Hever Castle- The Italian Garden

[poliphilo]

The Astors went to Italy- and came back with crateloads of bits of ancient monument- rather like Citizen Kane (they too were in the newspaper business). The result was Hever's fabulous Italian Garden

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

The first picture of the Pan/satyr is wonderful!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He's fun isn't he?

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Must be nice to have stuff around from the middling past ... here, of course, everything is less than a couple of hundreds years old, or thousands of years old. The earliest examples of Aboriginal rock art date (contentiously) to about 40,000 years ago. Lovely pics.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I do draw strength from this stuff. It helps keep me going. I suppose one uses whatever happens to be around. If I were an Australian I'd be a hugely enthusiastic about your rock art.

[currawong.livejournal.com]

Much of it is very beautiful and very old. There are many artistic styles in aboriginal art ... but because of the controversies that constantly swirl about issues relating to aboriginal politics and history , colonisation and subsequent social dysfunction ...the subject is also awash with enormous amounts of bullshit.
Contemporary Aboriginal Art ranges from the superb, (in both traditional and contemporary styles) to some of the world's worst kitsch tourist trash.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

What wonderful photographs!

(I must tell you that in our news last night was another vandalism of an old graveyard--lambs' heads sheered off children's headstones, some stones just chopped in half, and these were very old graves dating back to the early 1800s. I am glad these fine statues are in such untouched, if weathered, condition!)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's a shame when old things get smashed.

I guess this is the work of some very angry, kids. I wonder how they got that way.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

And maybe just bored kids, who have somehow never developed empathy or any sense of consequences.

Scary, and hard not to extrapolate that this is an indicator of horrors to come!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Horrors to come? I don't think so. Bored kids have always smashed up graveyards- at least they've been doing it for as long as I can remember. It's a phase of adolescent nihilism that most of them will grow out of.

I read somewhere that there's a time during adolescence when the brain undergoes changes which- for a short time- turn off the centre that controls empathy- with the result that the person becomes a temporary psychopath. We've all been there.