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Sep 4, 2023 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Art Nouveau was a nature-inspired, decorative movement which flourished between 1890 and 1910 across Europe and the Americas.

A thread of its most beautiful examples 🧵 Image
1. Gran Hotel Ciudad de México, Mexico City (1899) Image
2. The Félix Potin building, Paris (1904) Image
3. The facade of a jewelry store in Lille Image
4. Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona (1908) Image
5. Sterner's Studio, Brussels (1902) Image
6. The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (1934) Image
7. The Guaranty Building, Buffalo, NY (1896) Image
8. Entrance of the Lavirotte Building, Paris (1901) Image
9. The stairway at the Hôtel Tassel, Brussels (1893) Image
10. The elevator at Majolica House, Vienna (1898) Image
11. Casa Batlló, Barcelona (1906) Image
12. Liberty Bridge, Budapest (1896, rebuilt 1945) Image

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More from @Culture_Crit

Nov 20
America was founded to be the true successor of Ancient Rome.

But most don't know how deep the parallels run: from its grid plans to its constitution.

Here's why we still live in Rome — and why it won't collapse this time… (thread) 🧵 Image
It's no secret the American Founders sought to emulate and perfect the Roman Republic.

They chose for their seal an eagle — Rome's symbol of wisdom and power — but one indigenous to North America. Image
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They also made an important logo change: America's eagle clutches an olive branch.

The power of peace was central to the American ideal, as it was in Rome's founding myth (the olive branch extended by Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid). Image
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Read 21 tweets
Nov 18
C.S. Lewis, one of the 20th century's top intellectuals, considered himself too smart for Christianity.

So how, at age 32, did he suddenly become one of its greatest advocates?

He was struck by a strange feeling — and something Tolkien said to him late at night… (thread) 🧵 Image
C.S. Lewis's conversion didn't begin suddenly. He first began to feel a deep longing, pointing him to seek out the most beautiful things in life: music, art, romance.

And yet, nothing he could find completely satisfied it... Image
He called this profound longing "joy", and intuited:

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." Image
Read 19 tweets
Nov 14
To us, Ancient Greece is a distant culture of mystery and intrigue.

But the Greeks also lived in the ruins of a civilization they couldn't understand — or build themselves.

What Homer wrote about them will transform your understanding of history... (thread) 🧵 Image
People living in Ancient Greece were amazed by the palatial ruins of their ancestors.

They couldn't understand how they were built, and assumed mythological beings had been involved. Image
Structures of massive, tightly-fit limestone blocks came to be known as "Cyclopean".

According to the Greeks, only the mythical, one-eyed giants (Cyclopes) could move stones that big... Image
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Read 16 tweets
Nov 12
New analysis recently revealed the Shroud of Turin (Christ's alleged burial cloth) to be 2,000 years old.

But that's just one of the relics of Jesus — the Vatican claims to have far more.

Here are the most interesting, and why they could be real... (thread) 🧵 Image
Relics associated with Jesus are some of the most sought after objects in existence.

Countries have paid their entire annual budgets to get hold of them, or traded them off for armies... Image
Turin's Shroud is perhaps the best known: a linen cloth said to be the real burial shroud, imprinted with a miraculous image.

New X-ray analysis of the linen's flax cellulose has dated it to the time of Christ. Image
Read 21 tweets
Nov 11
Why is university education today so broken?

In the Middle Ages, it was profoundly different — it wasn't about acquiring skills, but about thinking.

By teaching you the 7 liberal arts... (thread) 🧵Image
Ancient and medieval societies had a vastly different idea of what higher education should be.

It wasn't about readiness for work, but cultivation of the moral and intellectual virtues that free the mind... Image
From the 12th century, a standard university course consisted of 7 liberal arts: 3 humanities (the trivium) and 4 sciences (the quadrivium).

These weren't exactly subjects in and of themselves, but modes of learning. Image
Read 19 tweets
Nov 7
The Lord of the Rings is a deeply Christian story — once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Tolkien's elves aren't just mythical beings; they're Mankind before the Fall.

And Middle-earth is no imaginary world — it's our Earth, a long time ago... (thread) 🧵Image
Middle-earth is meant to be our world thousands of years ago. With LOTR and his legendarium, Tolkien was trying to create a mythology for England.

He said himself: "Middle-earth is our world..." Image
"I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different." Image
Read 18 tweets

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