Tuesday 21 June 2011

Phew

Well, after the frightful vulgarity of all that ornament in the Alhambra, what a relief it was to move on to Seville Cathedral and the restrained approach of the Spanish Catholic Church to interior decoration:















 And, ooh look: here we have some holy bling:


7 comments:

  1. gonna get me one of those necklaces to go with my solid gold pimp cup yo. Atheists be haters

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  2. I have asked one of the daughters but she can't help me so I am forced to reveal my ignorance to the world, Worm - what on earth is a pimp cup?

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  3. I don't know either, but it sounds . . . icky.

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  4. Like a pimp plate but higher and cuppier.

    The personality in that second bust comes so purely from its sweetly camp little moue that I wonder what the sculptor was aiming for. Possibly Detached Benevolence.

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  5. All praise to Islamic architecture for the arch and the dome, though I'm not sure some of the Muslims would have been too pleased about the iconography, comparatively restrained though it might be! (Still, Persian and Indo-Islamic art and architecture remind us that they have their own way of adding the frills!)

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  6. You and I lead sheltered lives, Chris - and Umbagollah, that is not helping. I thought the second bloke looked as if - actually, I'm not going to say what I thought on a public page, except that it brought to mind a cartoon by Bill Tidy in which a man is washing his hands in a public lavatory beside a sign that says 'Wash and brush up, 20p' and the lavatory attendant is coming up behind him with a broom, handle towards the unsuspecting customer, and a fiendish expression.
    Denis - I thought the dome was a hard won product of our own? Brunelleschi had a go with hidden chains and others tried and failed before we perfected the engineering - but I suppose we were inspired by the domes we saw on mosques to begin with? The depths of my ignorance are once more revealed.
    When in doubt, say it with gold, Steerforth. The young Russian girls I see in Budapest clothes shops understand this principle well.

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