NO one knows which bloom was the first ever to catch the eye of an artist. Although it withered and died deep in historical times, that flower inspired one of art's most venerable and joyous genres. It was most likely an anonymous Egyptian artist-artisan, who, walking by the Nile, saw in the lotus flower a plant of pleasing shape and pattern and decided to record it. From that first insight, lotus flowers began to appear on papyrus and wall paintings, ceramics and amulets, clothing and jewellery. By then, the flower, as so many other blossoms were to gain over the centuries, had a symbolic association as well with the sun, in the case of the lotus, because the flower closes and sinks at dusk and rises and opens again at dawn-so, when depicted by artists, it was not merely a thing of beauty, but carried meaning, too.
By the middle of the second millennium BC, flowers were to be found everywhere in Egyptian art, architecture and decoration -so much so that at the Festival Hall of Thutmose III at Karnak there is a stone relief depicting 275 different species of plants. The fashion for flora that started on the southern shores of the Mediterranean quickly crossed the sea to Europe, where it spread like bindweed. By the 5th century BC, the Greeks were using the acanthus plant as a pattern on columns and friezes, and the Egyptian lotus was Hellenised and re-emerged as 'eggand-dart' moulding, which snaked its way around temples and civic buildings and remains familiar to us thanks to innumerable 18th- and 19th-century Greek Revival buildings and furniture.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 21, 2024 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 21, 2024 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
A tapestry of pinks
THE garden is now entering its season of vigour and exuberance.
Bringing the past to life
An event hosted by COUNTRY LIFE at WOW!house is one of the highlights of a programme that features some of the biggest names in interior design
This isle is full of wonder
GEOLOGY? A bit like economics, the famously boring science? I confess I suffered the prejudice—agriculture and history being my thing, both of them vital in every sense— but Robert Muir-Wood’s voyage through the past 66 million years of the making of the British landscape has biblical-level drama on almost every other page. Flood, fire, ice… or, perhaps, the formation in rock, sand, mud and lava of these isles is best conceived of as fierce poetry.
Empire protest
Without meaning to issue a clarion call for independence, E. M. Forster perfectly captured the rising tensions of the British Raj. One hundred years later, Matthew Dennison revisits the masterpiece A Passage to India
Hops and dreams
A relative of marijuana, hops were a Teutonic introduction to British brewing culture and gave rise to the original working holiday
Life and sol
The sanctuary of the Balearic Islands has enchanted a multitude of creative minds, from Robert Graves to David Bowie
'Nature is nowhere as great as in its smallest creatures'
Giving himself neck ache from constantly looking upwards, John Lewis-Stempel makes the most of a sunny May day harvesting ‘tree hay’ and marvelling at the myriad wildlife including flies and earwigs–that reside on bark
'Plans are worthless, but planning is everything'
Country houses great and small were indispensable to D-Day preparations, with electricity and sanitation, well-stocked wine cellars, countesses to run the canteens and antique furniture to feed the stoves
The darling buds of May
May Morris shared her father’s passion for flowers, embroidery and Iceland, but was much more than William’s daughter. Influential both as a designer and as a teacher, she championed the rights of workers, particularly women, as Huon Mallalieu reveals
Achilles healed
Once used to comfort the lovelorn or soothe the wounds of Greek heroes, yarrow may now have a new starring role in sustainable agriculture