I have a dear friend who's spending the year studying abroad in Austria right now (though I think at the moment she's in Greece - and will soon be headed to Rome. I told her she has to go see Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne.":) ) and today I received a letter and a postcard from her, and a little wooden bookmark from Prague.
The bookmark is gorgeous - it's in one of my favorite styles: Art Nouveau.
This picture to the left is one she sent me over a year ago - and still one of my favorites. The style adapted from older forms of art; new takes influenced by the rococo and Grecian, Gothic and Roman, to name a few. Whenever I had seen these pictures and paintings before I'd been in class, I always thought they were so Grecian.
I love the subject matter that many of the artists used - mermaids and nymphs, all the beautiful women with flowers in their hair that could be dryads or nymphs. The woman on my bookmark is set against a beautiful palette of oranges and yellows, standing delicately like the beautiful marble statues I saw in Rome. All of the women in these pictures could be Callisto, Daphne, Europa...any of the famed ladies of many myths.
As I was looking through an online album, I came across this one:
They are everywhere, these characters. They are timeless.
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