunt – Introduction Significant prior studies have summarized and at times specifically delineated the ways Vermeer employed music in his carefully-wrought and subtly staged mise-en-scène genre paintings. One of the most recent and fairly comprehensive is Marjorie Wieseman’s excellent Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, […]
Possible Chinese Silk in Bronze Age or Iron Age Jericho: the “Babylonish” Garment from Shin’ar in Joshua 7 ?
By Patrick Hunt – One of the more intriguing passages of the Hebrew Bible, Joshua 7: 10-23 & ff. describes the sin of Achan and his “accursed” secret purloined material spoliation after the taking of Jericho by the Israelites, a narrative with controversial historicity. Regardless of when it can be […]
Olaf and the Axe Iconography in Norway – Undredal, 12th c. Stave Church Depiction?
By Patrick Hunt – Olaf Tryggvason Olaf I Tryggvason (ca. 960-1000 CE) was the Viking king who forcibly began to Christianize the people of Norway at the end of the 10th century, a change suggested at times by his detractors as conversion forced at swordpoint. If depicted as a bloody […]
Vikings Renavigated in RIVER KINGS Book – A Review
By Patrick Hunt – Vikings continue to be a magnetic topic, especially in light of new discoveries of ships, burials and sites that enable us to concentrate more on their far-flung commercial savvy and technology than the weary and skewed caricature of merely violent rapacity. Anyone who has been to […]
Hanselmanns, St. Moritz Konditorei-Chocolaterie- Confiserie
By Patrick Hunt – In the Engadine Valley of Switzerland’s Graubunden Canton below the Alps, the town of St. Moritz and villages like Sils alongside Lake Silvaplana and Lake Sils are justifiably renowned since Celtic and Roman times for Roman stone roads sloping down the mountains to mineral springs, and […]
Albert Seltz Wines in Mittelbergheim, Alsace
By Patrick Hunt – One of the oldest and respected domaines in Alsace, already known for some of the oldest continuing wineries in the world, is Domaine Albert Seltz in Mittelbergheim from 1576, with fourteen generations of wine production for highly sought-after wines. The current patriarch Albert took over from […]
Classical Mythology A to Z: An Encyclopedia of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, Heroines…A Review
By Patrick Hunt – Annette Giesecke has recently added a wonderful and indispensable book to the corpus of mythology: Classical Mythology A to Z: An Encyclopedia of Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, Heroines, Nymphs, Spirits, Monsters and Places (Black Dog & Leventhal / Hachette Group, 2020). While “beautiful” isn’t the most important […]