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Feb 19

This unusual house in Turin was built 123 years ago.

It's the perfect example of a kind of architecture unique to Italy, known as the "Liberty Style".

How to make ordinary buildings more interesting? The Liberty Style has an answer...

During the 1890s there was an artistic and architectural revolution in Europe: Art Nouveau.

It means "New Art" in French, and that's exactly what it was — a whole new approach to design, whether of buildings, furniture, clothes, sculpture, or crockery.

There were many genres of Art Nouveau, but what they had in common was a commitment to traditional craftsmanship, the embrace of new materials like iron, and a turn toward flowing designs inspired by nature.

Like the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, designed by Victor Horta, from 1893:

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The Cultural Tutor

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Feb 13

This painting is nearly 100 years old.

It's by Grant Wood (most famous for American Gothic) and it's called The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

Why does it look like that? Because Grant Wood had one of the most unusual styles in art history...

Grant Wood was born in 1891 in rural Iowa; ten years later the family moved to Cedar Rapids.

He worked at a metal shop, studied at arts and crafts schools in Minneapolis and Chicago, and then became a public school art teacher back in Cedar Rapids.

Humble beginnings.

In the 1920s, while working as a teacher, Wood made several trips to Europe, including a year studying at the Académie Julian in Paris.

There, like so many artists of his generation, he adopted a generic and basically unremarkable Impressionist style:

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The Cultural Tutor

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Feb 9

This is Mount Nemrut in Turkey, one of the strangest ancient ruins in the world.

It's a colossal, 2,000 year old burial mound on top of a mountain, surrounded by huge stone heads.

Who built it? A king who wanted to become a god...

First, where is Mount Nemrut?

It's in the Taurus Mountains, a range in south-eastern Turkey. And, rising to more than 2,000 metres, it's one of the tallest mountains in the region.

It was part of the ancient Kingdom of Commagene, a small state that fought both with and against the Roman Republic, and eventually became part of the Roman Empire.

The tomb-temple at Mount Nemrut was built in 62 BC, when Commagene was an independent kingdom.

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Feb 5

A brief history of landscape art:

In Medieval Europe landscape painting wasn't a genre of its own, and it hardly featured in art at all.

Notice how the background of this 11th century mural indicates the landscape merely by the generic sketch of a castle and an isolated, highly stylised tree:

This changed in the 14th century with Giotto, a revolutionary painter from Florence.

He introduced proper landscapes into his paintings: rocks, trees, flowers, and skies.

But Giotto's version of nature remains highly stylised; this is not a "realistic" landscape.

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Feb 3

In the year 1712 something incredibly strange happened in Sweden.

For the first and only time in history, February had 30 days.

Here's the story of what happened — and why...

The story begins in 753 BC, when Rome was founded by the mythical Romulus.

Now, Romulus was credited with creating the first Roman calendar.

It had ten months, each of 30 or 31 days, beginning in March and ending in December.

What about the time between December and March?

Early Rome was fundamentally agricultural. With less work to do in Winter it was simply a long, dark, and undated stretch of time.

But as Roman society grew more sophisticated this situation became obviously troublesome.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Jan 28

This is the American Radiator Building, a 101 year old black and gold skyscraper that's half Gothic, half Art Deco.

It's famous, but not as famous as it should be — so here's a brief history of one of the world's coolest skyscrapers...

In 1923 the American Radiator Company wanted to build a new office in New York.

This was the Golden Age of Skyscrapers: the Woolworth Building was ten years old, and the Empire State and Chrysler were less than a decade away.

So it was going to be a skyscraper... but what sort?

Enter Raymond Hood, an architect who had just won the competition to design Chicago's Tribune Tower.

Even though it hadn't yet been completed, his Neo-Gothic design was so well-received that the American Radiator Company wanted him to design their new skyscraper.

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