Search results for "Treasure"

The Treasure in Law and Early Archaeology

2012

The problem of who should be the rightful owner of a discovered treasure, and its distribution between the finder, the owner of the land on which the treasure was found and the fisc, is as ancient as it is difficult. The parable of the treasure hidden in a field (Matthew 13:44) hinted at that problem: the man who had found the treasure in the field buried it again and bought the field. Evidently, the Bible assumed that only the owner of the land where the treasure was buried had any claim to it. Some historians of law suggested a rather simple pattern that focused on two huge legal traditions. The Roman legal tradition had ruled the ancient empire. After the end of the Middle Ages, many par…

Dowsing from the Late Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century: The Practices, Uses and Interpretations of an Element of European Magic

2012

Dowsing was an element of European folk magic. With the help of simple wooden rods persons with special magical abilities were supposed to be able to find hidden objects, from buried treasures to subterranean springs. The rise of dowsing can be traced to its use in the emerging mining centres of Central Europe around 1500. However, dowsers soon claimed nearly universal magical knowledge. Even though dowsing encountered strong scepticism, a number of early modern scholars and scientists tried to explain the alleged efficacy of the rod in a number of different ways, ranging from demonological arguments to the atom theory, and the idea of an all-encompassing world spirit. From the eighteenth …

Teaching Petrarchan and Anti-Petrarchan Discourses in Early Modern English Lyrics

2012

The aim of the present article is to help students realize that Petrarchism has been an influential source of inspiration for Early Modern English lyrics. Its topics and conventions have lent themselves to a wide variety of appropriations which the present selection of texts for analysis tries to illustrate. A few telling examples from Spenser, Sidney, Donne and Marvell have been chosen where the topic of the lady cast as a valuable treasure is variously addressed. Whereas Spenser’s Sonnet 15 of his Amoretti conveys the lover’s confident hope of its possession in a near marriage, Sidney’s Sonnet 37 of Astrophil and Stella portrays his frustration at the idea of being robbed of his cherished…

Rodziny liturgiczne chrześcijańskiego Wschodu – panorama

2014

The life of the Eastern Churches and their liturgies still remain a deep well of undiscovered riches for many, their fertile and varied traditions are signposts indicating ways of being authentically Christian and truly catholic – in the full universal sense of that word. The return ad fontes liturgicos , called for by the Second Vatican Council, drew deeply from the wisdom of the ancient Churches, which were born – as indeed was the whole of Christianity – “in the East”; the research that was to follow, based on this essential insight, allowed many to reach that desired goal. That sense of dealing with the seamless and undivided garment of the tradition of the whole Church, allowed a compl…

Medieval Treasure Lore

2012

Treasure took a number of forms in the Middle Ages.1 We will first deal with treasure troves in mythical and epic sources. Then we will look at the political and theological significance of medieval treasures.

2005

The Authorities’ Attitude Towards Treasure Hunting

2012

Shortly after the fall of the Bastille, a London newspaper was scandalized that people had been imprisoned there for mere trifles. Among the prisoners listed was a certain Girard, allegedly a treasure seeker.1 Was treasure seeking indeed merely a trifling offence? What had the courts and law enforcement agencies of premodern Britain and Europe to say about it? As we have seen in Chapter 1, treasure hunting as such was hardly ever illegal. It was, however, riddled with legal difficulties. What percentage of his find would the treasure hunter actually get? What would the fisc demand for the prince’s coffers? In addition to these juridical problems, an important part of pre-modern treasure hun…

Santa Lucia Patrona di Siracusa: il suo simulacro, la sua ‘vara’, il suo tesoro

2020

The treasure of Saint Lucia in Syracuse is not only a collection of works of art of inestimable value, but it testifies a complex interweaving of social, religious and art-historical aspects closely connected to the culture and identity of the whole Sicily. The essay, on the basis of the latest documentary studies and of the data relating to the recent restoration, updates the scientific research on the simulacrum, the vara and the treasure of precious jewels donated ex voto to Saint Lucia, examining the figures of silversmiths and goldsmiths linked to their creation and retracing the events through the inventories and the historical testimonies, with reference to the art-historical context…

Tesori d'arte a Bisacquino

2008

Il percorso attraverso i tesori d'arte delle chiese di Bisacquino si pone da un lato quasi come un Museo diffuso dell'arte sacra di questo centro della Diocesi di Monreale e dall'altro come un museo virtuale che ne raccoglie la collezione d'argenteria sacra. L'inedito corpus delle suppellettili liturgiche d'argento viene schedato secondo la più attuale metodologia catalografica e storico critica. La monografia è compendiata da un catalogo dove ciascun manufatto è descritto e contestualizzato nella temperie stilistica di riferimento. La rassegna delle opere d'arte proposte copre un arco temporale che va dalla seconda metà del XVI secolo alla prima metà del XIX. The path through the art treas…

The silver collection of San Gennaro treasure (Neaples): A multivariate statistic approach applied to X-ray fluorescence data

2021

Abstract In this work we report an X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) study combined with a multivariate approach allowing to detect compositional differences and similarities among the alloys used in realization of silver collection of San Gennaro items collection. The San Gennaro treasure in Naples (Italy) represents, in fact, one of the most important silver collections in the world. The classification of the collection items is very complex, not only for the large number of objects, but also in consideration that between 1600 and 1700, in Naples, more than 350 laboratories were active, most of them specialized in specific art of work. As a consequence, a given collection object could…