» 2010 » April
This trip would not be complete, without retracing world history through exhibitions of antiquities, paintings, sculpture and more….basically visiting museums. I will be in Europe for about six weeks from mid August to late September and I plan to visit some of the ancient world while I am there. Here are some top museum destinations from around the globe which happen to be in the cities I plan to visit.
Museo National del Prado – Madrid, Spain
The Museo del Prado is a museum and art gallery located in Madrid, the capital of Spain. It features one of the world’s finest collections of European art, from the 12th century to the early 19th century, based on the former Spanish Royal Collection. El Prado is one of the most visited sites in Madrid, and it is considered to be among the greatest museums of art in the world.
Vatican Museums - Rome, Italy
The Vatican Museums is a web of museums or museum complex inside the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection built up by the Roman Catholic Church throughout the centuries. Pope Julius II founded the museums in the 16th century. For example The Sistine Chapel is on route in the Vatican Museums. They were visited by 4,310,083 people in the year 2007.
Museums I might want to check out:
Vatican Museums and Saint Peter’s Basilica – Art and Faith Itinerary Tour
A display of the continuous interweaving between Christianity and culture, between faith and art, between the divine and the human
It houses monuments and artifacts of ancient Egypt partly coming from Rome and from Villa Adriana (Tivoli), where they had been transferred mostly in the Imperial age, and partly from private collections, that is purchased by nineteenth century collectors.
Ethnological Missionary Museum
The original nucleus of the collection, of about 40,000 works, was chosen by a special committee from among 100,000 objects from all over the world, offered to the Pope from private donors, from the missions and from 400 Dioceses for the great Exhibition of 1925.
Michelangelo painted 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) of the chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512., today the ceiling, and especially The Last Judgement, are widely believed to be Michelangelo’s crowning achievements in painting
Galleria Degli Uffizi – Florence, Italy
The Uffizi Gallery is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world. It’s housed in the Palazzo degli Uffizi, a palazzo in Florence, Italy. Uffizi was originally built as a palace designed by Giorgio Vasari in 1560 for Cosimo I de’ Medici as the offices for the Florentine magistrates — hence the name “uffizi” (“offices”). Over the years, further parts of the palace evolved into a display place for many of the paintings and sculpture collected by the Medici family or commissioned by them. According to Vasari, who was not only the architect of the Uffizi, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo gathered at the Uffizi “for beauty, for work and for recreation.”
After the house of Medici was extinguished, the art treasures remained in Florence to form one of the first modern museums. The gallery had been open to visitors by request since the sixteenth century, and in 1765 it was officially opened to the public.
British Museum - London, England
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present.
Ebony’s Must Sees;
Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa
The Kingdom of Ife (pronounced ee-feh) was a powerful, cosmopolitan and wealthy city-state in West Africa (in what is now modern south-west Nigeria). Ife flourished as a political, spiritual, cultural and economic centre in the 12th–15th centuries AD, and was an influential hub of local and long-distance trade networks.The exhibition features superb pieces of Ife sculpture, drawn almost entirely from the magnificent collections of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.The human figures portray a wide cross-section of Ife society and include images of youth and old age, health and disease, suffering and serenity
South African Landscape: A corner of South Africa in London
South Africa Landscape will highlight the rich diversity of plant life from South Africa’s Cape region – an internationally renowned biodiversity hotspot – and will celebrate the two nations shared vision to strengthen cultural understanding and support biodiversity conservation across the world. Connections will be made between plants, people and objects on display in the Museum’s African galleries.
While on spring break in 2002, I had the opportunity to visit the Louvre. It is one of the most amazing places I have ever visited. You could spend a few days traversing all of the rooms and feel like you have visited places in the ancient world. FYI, The original Mona Lisa is in the Louvre.
The Louvre Palace (Palais du Louvre) which houses the museum was begun as a fortress by Philip II in the 12th century, During the French Revolution the Louvre was transformed into a public museum. In May 1791, the Assembly declared that the Louvre would be “a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts”
The Musée du Louvre houses 35,000 works of art drawn from eight departments, displayed in over 60,000 square meters of exhibition space dedicated to the permanent collections. The eight cultureal deparment include: Near Eastern Antiquities, Greek , Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities, Islamic Art, Egyptian Antiquities , Pantings, Sculptures, Prints and Drawing and Decorative Arts.