sandr020

The main founder of the Surrealist movement and writer of the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 was André Breton (1896-1966). According to Breton in 1924, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud  (1856-1939) “very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this consider­able portion of psychic act­ivity”. Also Breton credited Freud’s ideas with discovering “a current of opinion that was finally forming and that the imagin­ation is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights”. So André Breton and Max Ernst were very knowledgeable about Freud's beliefs. They saw that Surrealism was the most popular modern art form because it was a special, dogmatic and theoretical art that revealed human emotional truths. The theory it illustrated, i.e Freud's, was true as well. Freud's conception of the unconscious and the importance of dreams en­c­ouraged painters, sculptors and writers to pay attention to thei...

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881, in Málaga Spain. Landmarks of the artist’s childhood are still vibrant today in this sunlit Medit­er­r­anean city. The Church of Santiago was where Picasso was bapt­is­ed. Touristy Plaza de la Merced was where the art­ist etched his first drawings outside his home. Picasso was messy, both boisterous and silent, amor­ous and domineering. His love of bullfighting stemmed from child­hood visits to Málaga’s Plaza de Toros de la Malagueta, making picadors and bulls a recurring motif in his work.   Guernica, 1937 3.5 × 7.8m Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid Photo credit: publicdelivery Early on Pablo shed his father’s name, Ruiz, and adopted his mother’s more memorable Picasso. Within a few years, Picasso was painting skilled portraits of family and friends. By 16, his work got him into the prestigious Royal Acad­emy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid . And studied the Spanish masters he admired at the Prado Museum . Picasso was young when Paul Cézanne, Geo...

In 1628, Dr William Harvey  was an English physician who published a book in which he described the circulation of blood in humans. Researchers commenced experim­ents involving the intraven­ous injection of various substances into an­imals, which progressed into blood transfusions between animals. Richard Lower , a member of the Oxford Experiment­al Group, showed that transfusion could be used in cases of severe blood loss by exsanguinating a dog and transfusing it with blood from another. Dr Jean-Baptiste Denys (1643–1704) was personal physician to King Louis XIV and was noted for having performed the first fully docum­ented human blood transfus­ion. In 1667 he administered tran­sfus­ions of calf's blood to a man who died during the trans­f­usion. Denys was charged with murder and although he was acquitted, the practice of blood transfusion was deemed a crim­in­al act by the French parl­iament in 1670. The Royal Society expressed uncertainty about blood transfusion and the n...

A settlement called Portus Cale was founded on the north bank of the Duoro River in the C4th BC. But nothing much was known before Porto was recovered in 868 AD from the Moorish empire. Sao Bento Railway Station 1900-1916 Prince Henry the Navigator  (1394–1460) was born to English Queen Philippa and Portuguese King John I who had earlier married in Porto, creating a political alliance between Portugal and England. It was Prince Henry who, in the new Portuguese Empire, initiated the Age of Discoveries. Henry supervised the early development of Portuguese exploration and maritime trade with other continents through the exploration of Western Africa, Atlantic Ocean islands and the search for new routes. Only thus did Portugal become a sea-trade force, so it is appropriate that a statue in a park honours Prince Henry still today. Prince Henry, the Navigator pointing to a far-off place across the Atlantic Once Portugal became an economic power in the age of the great geo­graph­ical disc...

The  Rock of Gibraltar  is a nar­row sandy isthmus off the Iberian Pen­in­sula. Being limestone, the 6sq km Rock is riddled with 140+ caves. Off the eastern cliffs of the rock a flat, sandy plain stret­ched out towards the Mediterranean. The Strait of Gibraltar is the narrow neck separ­ating Europe from Africa, the only link between the Atl­ant­ic Ocean and the Med­iter­ranean Sea. Sin­ce the Prophet died in Medina in 632 AD, the pro­g­ress of Islam’s armies was rapid. Berber  Tarik-ibn-Zeyad  land­ed in 710 AD and from 742 on, the Moors defended their rock with a fort. In 1068, the Arab Gover­nor on Gib­ral­tar ordered that a strong­er  Moorish Castle  be built to watch events across the Strait. The castle had the largest keep and the tallest towers in all the Iberian Peninsula, plus buildings, gates and for­tified walls. In 1160 the Caliph of Mor­occo commissioned a fully fortif­ied city. The Rock rem­ain­ed in Arab hands until an unexp­ect­ed Spanish att...

Rodrigo de Borja was born near Valencia in 1431; he was the son of a Spanish noble fam­ily who lived comfortably in the court of Aragon. The family did even better when Alonso de Borja , Rod­rig­o's uncle, was made bishop of Valencia. Later the very elderly Alonso became Pope Callixtus III in 1455. Alfonso, king of Aragon & Naples, pur­sued his own territorial aims rather than supporting the Pope’s war against the Turks in Constantinople, so Pope Callixtus determ­ined to app­oint his own fam­ily as the next king of Naples. He also put two nephews in as cardin­als, and made one nephew Pref­ect of Rome. The papal court started to look like a Spanish club. It didn’t last, but Rodrigo Borgia did well. He studied in Val­en­cia and then specialised in law at Bologna. In 1456, Uncle Alonso made him a cardinal, and then vice chancellor of the Cur­ia. App­arently this was a VERY lucrative position; Rodrigo held it during the next four pont­ificates. Rodrigo was endowed with bishoprics...

Dr Henry Lew wrote Smitten by Cath­er­ine , the story of Catherine Rachel Mendes da Costa (1678-1756). Lew was stroll­ing through an auction house looking at furniture, and noticed a sp­ec­ial C18th watercolour copy of a Rubens oil painting, att­rib­uted to Catherine da Costa. Since I am particularly interested in the era when Jews were permitted to return to England in mid C17th, my question became: who was this little known artist? Lew started the story back in Spain and Portugal, from where the Jews were expelled in the 1490s.  The author focused on the strength of Manasseh Ben Israel whose family had fled to Amsterdam from Madeira in Por­t­ugal. In his 1652 book, The Hope of Israel , Manasseh noted that countries tol­er­ant of Jews were also those that flourish­ed economically. Man­asseh had tried to find a solution to counteract the Chris­tian concept of the oppressed homeless Jew; he reminded Whitehall that Jews always displayed civic loyal­ty. Manasseh was a man of grand ...

Born in South Africa in 1959, Deborah Levy’s family exiled themselves to London in 1968 as opponents of Apartheid. She started writing poems, plays and novels in the 1980s. Her 2011 novel, Swimming Home , a dark fable about a famous poet holidaying in the French Riviera, was eventually published after having been turned down by mainstream publishers. It went on to be nominated for the Man Booker prize . Last year she published a collection of short stories, Black Vodka . Now Penguin is reprinting her old novels. Swimming Home depicted a sun-bleached, Mediterranean setting; explor­ations of troubled familial bonds, of sexuality and an examination of exile. Hot Milk shared these themes and obsessions with Swimming Home. Levy’s Hot Milk 2016 (publisher Hamish Hamilton) sounded like an ironic title, given the connect­ion with cosy and bland toddler food. Yet Sofia    Papastergiadis was spending a night­mare holid­ay in a rented beach house with her mother Rose, in southern S...