The Last Prince of Art of Munich

 

"Born in lower Bavaria, Franz Stuck came from a peasant stock, and his talent as an artist was evident from an early age. He received his artistic training at the Academy of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. While still a student he began supporting himself with work as an illustrator, producing drawings and caricatures for the picture magazine Fliegende Blätter, as well as designs for bookplates, menus, and so forth. Active as a painter, sculptor, printmaker and architect, Stuck was one of the founders of the Munich Secession in 1892, and soon became among the most successful and renowned artists in the city. His large and boldly coloured mythological paintings, characterized by Symbolist overtones, won medals and prizes at exhibitions in Germany, Europe and America over the next three decades, and he was also much in demand as a portrait painter. 

In 1895 Stuck was appointed a Professor at the Akademie in Munich, where his pupils were to include Paul Klee, Josef Albers, and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1897 he began work on the construction and elaborate decoration of a new home and studio in Munich, known as the Villa Stuck, for which he also designed the furniture. The house was completed in 1898, and is today a museum devoted to the artist’s life and work. In 1905 he was awarded a Knight’s Cross of the Order of the Bavarian Throne, which raised him to the nobility, and from this point onwards he signed his works as ‘Franz von Stuck’. At the International Exhibition in Venice in 1909 Stuck was given a room to himself, and in the later years of his career began to focus on sculpture over paintings. By this time, however, his work was beginning to fall out of favour with art critics outside Munich. Although his reputation in Munich itself remained undimmed throughout most of his career, his work and his reputation had fallen into a gradual neglect elsewhere in Germany and the rest of Europe by the second decade of the 20th century."

The Aryan Ideal

 

By 

Chad Crowley

Reinhard Heydrich was widely regarded, even by his adversaries, as one of the most intelligent and capable figures within the Third Reich. Hitler himself referred to him as “the man with the iron heart.” He mastered several languages, including French and English, and had begun studying Czech before his death. He possessed a genius-level IQ, reflected in his extraordinary ability to absorb, organize, and command vast systems of information with methodical precision and unwavering clarity.

Although the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) had already been established in name, it was Heydrich who built it into a modern instrument of statecraft. He did not merely oversee an office of internal surveillance; he redefined the practice of political intelligence in the twentieth century. He transformed the SD into a centralized and methodologically advanced apparatus of internal control, establishing a framework that prefigured the major intelligence services of the postwar world. Through coordinated surveillance, ideological supervision, psychological analysis, and systemic integration, he developed operational principles that would later be reflected in the structures of both Eastern and Western intelligence agencies. In many respects, the foundational logic of institutions such as the CIA and Mossad still echoes the architecture first constructed under his direction.

His upbringing reflected both discipline and refinement. Raised in a musical household, with a father who was a composer and opera singer, Heydrich became a classically trained violinist of near-professional caliber. Music was not a casual pastime but a serious and cultivated pursuit; for a time, he even considered a career in it before choosing the military path. Alongside this, he developed into a master fencer of Olympic-level skill, known for his speed, precision, and aggression. He was widely regarded as one of the finest swordsmen in the SS and was later appointed president of the National Socialist Reich Fencing Association.

This combination of intellectual brilliance, cultural cultivation, and martial discipline defined his early military career. He joined the German Navy at eighteen and rose rapidly through the ranks. His dismissal, the result of a personal scandal involving a noblewoman, left a lasting mark on his sense of honor and personal conduct, yet it also propelled him toward the SS, where he would ascend even further.

Such was the threat he posed that the British government, in coordination with anti-National Socialist Czechoslovak operatives, undertook a covert mission known as Operation Anthropoid, conceived for the express purpose of eliminating him. It was among the very few Allied operations directed not at an army, installation, or infrastructure, but at a single man. His death was not the outcome of battlefield engagement, but the result of a calculated act of removal, carried out in recognition of the magnitude of his strategic influence.

He was not a clown, nor a brute, nor a sociopath, and certainly not a goofball. He was a brilliant, disciplined, and formidable man whose influence reshaped the machinery of modern power. That is what made him so respected, and to his enemies, so feared.

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Knight of The Black Teutonic Order

The Arch of Titus

 

The Arch rises with its only fornix (archway) at the point where the visitors from the Roman Forum go up to the Palatine Hill. It was erected in honor of Titus Vespasian Augustus (79-81 AD), second emperor of the Flavian dynasty, as a spectacular gateway to the Imperial Palaces.

It is identified with certainty by the legible inscription on the attic, on the side facing the Colosseum, which preserves the original dedication (CIL VI, 945): “Senatus / Populusque Romanus / divo Tito divi Vespasiani f(ilio) / Vespasian Augustus” (The Senate and People of Rome in honor of the divine Titus, son of the divine Vespasian, Vespasian Augustus).

The attribute “divus” referring to Titus, suggests that he was already deified, and therefore deceased, when the text was engraved. The construction of the arch, therefore, is thought to be after 81 AD, probably to be placed in the early years of the reign of Domitian (81-96 AD), who did so much to ensure that his brother was deified. The reliefs carved on marble show off the success of the Jewish War, concluded by Titus, together with his father Vespasian, in 71 AD: in the small frieze under the attic, which was originally intended to go all the way around, the triumphal procession is depicted; the panel affixed on the South pylon shows the procession’s passage through the Triumphal Gate of the Forum Boarium, where the ceremony began, with the exhibition of the rich spoils brought to Rome, including the seven-branched candelabra (the menorah); the imperial quadriga with Titus crowned by Victory is depicted on the opposite North pylon.

Despite the references to historical facts, the monument never had a triumphal function; another arch, dedicated to the emperor but erected in the curved side of the Circus Maximus, performed this function. Rather, the subject of debate among scholars is whether, provided at the top with a spacious hollow room, it could have housed the temporary burial of Titus, whose apotheosis is carved in the center of the vault below as a flight over the back of an eagle towards the sky.

In the Middle Ages, the Arch was incorporated into the fortress of the powerful Frangipane family and later annexed to the Olivetan monastery complex. Thus, we often see it depicted in the drawings and paintings of artists and travellers of all times.

The first demolitions of the post-ancient additions that began in the 15th century were followed in the 1820s by a radical restoration by architect Giuseppe Valadier (1762-1839), when the structure, disassembled piece by piece and totally freed, was reassembled and integrated with travertine in the missing parts, taking on its current appearance. The inscription visible on the attic, in bronze letters, on the side facing the Roman Forum, dates back to this period and, in particular, to the pontificate of Pius VII (1800-1823), who wanted to commemorate this important restoration work, marking a milestone for the conservation practices of ancient monuments.

SOURCE: Parco Archeologico Del Colosseo

Axis of Resistance

 

"We must give a strong response to the terrorist Zionist regime. We will show the Zionists no mercy."

21 Years of Silence....

 

29th of May 1453 - The Fall of Constantinople

 

By Jonathan North

Early in the morning of Tuesday, May 29, 1453, they came swarming like hungry wolves over the plain between the Turkish palisades and the battered walls of Byzantium. Thousands upon thousands of wild and ferocious men rushed through the darkness upon the exhausted defenders. Scimitars glistened in the flickering light of torches. Monotonous drums, blaring trumpets, and clashing cymbals urged them on with a frenzied beat. Across the besieged city, bells tolled dolefully as exhausted defenders prepared to make another supreme effort, while women and children sought sanctuary in churches and behind bolted doors. But on came the Turks, their shouts audible, their approach like the rushing of a wave. The spectacle was magnificent and terrifying. The Sultan’s army was storming Constantinople.

The first wave of the ferocious assault was soon crashing into the city’s defenses. Bashi-Bazouks, drawn from all over the Ottoman Empire, were desperate for plunder and frustrated by weeks of fruitless siege. They showed astounding energy and valor as they surged beneath the walls, raising ladders, cheering, cursing, baying for blood. The chain-mail-clad Greek and Italian defenders, fighting for their lives, sent stones hurtling down into the warriors below or picked off Turks with crossbow bolts. For “an hour the savagery continued. Ladders were raised only to be sent crashing down into the jostling throng. Turks turned to run, only to find a cordon of Imperial officers cutting down those who attempted to flee. Most fought with a frenzy the defenders were astonished to behold until, finally, the Sultan relented and the first wild wave turned away from the walls and ran back to the Ottoman camp.

You can read the full article HERE

Bridge To The Gods

" If he's going to become the man he was born to be, Richard Wodenson is going to need some help from the gods."