Why Art

In the 1960s, when I was little, my dad had a subscription to a loose leaf art book called (in Dutch) "Openbaar Kunstbezit". I remember spending lots of time looking at the pictures of famous art. Particularly, I remember a picture of a painting of the Tower of Babel. Not so long ago in 2011, on a visit to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, I saw the original painting "The Tower of Babel" by Pieter Bruegel (1565), for the first time for real. It was a moving experience, also because my dad past away not long before that visit. I shot some photos, like the one shown here to the left. This is what good art does to me, it touches inner strings and not always for obvious reasons, like in this example.

Over the last years I have developed a particular liking for the Italian Renaissance masters. Their discovery and first use of linear perspective in art also resonates with my interest in history and technology. The result is an irresistible mix. Shown here is a fresco by Tommaso Siciliano, called "Triumph of Christianity over Paganism" (1524). I photographed this work December 2010 in the Vatican Museum in Rome, Italy.

Follow this link to see my photo gallery of Russian Art (site opens in a new window). Why Russian Art? Well I could have shown you my photo galleries of Italian, Dutch, French or Spanish paintings, but instead I have chosen Russian Art because a lot of these paintings were never accessible to us mere Western mortals in the Soviet era. Please note this gallery contains a large selection of the images I have of Russian Art. The recent ones I shot using a decent DSLR camera, some of the older images were taken in low light with not so decent cameras. In some cases, photography was not allowed, so I bought postcards and scanned those. About doubles: some of these paintings traveled around the world and I just happened to see (and shoot) them more than once.