Ruth Paget: April 2014

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Visiting the Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg in Alsace (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg in Alsace, France is a fort and not a palace, which requires much steep climbing to visit: be forewarned.

German rulers beginning with Frederick von Hohenstaufen in the 12^th century have used this mountaintop location to survey the wheat and wine road (running north to south) and the salt and silver road (running west to east) on the plain outside the modern town of Kintzheim.

The masonry of the holding walls along the way up to the Château reflects German construction methods rather than English and French ones. The stones on the holding wall did not have mortar between them to hold them up like the massive stonework masonry that you find in Incan construction. Moss and plants have grown between the cracks to form a sort of mortar.

Germanic masonry here differs from English masonry in the way that stones are laid down upon one another. The base row of stones is covered by stones that are placed at regular intervals that fall in what appears to be at 1/5 intervals of the stone below.

The effect of this mathematical scheme on the entire wall is to see diagonal, parallel lines in the wall of German masonry. This type of construction is very solid and could hold one side of a tunnel wall in a mountainside.

The effect of English and French masonry when you can see it under stucco is to have a series of parallel lines perpendicular to the base row of stones or bricks. The base row is covered by stones or bricks that fall upon the base at ½ intervals. The pressure point on the bricks is on the center and may be easier to break down for this reason.

German masonry is found on all three levels of the Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg fort. The view from this solid perch has been in peacetime as well as in war. Jean Renoir filmed La Grande Illusion here and used the interior as well as the exterior for shots.

The day my husband and I visited, there were two busloads of Italian schoolchildren from the Veneto region of northern Italy doing a tour. German rulers have been very influential in the politics of Italy, which probably explained the children’s educational tour before a visit to Kintzheim’s monkey zoo and the preserve for storks, the symbolic bird of Alsace.

I somewhat envied the children’s field trip.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

Friday, April 4, 2014

Visiting Nuremberg, Germany's National Museum with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

You could spend a week or two just visiting each gallery once in Nuremberg’s German National Gallery. With just a morning to devote to it, my husband and I decided to visit the Renaissance galleries.

What struck me the most was the presentation of tools such as sextants, protractors, pantographs, compasses, and globes before you could enter the painting collection. I thought this was a subtle way of explaining that technological advances set the foundation for the Renaissance style, particularly in the development of perspective painting.

Perspective painting is based on what is called the vanishing point, a point from which angles emanate to determine size in a painting. Images are larger the further away they are from the vanishing point and smaller as they approach it. The difference in size gives the illusion of depth or perspective in painting. This approach differs from that of the Middle Ages where the most important person in paintings or sculpture is usually much larger than surrounding people and landscape elements like trees.

Mathematical precison was the element sought after in the Museum’s Behaim terrestrial globe (c. 1493), the oldest surviving globe in the world. Hispaniola, where Columbus and crew landed, is very large with no North American and South America depicted.

You could predict sea voyage lengths with an accurate globe. Knowing this helped control lucrative trade routes that made nations rich and able to control other countries. Globes were almost proprietary knowledge for this reason: information sharing was not an asset during this period in history.

The German Renaissance paintings in the galleries displayed a sobriety that you do not find in Italian Renaissance art. Flemish painting was more of an influence on German Renaissance art with brown backgrounds and interiors and emphasis on detailed lacework. Nudes by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472 – 1553) and portraits by Albrecht Dürer (1471 -1528) reflect the influence of Flanders.

This short visit whetted my desire for return visits to the German National Museum to see suits of armor, tea sets, doll houses, and German furniture, which are all in the collection.