Commissioned by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a great-nephew of Pope Alexander VIII, this was part of a massive series, heroic in scale as well as narrative, of fifteen tapestries depicting the romanticized version of the Christians’ First Crusade into…
Nearly one year after a fire ravaged the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the city’s archbishop briefly returned to the cathedral its most prized relic, the Crown of Thorns, on Good Friday, the day in which Catholics commemorate Jesus’s suffering…
Another scene from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, this time showing two Christian knights confronting a dragon in an attempt to rescue Rinaldo from a sorceress
This 17th century drawing illustrates a scene from Torquato Tasso's epic poem, "La Gerusalemme liberata" (The Liberation of Jerusalem or Jerusalem Delivered). The subject of this poem was the First Crusade. It served as a subject for numerous artists…
Born in the Dutch Republic but active in Rome, Vanvitelli gained fame for his vedute, or detailed views of cityscapes or vistas. These evocative views were popular purchases for eighteenth-century travelers on the Grand Tour. Here, Vanvitelli paints…
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem contains the sites of Jesus' crucifixion (on Golgotha) as well as the tomb (hence the name, Holy Sepulcher) where we was buried before his resurrection. The Church has been a site of Christian worship for…
Built between 1220/1230 by the Geoffrey I de Villehardouin, Chlemoutsi was the strongest fortress in the Frankish principality of Achaea, in the Peloponnese. Named Clermont by its founder and Chlemoutsi by the locals, the castle was known by the…