Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: rotunda

from "Cool Gray City of Love" by Gary Kamiya (pages 53-55): The beauty of the Palace of Fine Arts is inseparable from its strangeness. A vast, purposeless rotunda supported by mighty Corinthian columns and surrounded by a mysterious, vaguely ruinlike colonnade, it looms above its tranquil lagoon like one of those illogical, pseudo-classical structures that appear in the backgrounds of baroque paintings. The Palace is so familiar that it is easy to forget that it is a folly. And like the other members of that peculiar architectural genre, it is a mood enhancer, as much a drug as it is a building. The Palace of Fine Arts is the only on-site survivor of one of the most delirious miniature cities ever created, the joyously ephemeral Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 that announced the rebirth of San Francisco from the 1906 catastrophe. Magnificent courts – the Court of the Universe, the Court of Abundance, and the Court of Four Seasons – adjoined a pleasure strip called "The Zone," which featured enormous models of the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and, in a more modest vein, the Creation. The crown jewel – literally – of the fair was the Tower of Jewels, a 435-foot structure decorated with 102,000 cut-glass "novagems" that at night turned into a vast, glittering diadem. Not until Burning Man – which started on Baker Beach, just around the seafront corner from the fair’s site – would the world see another fake city so dazzlingly psychedelic. The Palace was so beloved that a movement to preserve it started while the Exposition was still going on. It was saved, but it had not been built to last, and in 1965 it was completely rebuilt. It is appropriate that the Palace is the last building on the site of the last of the great world expositions. For it is a shrine to absence, a tribute to a vanished world, a concrete manifestation of things unseen. The Palace’s architect, Bernard Maybeck, was charged with creating a building that would serve as a kind of decompression chamber for fairgoers, a mind-calming passageway between the crowded and chaotic fairgrounds and the paintings and sculpture housed in a hall behind the Palace. Maybeck drew his inspiration from the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi’s atmospheric etchings of Rome, in particular his etching of the collapsing, overgrown ruin of the Temple of Minerva Medica. He was also deeply influenced by Isle of the Dead, the eerily evocative painting of a surreal funerary island by the 19th-century Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. Both works captured the emotion that Maybeck was searching for, a feeling he called "modified melancholy" or "a sentiment in a minor key." But as Maybeck noted in the fascinating little book he published about creating the Palace, Böcklin’s painting was too sad to serve as an "art gallery frontispiece," just as a Greek temple set on a wild island surrounded by stormy seas and mighty cliffs would be too terrifying and uncanny. Maybeck’s solution was to place his Greek temple (the Greeks did not have domes, but for the visionary Maybeck that fact was irrelevant) on "the face of a placid lake, surrounded by high trees and lit up by a glorious full moon." This temple, he wrote, "would recall the days when your mother pressed you to her bosom and your final sob was hushed by a protecting spirit hovering over you, warm and large." It would achieve a "transition from sadness to content." As they wander about the Palace and its lagoon – for its magnificent setting are an inseparable part of it – some may feel the sense of a protecting maternal spirit. … Maybeck achieved his goal. He created a building so mysteriously evocative, so perfectly balanced between nature and artifice, reflection and joy, sadness and content, that it is like a giant mood ring. Its appearance depends not only on what time of day you see it but on what emotions you bring to it. The associations it evokes are infinite: a granite peninsula in a High Sierra lake; the endless vegetation-tangled ruins in Termessos, Turkey; the altar of a kindly god, who left it as a gift after a brief visit here. Who are those mysterious downward-looking women atop the colonnade, their faces turned away? Are they symbols of mourning? Or symbols of searching? Do they sum up the entire building, an impossible, Orpheus-like attempt to bring back the dead? Are they embodiments of time itself, which disappears even as we try to seize it? Maybeck never explained. But in a way, perhaps he did. After noting that "the artist began his work a long time ago in a nebulous haze of whys," Maybeck wrote that he must work for a long time before he realizes that he is not aiming at an object, but at "a portrayal of the life that is behind the visible." The life that is behind the visible. Maybeck’s words recall those of another great Romantic, a young poet who in the face of his own impending death used an ancient urn to celebrate the eternal spirit of art: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on … Like Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts is an elegy so profound that it takes its own place in the pantheon it extols. Like the urn, and the poem about the urn, it says to all those who stand before it: Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

These very large "flower boxes" (to quote the official guidebook to the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition) once bore masses of luxuriant California shrubs. They are located in the Peristyle Walk in the Fine Arts Colonnade of the Palace of Fine Arts. The friezes are by Ulric H. Ellerhusen, who made also the Weeping Figures and the heroic "Guardians of Arts" already described. The guidebook continues: "It is interesting to note that the precision of handling has given this design, in spite of its size, an exquisite delicacy. Standing at charmingly balanced intervals, a circle of maidens bear a heavy rope-garland. This rope makes a gratifying line that has given pleasure to connoisseurs. The frieze is so successful largely because, though frankly decorative as suits its purpose, its personality and charm distinguish it from the pattern-like or conventional. The landscape planting in the boxes, in the flower beds and above, is one of the enduring attractions of this colonnade and walk. The green is architecturally massed and the relief of flowers bright and delicate, never intrusive."

From the official guidebook of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition: "High on the decorative columns that mark the great arches within the beautiful Rotunda of Fine Arts, stand, repeated, the peaceful, dignified and serene ‘Priestess of Culture,’ by Herbert Adams. These are angelic figures, modeled with the control and calm that fittingly express the mission of culture upon the earth. Indeed the work of Mr. Adams may be said generally to be characterized by that probity and intellectual beauty ministering to the purposes of culture. These figures are harmonious ornaments to the richly decorated ceiling which they touch and to which they give a certain tranquillity. The slope of their wings connects gracefully with that of the arches; this, with the quiet beauty of the drapery and its accord with the line of the cornucopia, creates a restful architectural effect."

The Rotunda, dedicated in honour of Ernest and Elizabeth Samuel, is the Royal Ontario Museum’s ceremonial entrance hall. It features one of the Museum’s most magnificent architectural treasures – a spectacular mosaic dome that has fascinated generations of staff and visitors. Charles T. Currelly, the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, conceived of this mosaic introduction for the 1933 addition. The mosaic ceiling was designed to reflect the breadth of the collections, being adorned with patterns and symbols representing cultures throughout the ages and around the world. The ceiling is made from thousands of sheets of imported Venetian glass, cut into more than a million tiny coloured squares. A team of skilled workers laboured for eight months to install the ceiling. Its sparkling gold, rust and bronze background is inset with red, blue and turquoise patterns, recalling the magnificent mosaics of the Byzantine world and Eastern Europe. Worked out on the golden field are geometrical borders and panels which frame decorative floral designs. The central panel is inscribed with a passage from the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible: "That all men may know his work." Each of the sixteen pictorial images on the ceiling and adjacent niches symbolizes a different culture throughout history. In this photo, we see a magical elephant representing India; a three-clawed dragon, representing China; a heraldic griffin of Gothic art; and a Mesopotamian ziggurat. The ceiling is complemented by a stained glass window with 18 panels. Each panel has a red or blue bird in the center surrounded by concentric geometric shapes most of which are a light blue-green hue.

The Rotunda, dedicated in honour of Ernest and Elizabeth Samuel, is the Royal Ontario Museum’s ceremonial entrance hall. It features one of the Museum’s most magnificent architectural treasures – a spectacular mosaic dome that has fascinated generations of staff and visitors. Charles T. Currelly, the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, conceived of this mosaic introduction for the 1933 addition. The mosaic ceiling was designed to reflect the breadth of the collections, being adorned with patterns and symbols representing cultures throughout the ages and around the world. The ceiling is made from thousands of sheets of imported Venetian glass, cut into more than a million tiny coloured squares. A team of skilled workers laboured for eight months to install the ceiling. Its sparkling gold, rust and bronze background is inset with red, blue and turquoise patterns, recalling the magnificent mosaics of the Byzantine world and Eastern Europe. Worked out on the golden field are geometrical borders and panels which frame decorative floral designs. The central panel is inscribed with a passage from the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible: "That all men may know his work." Each of the sixteen pictorial images on the ceiling and adjacent niches symbolizes a different culture throughout history. In this photo, we see the winged lion of St. Mark, emblem of Venice; an ancient Egyptian falcon-god; a bison from a prehistoric cave painting; and an ancient Assyrian winged bull.

Webster’s Dictionary defines a cupola as "a rounded vault resting on a usually circular base and forming a roof or a ceiling." In other words, it is literally over the top. The ceiling above the rotunda of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is also "over the top" in the collquial sense of the term. When he was commissioned to create decorations for a library entrance, the ceiling above the grand stairway and the dome of the gallery's rotunda, artist John Singer Sargent chose as the theme of his creations a celebration of the arts. Sargent (1856-1925) was an American expatriate who was trained in Paris prior to moving to London where he found fame as a portraitist of America's Gilded Age and Edwardian England. He worked for almost 10 years on the commission in a rented Boston studio, where he constructed a model of the dome and experimented with decorative schemes using plaster studies. When his decorations were unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1925, reviewers compared his achievement with that of Michelangelo. Sargent never saw the final installation, however, having died in London on the eve of his departure to Boston. Rather than creating his murals as frescoes – that is, applying the paint directly to wet plaster walls – Sargent produced monumental oil paintings in his studios in London and in Boston’s South End. The finished canvases were then adhered to the Museum’s walls. Sargent also created plaster reliefs, the frames for his paintings and sculptures, the ornaments that adorn the spandrels, and even the classical-style urns and sphinxes in the balconies above the rotunda’s three doorways. To complement the building’s classically influenced architecture, Sargent depicted scenes from ancient mythology. He also invented subjects using mythological figures to illustrate the Museum’s role as guardian of the arts. The key painting – the first work of art that visitors see as they ascend the grand staircase – features Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, turning away a figure representing Time, while sheltering with her cape three personifications of the visual arts: Sculpture (left); Painting (right); and, in the pose of Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna (one of Sargent’s many quotations from great art of the past), Architecture.

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