The Medici’s lost garden of wonders |
The Medici’s lost garden of wonders
Recreating Donatello’s sculpture
Deconstructing the Colosseum
Great art explained: Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne
De artificiali perspectiva, or anamorphosis
Virtual ancient Rome: walking from the Colosseum to the Forum
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The rise and fall of Pratolino: Tuscany’s ‘proto-theme park’
The video essay from the YouTube channel Kings and Things takes viewers through the once-extraordinary grounds, as well as the fascinating history, of the Villa di Pratolino in Tuscany. Built in the late 16th century amid the Medici dynasty’s rule of Florence, this estate was deeply unusual for its time and place. Its creators eschewed refined Renaissance tastes in favour of something more like a ‘proto-theme park’, with world-class engineers populating the grounds with automata, fountains designed to surprise and soak visitors and, perhaps most famously, an 11-metre stone colossus that can still be visited today. Combining rich archival imagery and firsthand accounts from visitors to Pratolino (now part of Villa Demidoff), the video details the rise of this ingeniously engineered ‘Garden of Wonders’, as well as how it fell into disrepair due to the tides of time and changing tastes.
Video by Kings and Things
videoThe ancient world
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From a pencil sketch to cherubs dancing in stone – recreating a Donatello work
A 3D rendering of the Colosseum captures its architectural genius and symbolic power
The overlooked polymath whose theatrical oeuvre made all of Rome a stage
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams
A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture
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The Renaissance art illusion that proved everything is a matter of perspective
Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China
videoThe ancient world
Walk like a Roman in this digital reconstruction of the ancient city
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