Traditional Scenes Research Articles

Green Christmas: bryophytes as ornamentals in Croatian traditional nativity scenes

BackgroundThe bryophytes are a plant group that is smaller than and not as well known as the vascular plants. They are less used and are almost completely neglected in ethnobotanical studies. Traditional nativity scenes depicting the birth of Christ are commonly decorated with both vascular plants and bryophytes. The aim of this study was to document the diversity of decorative bryophytes sold during the Advent season at farmers’ markets in Croatia (Southeastern Europe, Balkan Peninsula).MethodsTwenty-eight farmers’ markets in the two largest Croatian cities (Zagreb in the continental part and Split in the Mediterranean part) were studied in the search for local vendors selling bryophytes during the pre-Christmas season. The bryophytes collected were identified and analysed with respect to families, growth type, life forms and threat status.ResultsAmong 275 collected specimens, 43 moss and four liverwort species were identified. The mean number of species per vendor was 3.5. The most frequent species were Hypnum cupressiforme, Homalothecium sericeum and Ctenidium molluscum. Mats, wefts and tufts were the most common life-forms, while pleurocarpous prevailed over acrocarpous mosses, as they are usually pinnately branched and form large carpets, suitable for decorations. The overall selection of bryophytes and the decorations made of them were more diverse and abundant in inland Croatia, where 49 vendors at 15 farmers’ markets sold goods containing 43 species. In Mediterranean Croatia, at six farmers’ markets only 29 vendors sold goods, which contained 18 species. A considerable number of species that are less attractive to harvesters were collected non-intentionally, entangled in carpets of other, more frequent species. Among them, Rhodobryum ontariense and Loeskeobryum brevirostre are rare and insufficiently recorded in Croatia so far.ConclusionsThe present study provided a first perspective on the use of bryophytes in traditional nativity scenes in Croatia and Southeastern Europe, contributing to scarce ethnobotanical documentation of the decorative use of bryophytes in Christmas festivities in Europe and globally.

Application Of Characteristic Protection Of Historical And Cultural Blocks In Urban Renewal Through The Investigation And Research In Jinan By Taking Furong Street-Qushuiting Street As An Example

Many historical and cultural blocks have faced challenges due to the acceleration of urban modernization in China, not only the aging of urban buildings and municipal infrastructure, but also transformation, construction and renewal of the urban have a large-scale impact on the historical and cultural blocks, the fundamental changes in the way of life and street function of the citizens put forward new requirements for the physical environment of spatial environment of historical and cultural blocks. The healthy and orderly development of the traditional scenes of historical and cultural blocks can bring different vitality and economic points for the development of the city. Taking urban renewal of Jinan and historical block protection as the discussion point, this paper discusses the present situation, characteristics and existing problems of Qushuiting Street and Furong Street from the space structure, historical context and humanistic characteristics, so as to explore the integration, inheritance and development of the artistic style and cultural connotation of traditional historical and cultural blocks in urban renewal.

Sufismo y devoción popular en la pintura tangerina de Josep Tapiró Baró (Reus 1836-Tánger 1913): Los bustos de santones y La fiesta de los issawa.

El artículo estudia los retratos de derviches y las escenas de costumbres de las cofradías islámicas realizadas por el pintor orientalista Josep Tapiró Baró (Reus 1836- Tánger 1913). Se analiza el lenguaje formal y su iconografía relacionándolas con las fotografías de tipos humanos y de costumbres marroquíes realizadas en Tánger en el último tercio del siglo xix y primeros años del siglo xx. Así mismo se reflexiona sobre el realismo etnográfico del que las obras de Tapiró son exponentes destacados.

Un manuscrit parisien et ses énigmes: Le livre d’heures des Le Tellier (Paris, c. 1460)

The Le Tellier manuscript, book of hours, use of Paris (c. 1460) in Latin and French ; from a private collection in South Carolina, Unites-States ; (172 × 118 mm), Vellum ; A-D + 222 + E-H. This manuscript is written by several hands in gothic liturgical, in dark brown ink with rubrics painted in red, between two verticals and 16 horizontals, on a velum ruled in red. The text capitals are touched in yellow, and the prayers are highlighted with one-line initials and line-endings in burnished gold on grounds of pink and blue patterned with white tracery. Along the manuscript, hundreds of two- three- and four-line initials in blue or pink, patterned with white tracery and foliate infills on burnished gold grounds mark the offices and prayers. An unusually rich cycle of decoration adorns this colorful Parisian book of hours, including hundreds of panel borders in left margin of fine burnished gold leaves and disks on hairline tendrils and stems among acanthus leaves in gold and blue and sprays of colored flowers and fruits. The center of this artefact remains the twenty-six large miniatures in full color and gold placed in arched compartments with ornamented baguettes frames and full decorated borders. These highly detailed paintings result from the meticulous work of several artists, they depict various traditional scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary and the passion of Christ. While the illumination and the texts indicate that the manuscript was intended for use of Paris, several details deserve attention, in particular regarding its production. In this paper, we intend to give a brief description of this amazing manuscript mainly produced in Paris ; and to point out some textual and iconographic features which are of particular interest for the understanding of medieval methods of « mass production » of fine Books of Hours in the second half of the fifteenth century Paris.

Off the Beaten Sidewalk: Pedestrian Prediction in Shared Spaces for Autonomous Vehicles

Pedestrians and drivers interact closely in a wide range of environments. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) correspondingly face the need to predict pedestrians' future trajectories in these same environments. Traditional model-based prediction methods have been limited to making predictions in highly structured scenes with signalized intersections, marked crosswalks, or curbs. Deep learning methods have instead leveraged datasets to learn predictive features that generalize across scenes, at the cost of model interpretability. This letter aims to achieve both widely applicable and interpretable predictions by proposing a risk-based attention mechanism to learn when pedestrians yield, and a model of vehicle influence to learn how yielding affects motion. A novel probabilistic method, Off the Sidewalk Predictions (OSP), uses these to achieve accurate predictions in both shared spaces and traditional scenes. Experiments on urban datasets demonstrate that the realtime method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Annonciation

Annonciation is a series of photographs in which Elina Brotherus records herself through years of failed IVF treatments. Full of art historical references, Brotherus' images stand in sharp contrast to the traditional scenes and symbolism of Annonciation paintings. While the Virgin Mary receives the news that she is to give birth to the son of God, Brotherus pictures herself month after month in-front of a succession of negative pregnancy tests. Feelings of elation and abundance are replaced with those of sorrow and loss. Brotherus' photographs question the term 'mother', suggesting that it can stem from intention rather than being bound to biology or the physical act of having a child.

The First Exploration to Traditional Style Protection of the Historic Villages and Towns

The traditional style is an important part of the cultural heritage in the historical and cultural towns and villages in our country, which functions as a bridge between history and reality. It is a typical representative of extending history and reflecting the folk culture, also is the product of human civilization and the witness of China city development. At the same time, with the development of the ages, the traditional scenes develop and change with time. All this has also formed unique characteristics of the protection to the traditional scenes. In this paper, the author proposes a series of corresponding counter measures through caring on a more comprehensive analysis to traditional style protection of the historic villages and towns.

Research on the Guidance for Traditional Village Protection and Development Based on Functionalism Perspective

Function is the basic attribute of villages and the buildings, and is also the basic guidance for the protection and development. The functions have become multi-dimensional and complex as era changes, and the changes of functions inevitably result in the initiative adaptation and the adjustment of buildings and the environment space. It is an original perspective for the research on the interactions between the functions and spaces of traditional villages, also for the analysis on the development of traditional villages, to explain the social and cultural phenomena on the aspects of space introducing the method of functionalism. In this paper, the important buildings and the environment spaces are divided into four types, taking a case study in a traditional village in the south of Zhejiang Province in China. This paper puts forward the basic guidance that village protection and development must be combined with the functions of living, environment, tourism and historical culture and meets the multi-demands of the tourists by improving the human habitation quality, protecting the traditional scenes and integrating the historical cultures and landscape spatial structure.

Heroism and Comic Subversion in the Old English Judith

This article argues that the Old English Judith exhibits a more complex and ambiguous relationship to the heroic tradition than is generally admitted. It explores the functions and effects of various comic strategies used in Judith, in order to reassess the poem's relationship to the heroic tradition. It will show that the comic devices of parody, dramatic irony and the grotesque undermine and destabilise the concepts of the male hero, the feast, heroic battle and the comitatus. The Judith of the Old English poem is shown to represent an uneasy compromise between a woman hero who acts like a man and a heroine who plays one of the traditional female religious roles. Judith's essential femininity thus subverts the conventional categories of male hero, while her role as protagonist challenges the traditionally subordinate function of women in heroic poetry. In choosing to stress Judith's spiritual virtues, the poet recognises that, as a woman, she cannot lead a comitatus, like the traditional hero. In this respect she is the antithesis of Holofernes, who is presented as a powerful commander. By depicting Judith as a moral and religious figure, and by emphasising her status as a woman and as a servant of the Lord, the poet rejects a heroic frame of reference for his protagonist. This rejection of the heroic frame is further underlined by the employment of comedic devices to subvert traditional heroic values and institutions. Comic subversion in Judith takes three forms: parody of traditional type scenes; dramatic irony, which undermines the concepts of hero and comitatus; and grotesque humour. However, these elements are often combined for greater cumulative effect. The treatment of Holofernes's drunken feast (15–37) shows how the poet uses a combination of techniques to subvert the heroic convention of the feast. The effect not merely degrades the participants, but overturns a traditional cultural symbol of harmony: The strategies of comic subversion combine to create a disturbing and unsettling poem. The essential cause of the feelings of disquiet felt by the audience is the fact that in Judith a woman is seen to appropriate the role of hero. This action inevitably challenges traditional concepts of leadership and social institutions. The protagonist's strength is moral and spiritual rather than physical, and her leadership is based on her relationship to God rather than to a comitatus. The very presence of a woman in a role conventionally belonging to men leads inevitably to a questioning of traditional heroic expectations, and a re-examination of institutions such as feasting and the comitatus. The poem does not resolve its ambiguous attitude to the heroic, but it poses crucial questions which lie at the heart of the heroic ethos. The Old English Judith confirms the Christian paradox that, with God's help, the seemingly weak and vulnerable can become strong, and the seemingly powerful and unassailable can become weak.

DUTCH GENRE PAINTING AS RELIGIOUS ART: GABRIEL METSU'S ROMAN CATHOLIC IMAGERY

Gabriel Metsu's reputation rests on his popular genre imagery; however, the Dutch artist also produced religious paintings with Roman Catholic symbolism. Archival documents, personal and professional relationships, and a small number of paintings confirm a close engagement with the Dutch Roman Catholic community from his youth in Leiden to his maturity in Amsterdam. Metsu's connections with Roman Catholic painters, poets, and priests in the Netherlands provided the cultural context for his religious art. Moreover, contemporary devotional publications and reproductive engravings after Italian art established iconographic and compositional solutions evident in Metsu's traditional religious scenes and in his genre imagery.

Interior spaces, northern places: Nunavut artist Annie Pootoogook's artwork is observational and narrative

Unflinching, she depicts modern Inuit life as she sees it, rather than producing the traditional scenes that people in southern Canada have come to expect. There is tradition in Pootoogook's work, however. It is the Inuit concept of sulijuk , meaning when something “is true or real.” Her focus

« Les diverses dimensions d'apocryphité . Le cas du cycle de la nativité de Jésus dans le plafond peint de l'église SaintMartin de Zillis »

The famous XIIth century ceiling of the Church of St. Martin in Zillis, a small village in the Swiss Alps, in the Val Schons (Schamsertal) on the old road to the Splugen and the San Bernardino, offers a very elaborate series of well-known apocryphal scenes, among the 153 painted wood panels. Its interest lies in the pictorial narrative of the life of Jesus, the main part of the ceiling, an apocryphal piece of art like a Gospel harmony, a coherent and original composition about the figure of Jesus and his adventures in the Gospels, based on several sources. At the same time, the artist used his apocryphal imagination by modifying or adding details to traditional scenes, thus producing different and original episodes like the angel's visit to Mary and to the shepherd.

Indian painters of the Southwest: the deep remembering

The book profiles ten outstanding painters representing seven different Pueblo Indian groups and the Navajo Nation who participated in a recent convocation at the Indian Arts Research Center at the School of American Research. While some artists have chosen to depict traditional scenes and symbols and others have chosen to create modern works influenced by Euro-American painting, all draw on the deep remembering of tribal heritage and personal experience and a heightened awareness of the artist's role in more than one modern world.

Situation und Szene. überlegungen zum Verhältnis historischer und literarischer Deutung prophetischer Texte am Beispiel von Hos 5,86,6

Historical exegesis is highly interested in the historical situation as a shaping reality behind a given biblical text. This article claims that more attention has to be given to scenes as the literary pattern, which forms especially the dramatic speeches in prophetic books of the OT. This is exemplified by an exegesis of Hosea 5,8-6,6. Since A. Alt it is widely accepted that the situation behind this text is the so-called Syro-Ephraimite War. Our exegesis comes to the conclusion that not one historical situation is shaping the text but a set of traditional literary scenes or motives. Among these are : the levy of the Israelite tribes according to Judges 5, the assembly of the tribes and a lamentation-service. Especially in Hosea 5,13 there are allusions to the Assyrian-Israelite covenants and conflicts during the period of Assyrian hegemony. In Hosea 5,8-6,6 these traditional and historical motives are transformed into a sequence of speeches arranged in three dramatic scenes (Hosea 5,8-9a ; 5,9b-15 ; 6,1-6)

Les peintures du style « Nyaung Yan » à Po Win Taung

At about 40 km from Monywa, in the north-west of Central Burma, Po Win Taung [the hill of Po Win] is a huge, multi-level religious complex including some 800 excavations chiselled out of soft sandstone rock. The walls of the numerous grottoes are adorned with paintings which represent traditional scenes (the 28 Buddha of the Past, the previous lives of Buddha Gotama, and the Life of Buddha), scenes of daily life and a large variety of ornementations. Most of the paintings of Po Win Taung date from the second Ava period till the beginning of the Konbaung dynasty (16th-18th centuries). The Ava style is generally called "Nyaung Yan" as it started under the reign of the King Nyaung Yan (1597-1606) when the Burmese artistic production was reviving with numerous and original works showing the vigor of the Pagan period. The paintings of Po Win illustrate the Ava style at best, displaying the characteristics of the "Nyaung Yan" style as well as the various foreign influences (Chinese, Indian, Portuguese, Siamese, Muslim and Dutch) exerting on it.

I Stand in the Center of the Good: Interviews with Contemporary Native American Artists

What is Indian art? There have been many attempts to define it, but the so-called Santa Fe style of the 1930s - placid, two-dimensional depictions of traditional scenes - set the standard by which subsequent art by Native Americans would be judged. Art that radically challenged the stereotype - the work of Joe Herrera, Fritz Scholder, and T. C. Cannon, for example - met with resistance; questions were raised about its authenticity as Indian art.Today's Indian art has resoundingly overturned old preconceptions: here are cartoon figures in throbbing neon colors, 'decorated' grocery bags, messages to America on the Spectacolor billboard in Times Square, delicate abstractions and cubist images, work that ranges from monotype and photography to mixed media and clay, from humor and biting commentary to quiet introspection. I Stand in the Center of Good, the first book of its kind, offers a forum for seventeen contemporary Native artists to speak about the development of their art, their creative processes, how they define their art, and how it relates to their Indianness.The interviews are handsomely illustrated with works by the artists, who include Rick Glazer-Danay, Shan Goshorn, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Rick Hill, G. Peter Jemison, Michael Kabotie, Frank LaPena, Carm Little Turtle, Linda Lomahaftewa, George Longfish, Mario Martinez, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Susan Stewart, Frank Tuttle, Kay WalkingStick, and Emmi Whitehorse. Lawrence Abbott teaches English and Humanities at the Community College of Vermont in Middlebury. He has written for Studies in Indian Literatures, American Indian Quarterly, and Akewe:kon Journal.

Perceptual dimensions in the visual preferences for agrarian landscapes in western norway

In this article, a study examining the visual preferences for agrarian landscapes in western Norway is reported. The results suggest a substantially higher preference for traditional agrarian landscapes than for their modern counterparts. Most preferred were traditional scenes containing human influence in balance with the natural elements. Modern scenes containing a dominating human influence were among the least preferred. A non-metric factor analysis of the preference ratings revealed seven distinct categories in people's perception of these landscapes, mostly following the traditional-modern distinction, and with the content of the scenes as the basis for categorization. For all pairs of categories, except one, significant differences in preference were found. The results suggest that support for the preservation and maintenance of traditional agrarian landscapes can be expected. Challenges to the planning and agricultural disciplines include how to minimize negative impacts of agricultural techniques and development projects, and to reintroduce aesthetically valuable traditional landscape elements in modern agrarian landscapes.

Representations of Ritual and Symbolic Objects in Late XXVth Dynasty and Saite Private Tombs

Although several scholars have recently investigated aspects of relief decoration in Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Dynasty tombs and temples at Thebes, little attention has been given to depictions of so-called objects of a ritual or symbolic nature. This study will examine the representation of several categories of such objects, including the jars for the seven sacred oils, the lily, the lotus, the formal bouquet {Stabstrauss), and sacrificial animals. These objects of cultic and symbolic function, when used in late Dynasty XXV and Saite private tomb reliefs, reflect the main ideas of contemporary tomb decoration on a symbolic level and point to new interpretations of traditional Egyptian scenes that were evolving in the Late Period.

Theology and the Theatre

is historically the most closely related to the church. Its history in the English-speaking world is in part the history of the church and it has always seemed to offer the church an attractive medium for the exposition of its concerns. In fourteenth century miracle plays or denominational television productions, the church has sought an alliance with the dramatic arts. Because of its commitments, however, the church has always insisted that the alliance be on its own terms. Even in the miracle plays, the interests of theologian and thespian were not wholly compatible. Seeking to add interest to the presentation, directors took zestful license with sacred subjects. Comic figures dominated traditional scenes or choirboys, lashed