Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915 : San Francisco, Calif.)
All the art works of the mediaeval rooms are copies of originals, but in
the Bargello Hall, Signor Canessa, who was J. P. Morgan's European
agent, shows his collection of veritable Italian and ancient art. Here
are many things familiar through books, Michelangelo's bust of the
Virgin; a cabinet full of reliquaries and profane vessels in crystal,
gold and enamel done by Beuvenuto Cellini; the bronze Bacchante with
silver eyes which was dug up in the gardens of the Persian embassy at
Stamboul, and which dates from the Third Century B. C.; the famous
portrait bust in rock-crystal of an Egyptian king of the Eighteenth
Dynasty; madonnas and saints by Fifteenth Century painters; a complete
garden set, fountain, statues and all, from a Pompeiian villa; Greek
bronze and silver vessels and statuettes; Bernini's bust of the Cardinal
de Medici; Fifteenth Century tapestries, and so many other objects of
mediaeval and ancient art that a special catalogue has been prepared to
describe them.
Italy's modern painting and Sculpture are well represented in the Palace
of Fine Arts, and her industrial and commercial exhibits are in the
other palaces.
Japan.--Japan has chosen her temple and palace gardens as the types to
represent her at the Exposition. (p. 169.) She dug up the Mikado's
private garden at the end of the sacred Red Bridge in Nikko, trees,
shrine, rocks, greensward and soil, and set it down again on the
Exposition grounds. So doing, she has shown the Western world a lesson
in the beauty of simplicity. The central building in this charming
garden is a copy, enlarged, of the Golden Pavilion of the Roku-on-ji
Temple in the city of Nara. It is of plain wood and lacquer, with
interior walls and ceiling entirely covered with gold leaf. The office
building joined to the temple was suggested by the shrine of the ancient
castle of Fushimi. The exhibit building north of this temple houses a
complete and remarkably beautiful fac-simile of the famous temple at
Nikko, one of the finest in Japan. The Mikado's private collection of
Japanese art, never before opened to the public, even in Japan, is
placed in the Japanese section of the Fine Arts Palace. The paintings,
scrolls, porcelain, satsuma ware, Sculptures and metal work shown in
this very noteworthy exhibit were collected by the late Emperor
Mutsuhito.
One of the tea houses is an exhibit of the Central Tea Traders'
Association, the other one by the Formosan Government. The striking
features of the gardens, beside the stream and the lakelet, are the
dwarfed conifers, priceless trees. Two of them are the products of ten
centuries of systematic pinching back. With them are three sago palms,
five hundred years old. Scattered throughout the gardens are stone
lanterns. Every plant, every bit of turf, every stone in the bed of the
stream even, came from Nippon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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