Padova, l'arte, la sua pittura, le mostre, gli spettacoli e i musei

Galileo Galilei… 3 minuti per andare al lavoro

Giuseppe — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:26:48 +0000

Anche al tempo di Galileo le persone controllavano dove dovevano lavorare, il luogo il posto e probabilmente cercavano (motivo ancora più grande per i mezzi di trasporto che mancavano) un posto di lavoro vicino alla propria abitazione.

E’ il caso di Galileo Galilei, insegnante per 18 anni all’universotà di Padova abitava esattamente a 3 minuti (percorso a piedi) dall’ingresso dell’Università.

Se ci pensate bene, quanto tempio perdiamo in traffico, trasporti e altro solamente prchè abitiamo in un luogo lontano dal posto di lavoro. Galileo da Buon scinziato aveva capito che dedicare più tempo alle proprie aspirazioni e passioni rendeva di più che farsi scarozzare per ore durante la giornata.

Forse il nostro mondo ha bisogno di ritornare ai periodi del Galileo, dove la gente era più legata ai propri mestieri e professionalità, dedicando passione a quello che faceva.

Posted in arte cultura

La chiesa di Santa Sofia a Padova

Giuseppe — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:53:03 +0000

All’interno della chiesa nei sotterranei i trova una cripta con costruzione delle strutture arcaiche.

La sua origine è ancora prima alla Chiesa Cattolica Romana.

Vicino alla chiesa passa il fiume Bacchiglione e sembra che questo grande tempio esistente prima della chiesa di Santa Sofia si collegasse con un altro tempio antico che si supponga si trovasse al di là del fiume.
Questo collegamento era stato fatto con una galleria sotterranea che collegava i due siti.

Nella Basilica di San Marco a Venezia esiste una cripta molto assomigliante nella forma e nelle dimensioni alla cripta della Chiesa di Santa Sofia.
La cripta è stata rinvenuta negli anni ’50, mentre la la basilica di San Marco risale alla data del 1063.

Tutte le nicchie semicircolari fatte con dei mattoni con la tecnica a spina di pesce, testimoniano che le maestranze e le persone che hanno costruito questo tempio siano state di origine veneziana.

Questa grande chiesa fu costruita nel XII secolo sulle rovine di un tempio pagano probabilmente dedicato al culto del dio Mitra. La trasformazione da tempio pagano a tempio di culto cristiano sembra sia stata fatta ad opera di San Prosdocimo, in epoca paleocristiana.

San Prosdocimo di Padova, fu discepolo di San Pietro apostolo e da lui consacrato vescovo. Visse nel I secolo. San Prosdocimo fu l’evangelizzatore del Veneto. Morì in tarda età a Padova vicino all’anno 100. Le sue spoglie sono venerate nel sacello a lui dedicato, una delle più antiche costruzioni della città. San Prosdocimo è patrono di Padova insieme ai santi Antonio, Giustina e Daniele.

L’attuale edificio in pietre, di stile romanico, venne costruito tra il 1106 e il 1127 e si evidenzia dalla visione della facciata inclinata (dovuta a un cedimento delle fondamenta).

La chiesa all’interno è suddivisa in tre navate, si nota molto bene il recupero dei materiali da costruzione di origine romani, sistema diffusissimo al tempo della costruzione.

Ad operare in questa chiesa venne anche il Mantegna arrivato negli anni 1448-1450,
dopo aver operato anche nella basilica di S.Antonio.
Inizialmente si appoggiava al collega Pizzolo che, come Mantenga aveva frequentato

la bottega di Francesco Squarcione ed aveva ammirato le opere di Donatello.

Nella penultima arcata della navata sinistra si trova l’altare della Madonna di Pompei. In origine si trovava nella chiesa dei Gesuiti. Ne abbiamo notizia da un accenno di una visita pastorale del Vescovo Giustiniani nel 1782.

MADONNA CON BAMBINO (ELEUSA)
La Madonna consegna Gesù Bambino a S. Antonio

Nella prima nicchia dalla parte sinistra, nell’abside, vi è un affresco di una Madonna con Bambino detta “Eleusa” rappresentata con i caratteri iconografici della Madre di Dio della Tenerezza (Eleusa) formati nella pittura bizantina nel secolo XI°: . I modi e lo stile dell’anonimo pittore ricordano da vicino il miniaturista dell’Epistolario di Giovanni da Gaibana conservato nella Biblioteca Capitolare di Padova. Infatti il Pagnin, studiando lo stile di Giovanni da Gaibana, per primo definisce l’affresco “Gaibanesco”, giudizio condiviso anche da studi successivi.

http://www.santasofia.org/LaChiesa/VideoIChiesaSSofia/tabid/88/Default.aspx

Telescopic discoveries

Giuseppe — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:49:31 +0000

Telescopic discoveries

At this point, however, Galileo’s career took a dramatic turn. In the spring of 1609 he heard that in the Netherlands an instrument had been invented that showed distant things as though they were nearby. By trial and error, he quickly figured out the secret of the invention and made his own three-powered spyglass from lenses for sale in spectacle makers’ shops. Others had done the same; what set Galileo apart was that he quickly figured out how to improve the instrument, taught himself the art of lens grinding, and produced increasingly powerful telescopes. In August of that year he presented an eight-powered instrument to the Venetian Senate (Padua was in the Venetian Republic). He was rewarded with life tenure and a doubling of his salary. Galileo was now one of the highest-paid professors at the university. In the fall of 1609 Galileo began observing the heavens with instruments that magnified up to 20 times. In December he drew the Moon’s phases as seen through the telescope, showing that the Moon’s surface is not smooth, as had been thought, but is rough and uneven. In January 1610 he discovered four moons revolving around Jupiter. He also found that the telescope showed many more stars than are visible with the naked eye. These discoveries were earthshaking, and Galileo quickly produced a little book, Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger), in which he described them. He dedicated the book to Cosimo II de Medici (1590–1621), the grand duke of his native Tuscany, whom he had tutored in mathematics for several summers, and he named the moons of Jupiter after the Medici family: the Sidera Medicea, or “Medicean Stars.” Galileo was rewarded with an appointment as mathematician and philosopher of the grand duke of Tuscany, and in the fall of 1610 he returned in triumph to his native land.

Galileo was now a courtier and lived the life of a gentleman. Before he left Padua he had discovered the puzzling appearance of Saturn, later to be shown as caused by a ring surrounding it, and in Florence he discovered that Venus goes through phases just as the Moon does. Although these discoveries did not prove that the Earth is a planet orbiting the Sun, they undermined Aristotelian cosmology: the absolute difference between the corrupt earthly region and the perfect and unchanging heavens was proved wrong by the mountainous surface of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter showed that there had to be more than one centre of motion in the universe, and the phases of Venus showed that it (and, by implication, Mercury) revolves around the Sun.

As a result, Galileo was confirmed in his belief, which he had probably held for decades but which had not been central to his studies, that the Sun is the centre of the universe and that the Earth is a planet, as Copernicus had argued. Galileo’s conversion to Copernicanism would be a key turning point in the scientific revolution.

After a brief controversy about floating bodies, Galileo again turned his attention to the heavens and entered a debate with Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650), a German Jesuit and professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, about the nature of sunspots (of which Galileo was an independent discoverer). This controversy resulted in Galileo’s Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (“History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their Properties,” or “Letters on Sunspots”), which appeared in 1613. Against Scheiner, who, in an effort to save the perfection of the Sun, argued that sunspots are satellites of the Sun, Galileo argued that the spots are on or near the Sun’s surface, and he bolstered his argument with a series of detailed engravings of his observations.

Galileo’s Copernicanism

Giuseppe — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:51:39 +0000

Galileo’s Copernicanism

Galileo’s increasingly overt Copernicanism began to cause trouble for him. In 1613 he wrote a letter to his student Benedetto Castelli (1528–1643) in Pisa about the problem of squaring the Copernican theory with certain biblical passages. Inaccurate copies of this letter were sent by Galileo’s enemies to the Inquisition in Rome, and he had to retrieve the letter and send an accurate copy. Several Dominican fathers in Florence lodged complaints against Galileo in Rome, and Galileo went to Rome to defend the Copernican cause and his good name. Before leaving, he finished an expanded version of the letter to Castelli, now addressed to the grand duke’s mother and good friend of Galileo, the dowager Christina. In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo discussed the problem of interpreting biblical passages with regard to scientific discoveries but, except for one example, did not actually interpret the Bible. That task had been reserved for approved theologians in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–63) and the beginning of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. But the tide in Rome was turning against the Copernican theory, and in 1615, when the cleric Paolo Antonio Foscarini (c. 1565–1616) published a book arguing that the Copernican theory did not conflict with scripture, Inquisition consultants examined the question and pronounced the Copernican theory heretical. Foscarini’s book was banned, as were some more technical and nontheological works, such as Johannes Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. Copernicus’s own 1543 book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi (“Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”), was suspended until corrected. Galileo was not mentioned directly in the decree, but he was admonished by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621) not to “hold or defend” the Copernican theory. An improperly prepared document placed in the Inquisition files at this time states that Galileo was admonished “not to hold, teach, or defend” the Copernican theory “in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.”

Le migliori immagini di Padova

Giuseppe — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:22:28 +0000

Galileo Galilei

Giuseppe — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:48:14 +0000

Although Galileo’s salary was considerably higher there, his responsibilities as the head of the family (his father had died in 1591) meant that he was chronically pressed for money. His university salary could not cover all his expenses, and he therefore took in well-to-do boarding students whom he tutored privately in such subjects as fortification. He also sold a proportional compass, or sector, of his own devising, made by an artisan whom he employed in his house

Perhaps because of these financial problems, he did not marry, but he did have an arrangement with a Venetian woman, Marina Gamba, who bore him two daughters and a son. In the midst of his busy life he continued his research on motion, and by 1609 he had determined that the distance fallen by a body is proportional to the square of the elapsed time (the law of falling bodies) and that the trajectory of a projectile is a parabola, both conclusions that contradicted Aristotelian physics.

hotel padova vicino a S. Canziano

Giuseppe — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:20:40 +0000

Arrivando a San Canziano all’angolo troviamo la chiesa omonima. Girando a sinistra lungo la Piazza delle Erbe da cui possiamo ammirare il Palazzo della Ragione, poi imbocchiamo Via Daniele Manin e, alla fine, a destra per Via Monte di Pietà, entriamo attraverso il Volto dell’Orologio in quella che era la Reggia Carrarese. Percorriamo attraverso la Piazza Capitaniato e girando poi a sinistra per Via Accademia e ancora a sinistra per Via Arco Vallaresso verso Piazza Duomo.

hotel a padova … Giuliano Vangi

Giuseppe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:09:38 +0000

È riuscitissimo l’allestimento della mostra di Giuliano Vangi (Barberino di Mugello, 1931) nel palazzo patavino che ospita il ciclo di affreschi dello zodiaco. È la prima cosa che colpisce. L’occhio è catturato dalla monumentale ascesa della scalinata centrale, che richiama alla mente le ziqqurat babilonesi, e conduce lo sguardo dello spettatore fino alla testa del cavallo ligneo che ricorda il Gattamelata del Donatello di Piazza del Santo. Qui, disposte in un crescendo drammatico, troviamo le sculture più recenti, realizzate quasi tutte in bronzo.

Uomo e Caprone

Uomo e caprone è la prima ad attirare lo sguardo: il peso dell’animale sembra quasi gonfiare l’uomo, ridotto ad una massa grezza e primitiva in cui il modellamento plastico viene realizzato dall’artista con le dita. à di trasmettere il messaggio abbia preso il sopravvento sul messaggio stesso.
e delle delicatissime acqueforti-acquatinte di grandi dimensioni.

hotel padova l’attuale duomo

Giuseppe — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:58:50 +0000

L´attuale Duomo, al cui progetto partecipò Michelangelo, fu compiuto tra il XVI ed il XVIII secolo, su progetto di Andrea da Valle.
Belle statue dell´artista toscano Giuliano Vangi abbelliscono il nuovo Presbiterio, inaugurato nel 1997.
Collegato alla Cattedrale è il Battistero del XII secolo.

L´interno fu interamente affrescato da Giusto de´ Menabuoi nel 1375-78 con le storie della Genesi, dell´Apocalisse e di s.Giovanni Battista, al quale il Battistero è intitolato.

Assieme alla Basilica di Sant´Antonio, alla Basilica di s.Giustina e al Santuario di s.Leopoldo, la Cattedrale è stata scelta quale chiesa giubilare di Padova per il Giubileo del 2000.

hotel padova il duomo

Giuseppe — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:49:46 +0000

Il duomo attuale è la terza cattedrale della città nello stesso luogo. La prima fu costruita dopo l’Editto di Costantino del 313 che poi venne distrutta dal terremoto del 3 gennaio 1117. Fu ricostruito allora una costruzione di stile romanico che si riesce a vedere nei dipindi dell’artista Giusto de’ menabuoi all’interno del battistero. Nel 1551 fu approvato il progetto di Michelangelo per la nuova cattedrale, i cui lavori di costruzione si protrassero fino al 1754, lasciando però incompiuta la facciata.

Galileo Galilei

Giuseppe — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:39:15 +0000

Galileo was born in Pisa, Tuscany, on February 15, 1564, the oldest son of Vincenzo Galilei, a musician who made important contributions to the theory and practice of music and who may have performed some experiments with Galileo in 1588–89 on the relationship between pitch and the tension of strings. The family moved to Florence in the early 1570s, where the Galilei family had lived for generations. In his middle teens Galileo attended the monastery school at Vallombrosa, near Florence, and then in 1581 matriculated at the University of Pisa, where he was to study medicine. However, he became enamoured with mathematics and decided to make the mathematical subjects and philosophy his profession, against the protests of his father. Galileo then began to prepare himself to teach Aristotelian philosophy and mathematics, and several of his lectures have survived. In 1585 Galileo left the university without having obtained a degree, and for several years he gave private lessons in the mathematical subjects in Florence and Siena. During this period he designed a new form of hydrostatic balance for weighing small quantities and wrote a short treatise, La bilancetta (“The Little Balance”), that circulated in manuscript form. He also began his studies on motion, which he pursued steadily for the next two decades.

In 1588 Galileo applied for the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna but was unsuccessful. His reputation was, however, increasing, and later that year he was asked to deliver two lectures to the Florentine Academy, a prestigious literary group, on the arrangement of the world in Dante’s Inferno. He also found some ingenious theorems on centres of gravity (again, circulated in manuscript) that brought him recognition among mathematicians and the patronage of Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607), a nobleman and author of several important works on mechanics. As a result, he obtained the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa in 1589.

There, according to his first biographer, Vincenzo Viviani (1622–1703), Galileo demonstrated, by dropping bodies of different weights from the top of the famous Leaning Tower, that the speed of fall of a heavy object is not proportional to its weight, as Aristotle had claimed. The manuscript tract De motu (On Motion), finished during this period, shows that Galileo was abandoning Aristotelian notions about motion and was instead taking an Archimedean approach to the problem. But his attacks on Aristotle made him unpopular with his colleagues, and in 1592 his contract was not renewed. His patrons, however, secured him the chair of mathematics at the University of Padua, where he taught from 1592 until 1610.

Galileo Galilei

Giuseppe — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:19:37 +0000

(born Feb. 15, 1564, Pisa [Italy]—died Jan. 8, 1642, Arcetri, near Florence) Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific method. His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the study of motion. His insistence that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts of nature. Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against him.