Come to think of it, my stepdad would have, too, especially this map.
Don't be fooled into thinking it's static for this one year.
Oh, no.
It scrolled through centuries, showing the first appearance of the Venetian Republic, then continuing as it waxed and waned against the Ottoman Empire.
As soon as I saw it yesterday, I thought of Frank and wondered what he would make of it, and what discussion we might have had.
Grandpa, as a history buff on things gone by in Italy and Greece, would have been impressed with all the pieces concerned with trade in that region of the world.
I was glad to have been there at 2 PM for the daily docent tour.
Melissa was very informative and enjoyed fielding my questions for her fifteen-minute spell with me and a young Turkish couple.
I had noticed "The Battle Of Lepanto" yesterday, particularly the images of Jesus and Mary in the upper left, overseeing the naval warfare.
The docent told me that a lot of paintings around the mid-16th and 17th centuries included religious figures, signifying the strength of the Christian faith versus that of the Islamic or other faiths followed by the Ottomans.
I couldn't smell any remnants of those herbs, but the man insisted he could.
Power of suggestion, I proposed to him, but he didn't accept that.
By then the tour was done, so I carried on with the Family Activity Guide for this "Venice And The Ottoman Empire" exhibit.
Near the cookbooks was this painting - Sign Of The Guild Of Chefs - of a kitchen and dining room, with a bevy of cherubic lounging above them.
The task was to list things that were visible, like the 9 men at the table, or the dog taking a drink of water from the cistern, or the kitchen boy plucking chickens.
I preferred the two scavenger hunt games for the limited time I had today!
This first one had several items - shoes, a hat, a drum, and a porcelain bowl - to try to locate in the huge exhibit.
They all turned out to be from the mid-1600's to 1700, making them all far older than the United States of America.
That first item I knew from yesterday; it's a pair of wooden bath clogs.
They certainly didn't look comfortable, nor did that horn hat for Francesco Morosini, worn when he was the Doge (from 1688 to 1694).
That general had been all the rage, apparently!
There was even a marble bust and a painting of him in this collection!
Next is the percussion instrument, specifically called a naqqaro; I wonder what sound it made, with that metal base?
No way to know, as it was securely behind glass.
And that final item, with its lovely coloring, was a barber's bowl, to catch the hair from shaving the customers, perhaps.
(smile!)
There were four different floral motifs to locate, with no clues to location.
The middle two were found in paintings as part of clothing; the one with the red center to its golden flower was in the robe of Doge Cristoforo Moro (ruler from 1462 to 1471), whereas the golds on white dressed Sultan Mehmed II, in power just before that time.
Done and done!
However, the first and last florals took me quite a bit of searching.
The huge red-and-gold centered design was one I thought I'd seen earlier, so I retraced my steps from the tour... and there it was, part of the Persian rug adorning the table in the "Family Portrait" of the wealthy middle-class Venetians in the mid-1500's.
That left the orange flower... where could it be???
Ah, that's when I noticed that some of the shields mounted on the walls at the Jepson had decorations on their central portions!
Hooray! That's where it had been all that time, ever since the late 16th century!
It was all about one-point perspective, a technique for making things appear smaller when farther away in a painting.
Do feel free to work on it... I must fly!
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