.

The Starry
Night (Dutch: De sterrennacht) is a painting by the Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh. The
painting depicts the view outside his sanitorium room window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (located in
southern France) at night, although it was painted from memory during the day. It has been in the
permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, part of the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest,
since 1941. One of Van Gogh's most popular pieces, the painting is widely hailed as his magnum opus.

slave and Lion, a painting

by famous Chinese artist Xu Beihong, was auctioned in Hong Kong Sunday at 53.9 million HK dollars (6.9 million
U.S. dollars), a record high price compared with other Chinese artists' paintings worldwide. The price far exceeded
the 32 million HK dollars (4.1 million U.S. dollars) estimate by Christie's Hong Kong in October.
The Last Judgment is a canonical fresco by the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo executed on
the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. The work took four years to complete and was done
between 1536 and 1541 (preparation of the altar wall began in 1535.) Michelangelo began working on it
some twenty years after having finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The work is massive and spans the entire wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. It is a depiction of
the Second Coming of Christ and the final and eternal judgment by God of all humanity. The souls of
humans rise and descend to their fates, as judged by Christ surrounded by prominent saints including
Saints Catherine of Alexandria, Peter, Lawrence, Bartholomew, Paul, Peter Simon, Sebastian, John the
Baptist, and others.
This painting by Rubens was erroneously attributed to one of his assistants in 1787. It
wasn't until 2001 that an expert judged it to be a true Rubens.

It was sold at an auction in London in 2002 for £49.5 million (then US $86 million or 77
million euro). The buyer was revealed to be the Canadian newspaper baron Kenneth
Thomson. Thomson donated the work (and many others) to the Art Gallery of Ontario, in
Toronto. It currently is on display in the London National Gallery.

The work shows the massacre ordered by king Herod. He had been told by the Three Wise
Men that a King of the Jews had been born, and decided to prevent him from becoming a
rival. Mary, Joseph and their new born child were already on their way to Egypt.

Rubens was clearly influenced by Italian Baroque masters such as Caravaggio: rich color,
dramatic movements, and the use of chiaroscuro.

The Massacre of the Innocents is the subject of two paintings by Peter Paul Rubens depicting the
episode of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents of Bethlehem, as related in the Gospel of Matthew.

Contents

  [hide] 
 1 The lost

masterpiece

2 Analysis

3 Later version

4 Notes

5 External links

[edit]The lost masterpiece

The first version painted by Rubens dates from around 1611–12. In the seventeenth-century, the painting
was part of the Liechtenstein Collection in Vienna, Austria, along with another Rubens'
masterpiece, Samson and Delilah. After having been miscatalogued by Vincenzio Fanti in 1767, it was
attributed to one of Rubens' assistants, Jan van den Hoecke, after Rubens. There, however, it remained
until it was sold to an Austrian family in 1920. It was subsequently loaned in 1923 to Stift Reichersberg, a
monastery in northern Austria.

In 2001, the painting was seen by George Gordon, an expert in Flemish and Dutch paintings
at Sotheby's in London. He was persuaded that it was indeed a Rubens by its similar characteristics and
style to the Samson and Delilah painted around the same time. The work was sold at auction at
Sotheby's, London on July 10, 2002 for £49.5 million (CAD $117 Million)[1] to Canadian businessman and
art collector Kenneth Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet.

Following the auction the painting was loaned to the National Gallery, London for a period before its
transfer in 2008 to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, to whom Thomson had donated it, and which was
undergoing a major rebuilding and expansion during those years. [
The Great Wave off Kanagawa (神奈川沖浪裏 Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura?, lit. "Under a Wave off
Kanagawa"), also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by
the Japanese artist Hokusai. An example of ukiyo-e art, it was published sometime between 1830 and
1833[1] (during the Edo Period) as the first in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku
sanjūrokkei (富嶽三十六景?)), and is his most famous work. This particular woodblock is one of the most
recognized works of Japanese art in the world. It depicts an enormous wave threatening boats near
the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is, as the
picture's title notes, more likely to be a large okinami – literally "wave of the open sea." As in all the prints
in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself
appears in the background.

Copies of the print are in many Western collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York City, the British Museum inLondon, The Art Institute of Chicago, and in Claude Monet's house
in Giverny, France.

Pieta
Created by Michelangelo (1475-1564), the Pieta depicts the Virgin Mary holding her only
son, Jesus Christ, in her arms. Prior to sculpting the Pieta, Michelangelo was not a very
known artist. He was only in his early twenties when he was told, in 1498, to do a life sized
sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding her son in her arms. In about two years, from a single
slab of marble, Michelangelo created one of the most beautiful sculptures ever.

3
The Thinker
Also from Auguste Rodin, is the famous sculpture “The Thinker.” Originally named The
Poet, the piece was part of a commission by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris to create a
monumental portal to act as the door of the museum. Rodin based his theme on The Divine
Comedy of Dante and entitled the portal The Gates of Hell. Each of the statues in the piece
represented one of the main characters in the epic poem. The Thinker was originally meant
to depict Dante in front of the Gates of Hell, pondering his great poem. (In the final
sculpture, a miniature of the statue sits atop the gates, pondering the hellish fate of those
beneath him.) The sculpture is nude, as Rodin wanted a heroic figure in the tradition of
Michelangelo, to represent intellect as well as poetry.

2
Venus de Milo
The Venus de Milo sculpture was created sometime between 100 and 130 B.C. it is believed
to depict Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans) the Greek goddess of love and beauty. It is a
marble sculpture, slightly larger than life size at 203 cm (6 ft 8 in) high. Its arms and
original plinth have been lost. From an inscription that was on its plinth, it is thought to be
the work of Alexandros of Antioch; it was earlier mistakenly attributed to the master
sculptor Praxiteles. It is at present on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Amazingly,
the statue was discovered accidentally in a farmer’s field.

1
David
“David” is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created between 1501 and 1504, by the
Italian artist Michelangelo. It is a 5.17 meter (17 feet) marble statue of a standing male nude.
The statue represents the Biblical hero David, a favored subject in the art of Florence.
Originally commissioned as one of a series to be positioned high up on the facade of
Florence Cathedral, the statue was instead placed in a public square, outside the Palazzo
Della Signoria, the seat of civic government in Florence, where it was unveiled on 8
September, 1504. Because of the nature of the hero that it represented, it soon came to
symbolize the defense of civil liberties embodied in the Florentine Republic, an independent
city-state threatened on all sides by more powerful rival states and by the hegemony of the
Medici family. The eyes of David, with a warning glare, were turned towards Rome. The
statue was moved to the Academia Gallery in Florence in 1873, and later replaced at the
original location by a replica.

7
The Kiss
The Kiss is an 1889 marble sculpture by the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin
(1840-1917). This sculpture has a interesting story to it. it depicts the 13th-
century Italian noblewoman immortalized in Dante’s Inferno, who falls in love
with her husband, Giovanni Malatesta’s, younger brother Paolo. Having fallen
in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, the couple are
discovered and killed by Francesca’s husband. In the sculpture, the book can
be seen in Paolo’s hand. The lover’s lips do not actually touch in the sculpture
to suggest that they were interrupted, and met their demise without their lips
ever having touched. When critics first saw the sculpture in 1887, they
suggested the less specific title Le Baiser (The Kiss).

1. The
Crooked House (Sopot, Poland)
Construction of the building started in in January 2003 and in December 2003 it was finished. House
architecture is based on Jan Marcin Szancer (famous Polish drawer and child books illustrator) and Per

Dahlberg (Swedish painter living in Sopot) pictures and paintings. Krzywy Domek
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coordinates:  54°26′38.91″N 18°34′0.3″E
The Krzywy Domek

The Krzywy Domek is an irregularly-shaped building in Sopot, Poland. Its name translates in to English as
the Crooked House. [1]

The Krzywy Domek was built in 2004. It is approximately 4,000 square meters in size and is part of
the Rezydent shopping center.

It was designed by Szotyńscy & Zaleski who were inspired by the fairytale illustrations and drawings of Jan
Marcin Szancer and Per Dahlberg. It can be entered from either Monte Cassino or Morska Streets.[2]

Image via: brocha

2. Forest Spiral – Hundertwasser Building (Darmstadt, Germany)
The Hundertwasser house “Waldspirale” (“Forest Spiral”) was built in Darmstadt between 1998 and 2000.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the famous Austrian architect and painter, is widely renowned for his revolutionary,
colourful architectural designs which incorporate irregular, organic forms, e.g. onion-shaped domes.
The structure with 105 apartments wraps around a landscaped courtyard with a running stream. Up in the turret at the
southeast corner, there is a restaurant, including a cocktail bar.

 The Basket Building (Ohio, United States)

The Longaberger Basket Company building in Newark, Ohio might just be a strangest office building in the world. The
180,000-square- foot building, a replica of the company’s famous market basket, cost $30 million and took two years
to complete. Many experts tried to persuade Dave Longaberger to alter his plans, but he wanted an exact replica of
the real thing. If you like unusual things and want to admire unusual buildings then you must go to Ohio,
USA. It does not sound that interesting, but it is, believe me. Here you can admire the world’ s largest
basket- shaped building. It is actually an office building and it houses the headquarters of Longaberger
BasketCompany. I guess that explains the unusual shape.
The guy who founded this company, Dave Longaberger, was a visionary and realized the huge
opportunity to make picnic baskets and shopping baskets. And his ideas brought him fortune. So, as a
thank to the apparently innocent and unimportant item, he decided to move his company headquarters
into this unusually shaped building.
It is an accurate replica of a normal shopping basket and is now one of the main touristic attractions of the
town.The design is perfect and accurate and all the details are preserved. For example the building has
two handles attached, just like any normal picnic basket. These handles are constantly heated during the
winter months so as to avoid ice and snow deposits on them.

This unique looking building was finished in December 1997 and has been housing the company’ s
headquarters ever since. So if you ever go in or near Newark, Ohio, do not hesitate and visit this unique
building just for the sake of seeing a true record.
 Cubic Houses (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
The original idea of these cubic houses came about in the 1970s. Piet Blom has developed a couple of these cubic
houses that were built in Helmond.
The city of Rotterdam asked him to design housing on top of a pedestrian bridge and he decided to use the cubic
houses idea. The concept behind these houses is that he tries to create a forest by each cube representing an
abstract tree; therefore the whole village becomes a forest.
 Image via: vpzone

Copenhagen's Suspended Glass Office

 Posted by Jacob Paul Wiegmann on January 4, 2012 at 1:30pm
 View Blog
Designed by Scandinavian architecture practice Schmidt Hammer Lassen, the new headquarters for Nykredit, one of the leading
mortgage banks in Denmark, is quite stunning. The 10-story-tall structure allows for an ample amount of natural light thanks
to its impressive glass facade. The most striking part of the design has to be the three suspended meeting rooms that are
cantilevered off of the third and fifth floors. The building also features glass elevators, balconies, and exposed stairways,
creating an open and clean-looking work environment.

Great care was taken in anticipating how the large glass exterior would capture and hold heat. Along with being cooled using
water from a nearby harbor, specific sections of the roof and double layered facade can be opened up to allow for natural
ventilation. Not only does this building have an elegant appearance, it's also one of the largest office buildings in all of
Copenhagen.