Search for: "blog"

With the recent release of Dan Brown’s latest novel, Inferno, The Guardian’s Nick Lezard discusses in this article ten important facts about Dante, emphasizing  his relevance for modern day writers and Italian speakers especially.

Elaborating on fact number five, which states that Dante “more or less invented the Italian language,” Lezard writes:

“OK, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but in his day there was no country-wide language – rather, several dialects.  This is still pretty much the case today, but the reason Italian is the way it is is largely because Dante decided to write his poem in his beloved Tuscan dialect, rather than in Latin.”

If you can speak some Italian, or are currently learning the language, can you identify any dialects in addition to Tuscan?  If you’ve signed up for GLN’s Italian Foreigner class this summer, it may be an interesting question for your teacher.

Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait (1484). Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia commons

The National Gallery of Art is currently featuring an exhibit of the German artist Albrecht Dürer, widely regarded as the most important artist of the Northern Renaissance.  The exhibit, on display through June 9th, features a large number of works on loan from the Albertina Museum in Vienna.  Home to the the most renowned Dürer collection in the world, the Albertina’s contributions to this exhibit make it the largest display of Dürer’s artwork to be shown in the US in over forty years.

From the National Gallery of Art website:

“Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) has long been considered the greatest German artist, uniquely combining the status held in Italian art by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century, by Raphael in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by Leonardo da Vinci in our own day.

While Dürer’s paintings were prized, his most influential works were his drawings, watercolors, engravings, and woodcuts.  They were executed with his distinctively northern sense of refined precision and exquisite craftsmanship.”

For further reading on this exhibit, the Washington City Paper and The New York Review of Books both have articles discussing this collection, as well as the historical significance of Dürer’s artwork.

Sure, it’s refreshing, but did you that gelato’s history dates back to the 16th Century?  Italy Magazine offers a bilingual summary of the history of this classic treat .  Click on the photo above to access the article.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.srchoucair.com/

The Culture Trip discusses in a recent feature the current exhibition of the work of Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair at London’s Tate Modern.  Born in Beirut in 1916, Choucair is considered Lebanon’s first abstract artist.  An important figure in the Arab art world, she is now receiving international recognition after more than five decades of artistic production.  The Tate Modern exhibition is the first major collection of her works.  

The Culture Trip feature summarizes Choucair’s intellectual influences and the rationale behind her artistic decisions:

“Throughout her career as an artist, Choucair has consistently expressed a passion for Islamic geometric art and has always emphasised her rational way of thinking, having long been interested in arithmetics and rejecting any adjectival notions in her works. Using principles from Sufism, science and mathematics across all of her projects, her paintings of gouache and oil on canvas can be seen to show an influence from early Western 20th Century European art, as she explores the regular use of simple geometric shapes and the influence of colour upon the viewer’s perspective.”  

Choucair is still actively creating artwork and resides in her home city.  The Tate Modern exhibition will go on through October 20, 2013.

Photo by jmrodri, Some rights reserved

Does this sound like a conference room you know? You can donate your empty conference room to GLN to use for class space. Not only will your lonely conference room get a chance to meet new people and help them learn new languages, you can join them! Everyone who donates space will receive priority registration for the language class they host.