Art in the Villa Farnesina

Art in the Villa Farnesina This magnificent loggia, designed by Raphael and mostly painted by his crew of helpers in 1518, shows a spectacular amount of skill. Originally the main villa entrance presided here and the room was an open loggia. The walls imitate realistic architectural form using light and shadow to trick viewers with illusion. Nature plays an important role through the abundance of vegetation in the festoons outlining the ceiling and its partitions, and the illusion of sky along the top and semi-circle lunettes. The fruit and vegetables have an enormous amount of detail, many of which were modeled after the variety of exotic and well maintained plants in the glorious gardens. The color scheme in this room feels very cool. The pinkish shades of skin tone pop out from the ceiling and the interplay between the characters shows a mastery of space and expression. The ceiling depicts of story of Amour and Psyche as narrated in Apuleiuss Golden Ass. Legend has it, Psyche was the most beautiful child of King Anatolia. Jealous of her, Venus (Aphrodite) asks her son Cupid (Eros) to pierce Psyche with a golden arrow so she would fall in love with the ugliest man on earth. He agrees but falls in love with her instead. The two marry, but Psyche upsets Cupid. Advised by the gods, Psyche sets out to regain Cupids love through service. She eventually asks Venus for aid. Venus orders Psyche to perform a series of near impossible tasks. With the aid of others she completes enough for Cupid to forgive her. He flies to Mount Olympus and asks Jove to help save Psyche from the last task. Jove does and during a formal council declares his approval of the marriage between Cupid and Psyche. Later, Cupid fetches Psyche and she drinks immortalizing Ambrosia. The two have a child named Volupta (Bliss or Delight) and Venus and Psyche reconcile. The entire ceiling focuses around the dramatic love story full of courtship, danger, jealously and pleasure. The two main panels show the Council of the Gods and the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche. Along the sides of the ceiling, Raphael depicts other portions of the story. The beginning panel shows Venus pointing downwards while discussing her plan with Cupid. This room clearly carries the themes of nature and love in a very pagan manner. Raphael successfully intertwines the characters and the style of painting while following more realistic and 3-dimensional Renaissance art. Sala delle Prospective The name of this room works perfectly. The side frescoes, designed and painted by Baldassare Peruzzi, depict columns going into the distance. Agostino commissioned him in 1519. When standing in the center of the room, the columns follow perfect perspective. Painted with detail, they imitate dark veined marble. They present an architectural foreground to the countryside background that builds on the illusion of nature within the villa. These views conveniently tie in the traditional villa scene because villas were usually built in the suburbs. The continuation of the floor into the fresco emphasizes the illusion and carries the viewer out. Divinities reside above the doors and windows and a frieze of mythological scenes line the ceiling. The forge of Vulcan has a fitting placement on the northern side, above the fireplace. Deeply coffered squares tile the ceiling and give the room a sense of depth. This room clearly plays on illusions of space and successfully engages the viewer to pe er out and interact with nature. Sala di Sodoma This room is also known as the Agostinos bedroom and was commissioned in 1519. Walking in, the walls are completely frescoed. The coffered ceiling depicts scenes from mythology, again showing more pagan references. The most eye-catching aspect of the room is Sodomas Marriage of Alexander and Roxanne. Roxanne twists her body as she gazes to the outstretched hand of Alexander. Cherubs occupy a large portion of room along the top of the fresco and within. A few even tug at Roxannes limbs. The paintings on the side show people in battle and heading towards the marriage. Stairs leading into the fresco draws in and interacts with the viewer. The reoccurring theme of love and drama clearly presides in this room. Many believe the marriage scene reflects Agostinos third marriage to Francesca Andreazza. His martial ceremony, performed by Leo X, actually took place in the Villa Chigi. Thus, the frescoed theme of marriage and love properly define the private bedroom as a place of their union. Function The Villa Farnesina truly embodied its purpose of entertainment. Agostino Chigi used this building for parties, formal dinners, his wedding, theatrical performances and more. The amount of money and time put into the villa shows how ostentatious Chigi felt about showing his fortune. Agostino Chigi would serve dinner guests on lavish plates of silver. To demonstrate his abundance of money to his company, he would order his servants to toss the silverware out of the windows and into the Tiber after their meals. Secretly nets in the water caught the pieces of eatery and eventually made their way back to the villa. Architectural choices by Peruzzi emphasize the theatrical purpose of the building. Peruzzi alludes to the function by using Vitruvian authority. Vitruvius explains the design of Roman theatre through arithmetic ratios. Lower stories should have pedestals and an entablature respectively one third and one fifth the height of its columns while upper storey pedestals have half the height and columns have three fourths the height of their lower level counterparts. Peruzzi followed the advice with exactness. In the early 1500s, theatrical events adapted to their environment not the other way around. The u-shape, and open Loggia di Psyche creates an ideal enclosure for performances. At the time, a raised stage flanked the two wings to line the loggia. Actors entered from the rooms openings. Thoughtfully, the frescoes in the Loggia di Psyche just cover the ceiling while the paintings on the walls restrict themselves to architectural and patterned designs. This made setting changes and backdrops easier to create and adapt to during performances. Illusionary perspective and Muses carrying tragic and comic masks along the walls continue the theatrical implications upstairs in the Sala delle Prospettive. Goals of the Patron The goal of creating a building to function as a location for entertainment, partying and showing the wealth of the Chigi family definitely succeeded. In addition, bringing nature into the building presents another major goal when building a villa. At first glance the exterior is lined with an abundant amount of windows, allowing natural light in and connecting the rooms to nature as much as possible. Furthermore, the two loggias were originally open. Not only would that add more light, but sweet smells from the garden and even insects and animals had access to the rooms. The Loggia di Psyche served as the original entrance into the villa. Observing the ceiling, one can see the impact of nature on the fresco. A thick festoon of leaves and a variety of fruit follow the architectural space along the spandrels and ceiling panels. This matches the frieze on the exterior. The earthly colors and background of blue sky incorporate the outside in. Even the semi-circle lunettes above the walls have painted windows with a fictitious outdoor view. The large vertical panels of windows facing the garden flood the room with daylight. Upstairs, the Sala delle Prospettive creates an illusion of countryside views as one gazes at the frescoes and past the columns. The distant horizon generates a feeling of space and infinity. In Sala di Sodoma, Alexander and Roxannes courtship is in a covered area, but effort was made to continue the story outdoors on the side frescoes, and in the background of the main fresco. Nature clearly impacted the villa as a major theme through out the entire building. Conclusion The Villa Farnesina houses art from some of the most prominent figures of its time. Each room tells a different story as one can only imagine the splendor and extravagance Agostino Chigi must have experienced when entertaining guests in his new villa. After the Chigi sold the building to the Farnese family, the Farnese made plans to connect it by bridge with the Palazzo Farnese. Building began but never completed. In later centuries the Bourbon of Naples owned it, and the Spanish Ambassador in Rome. Today the Italian state has used it for the Accademia dei Lincei and the Gabinetto dei Disegnie dell Stampe. The harmonious architecture, meaningful proportions, innovative and eye-catching frescoes swimming in pagan themes of nature and love will attract passers by and art fanatics for many years to come.

The Challenges of Strategic Management

Strategic Management 313 News Critique – Topic 1 – The Challenges of Strategic Management *Mishal Ibrahim Mohamed *Didi 12928039 1. News item sources Gross, D. 2010. Major new app store to take on Apple, others. http://www. cnn. com/2010/TECH/02/15/app. store/index. html? iref=allsearch (accessed March 6, 2010). Kincaid, J. 2010. The Wholesale Applications Community Sounds Like A Disaster In The Making. http://www. washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/15/AR2010021502209. html (accessed March 6, 2010). Mobile firms unite to offer applications. http://news. bbc. co. uk/2/hi/technology/8515813. stm (accessed March 6, 2010). Schenker, J. L. 2010. Mobile Industry Strikes Back at Google and Apple. http://www. businessweek. com/blogs/europeinsight/archives/2010/02/mobile_industry. html (accessed March 6, 2010). 2. Summary On February 15th 2010, the world's largest 24+ companies that deal with telecommunications have announced that they are tying up with each other to form what they call the Wholesale Applications Community (Gross 2010). This strategy is aimed at creating a unified open platform to create applications to work on any phone, including any carrier and any operation system (OS) that they are using (Kincaid 2010). As we know, Apple dominates the app market with more than 3 billion downloads in 18 months (_Mobile firms unite to offer applications 2010). The operators realised that their current strategy of creating individual applications for each of their phones was not able to come even close to the market share and the competitive advantage that Apple's App store has (Gross 2010). They realized that if they combined their efforts with each other they would be able to serve 3 billion customers collectively (Schenker 2010). Currently all most all third party developers have all been developing for Apple's App Store which amounts to about 140, 000 applications and almost completely ignoring the rest of the market (Schenker 2010). The Wholesale Applications Community's plan is to balance this market by bringing these developers towards them since they would be serving a bigger market collectively (Schenker 2010). They aim to have this common standard by a maximum of 12 months (Mobile irms unite to offer applications _2010). *3. Links* to topic This news critique links to Topic 1 – The challenges of strategic Management in many ways. Firstly the topic talks about what a strategy is and what achieving competitive advantage means. Apple in this case has achieved competitive advantage using its App Store. It has dominated the market for a long time with its app lications which other companies were not able to imitate as efficiently (Gross 2010). Secondly, the topic talks about how there are intended strategies and emergent strategies and the implementation of these strategies. Since Apple had such a market dominance, the original strategy for the other companies were to make applications and application stores by themselves but as the market changed they decided to improvise and implement a new strategy which was to work with each other to make a universal application store that would work on all their phones (Schenker 2010). The aim of this strategy as explained in the summary was to even the market and reduce the competitive advantage that Apple had over the rest (_Mobile firms unite to offer applications _2010). 4. What can be learnt There is a lot of things that can be learnt from this. For one, it shows the importance of implementing strategies and the power of achieving competitive advantage. The article said that Apple's App Store had 3 billion downloads in 18 months because of how brilliant their app store was compared to the rest of the competition (_Mobile firms unite to offer applications _2010). What was also learnt was that no one strategy would work forever and that strategies need to be consistently changing based on the environment around the company as well as what the competition is doing. If the other telecommunication companies just stood still with their old strategy then it is most likely that Apple would gain even more competitive advantage over them. They adapted and changed their strategies to match the market and compete. 5. Future developments There is a strong debate in whether this would be successful or not. Rob Conway, CEO of the GSM Association is extremely excited about this since he feels that it will be the start of an equal market with much more innovation (Gross 2010). Andy Rubin, Google VP of engineering, on the other hand believes that this is merely a dream and is extremely sceptical that it would work since he believes that the market place is too fragmented and also the specifications of each phone is too varied to create a singular format (Kincaid 2010). I personally think that this is both good and bad. I do agree that this would create more innovation and ultimately more value for the customers since finally competition would be created in the application market, but at the same time I do notice certain problems. For example if they are creating applications that would work on any phone then I feel it is likely that we might start seeing too much similarity in phones. The sizes of phones would be almost the same, the screen size would be almost the same and so forth. Nothing would be more unique than the other and it is likely that the companies may argue with each other on what the final design should be. Then again if these application are made in such a way that it could fit any size then there should not be much of a problem. In conclusion, I guess time will tell how effective this strategy will be for the mobile phone market.

Essay about Analysis of Discipline and Punish - 1609 Words

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, although verbose, contains important dialogue concerning the concept of power in the penal systems of late 18th century France with public execution, and the gradual transformation of power in subsequent disciplinary systems up to modern times. Power is closely related to the concepts of violence or force, but they are not the same. Throughout this work, Foucault establishes the trend of using power as a sort of political technology over the human body. According to Foucault, power relations transcend every facet of society, and are not simply localized in those relations between citizens and the government. Power must be aligned closely with the concept of knowledge. Basically, there is no power†¦show more content†¦This was no accident, as the governing powers understood very well that retribution could best be accomplished by proving a meaningful connection between the body of the condemned and his or her punishment. Essenti ally, this makes the execution a political agenda. Executions served to make the person the center of the act. He was paraded through the streets with his crime attached to him physically in some cases, and more often than not required to stand at various places in public to have his sentence read aloud. Also, the public execution provided a place for confession. It seems theoretically sound to assume that when a person has nothing to lose, he or she will atone for the truth of the sentence placed upon him or her. The spectacle needed the affirmation of justice it attempted to encompass by giving the accused the chance to refute or acknowledge as truth the punishment he will endure for his crime. In addition, the spectacle placed the crime and the body together, and in many cases executions were held at the scene of the crime. Finally, executions served to establish proof of wrongdoing by means of slowness and suffering of the criminal. Punishment’s foremost intention is to p rove guilt, and this proof is much more intense when said punishment is public. Although public execution was not the most common form of punishment, philosophers and political reformers and France began to recognizeShow MoreRelatedFoucault s Discipline And Punishment1211 Words   |  5 Pagesinto the modern culture seen today. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish examines how punishment was viewed and enacted prior to the â€Å"humane† awakening of the eighteenth century, while establishing the progression of change that shifted punishment from the body to the soul. Foucault was a student and professor of philosophy and psychology during the twentieth century, which influenced his writings and political activism. 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The Da Vinci Code By Dan Brown - 1304 Words

â€Å"Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.†(Balt, 2013). This is a quote by Leonardo da Vinci and states one of his main ideas; knowledge will open your mind to new ideas and helps you learn about the past. A book that represents this quote, is the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. This book is the thrilling story of Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu in their hunt to solve the dying wish of Sophie’s grandfather. Not only does it contain a fantastic storyline, it also is full of rich history. John Paul Richter said history is like religion, it unites all learning and power and that is exactly what happens in the Da Vinci Code. His life was filled with many things that were hidden to the others, his paintings were filled with many things that are still a mystery to this day. The book the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is a historically accurate portrayal of the mysterious life of Leonardo Da Vinci and one of his most famous paintings, the Mona Li sa. One of the many things that influenced Da Vinci in his art was coding. Leonardo Da Vinci’s first painting he coded in was The Annunciation under the apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio. Towards the end of the creation of the painting, he jumped in to finish the painting for Andrea and painted an angel. The angel is invisible to the eye because he used a non lead paint that was different from the one Andrea used (Petricevic, 2015). The angel can only be seen under a specific light and it disappears underShow MoreRelatedThe Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown767 Words   |  3 Pages I read the novel the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Mythology is incorporated throughout the entire novel. The novel is based upon a secret that has been kept for thousands of years by the Priory of Brotherhood known as the Holy Grail. Some people, depending upon their religious beliefs consider the Holy Grail a myth itself. 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(Wikipedia) Being the oldest of three children, Dan Brown was born on June 22, 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire. His father, Richard G. Brown, was a mathematics teacher and wrote textbooks from 1968 to his retirement in 1982. (Wikipedia)Read MoreArtistic Symbology Of The Da Vinci Code Essay1210 Words   |  5 PagesGreat Literature: The Artistic Symbology of The Da Vinci Code Literature has been around for hundreds of years, and exerts an ever present force in our daily lives, our entertainment, and our learning. But what makes something literature? The Oxford Dictionary defines literature as â€Å"written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit†. Literature, therefore, could be considered by some to be a form of art. 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