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The Staffordshire Hoard (Tamworth) (Stoke-on-Trent) (Birmingham) (Bristol Museum) is the largest hoard of
Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork yet found. It consists of over 3,500 items of gold, silver and pieces of garnet cloisonné jewellery.
The hoard was most likely deposited in the 7th century, and contains artefacts probably manufactured during the 6th and 7th centuries. It was discovered in 2009 in a field near the village of Hammerwich, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, England. The location was in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia at the time of the hoard's deposition.
The hoard is of considerable importance in Anglo-Saxon archaeology. The artefacts are nearly all martial in character and contains no objects specific to female uses. The average quality of the workmanship is extremely high and especially remarkable in view of the large number of individual objects, such as swords and a helmet, from which the elements in the hoard came Read More..
The Bayeux Tapestry (copy at Reading Museum) or Bayeux Embroidery is an embroidered cloth nearly 70 metres (230 ft) long and 50 centimetres (20 in) tall, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold, Earl of Wessex,later King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings.
According to Sylvette Lemagnen, conservator of the tapestry: The Bayeux tapestry is one of the supreme achievements of the Norman Romanesque .... Its survival almost intact over nine centuries is little short of miraculous ... Its exceptional length, the harmony and freshness of its colours, its exquisite workmanship, and the genius of its guiding spirit combine to make it endlessly fascinating.
The tapestry consists of some fifty scenes with Latin tituli, embroidered on linen with coloured woollen yarns. It is likely that it was commissioned by Bishop Odo, William's half-brother, and made in England—not Bayeux—in the 1070s. In 1729 the hanging was rediscovered by scholars at a time when it was being displayed annually in Bayeux Cathedral. The tapestry is now exhibited at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux in Bayeux, Normandy, France Read More..
Hampton Court Palace: Tudor times: Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York, Chief Minister and favourite of Henry VIII, took over the site of Hampton Court Palace in 1514. It had previously been a property of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. Over the following seven years, Wolsey spent lavishly (200,000 gold crowns) to build the finest palace in England at Hampton Court. Wolsey rebuilt the existing manor house to form the nucleus of the present palace. Today, little of Wolsey's building work remains unchanged. The first courtyard, the Base Court, was his creation, as was the second, inner gatehouse which leads to the Clock Court (Wolsey's seal remains visible over the entrance arch of the clock tower) which contained his private rooms. The Base Court contained forty-four lodgings reserved for guests, while the second court (today, Clock Court) contained the very best rooms – the state apartments – reserved for the King and his family. Henry VIII stayed in the state apartments as Wolsey's guest immediately after their completion in 1525.
In building his palace, Wolsey was attempting to create a Renaissance cardinal's palace of a rectilinear symmetrical plan with grand apartments on a raised piano nobile, all rendered with classical detailing. The historian Jonathan Foyle has suggested that it is likely that Wolsey had been inspired by Paolo Cortese's De Cardinalatu, a manual for cardinals that included advice on palatial architecture, published in 1510. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson asserts that the palace shows "the essence of Wolsey—the plain English churchman who nevertheless made his sovereign the arbiter of Europe and who built and furnished Hampton Court to show foreign embassies that Henry VIII's Read More..
The Vatican Museums trace their origin to one marble sculpture, purchased 500 years ago: the sculpture of Laocoön and his Sons was discovered 14 January 1506, in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo Buonarroti Read More..
The four Raphael Rooms form a suite of reception rooms in the palace, the public part of the papal apartments in the Palace of the Vatican. They are famous for their frescoes, painted by Raphael and his workshop. Together with Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, they are the grand fresco sequences that mark the High Renaissance in Rome Read More..
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, 2 miles (3 km) west of Amesbury and 8 miles (13 km) north of Salisbury. Stonehenge's ring of standing stones are set within earthworks in the middle of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds.
Archaeologists believe it was constructed from 3000 BC to 2000 BC. The surrounding circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 BC. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the first bluestones were raised between 2400 and 2200 BC, although they may have been at the site as early as 3000 BC Read More