Today, The Grandma and Claire Fontaine havevisited some of the most important places of Palma.After
visiting the Cathedral, one of the most incredible monuments of the
island, they have returned to their hotel, where they have rested a
little.
Tonight, they are going to celebrate SantSebastià,thepatron of the city, with thousands of Mallorcan people dancing near wonderful bonfires. They are going to spend their last hours in this wonderful city before returning to Barcelona, where The Grandma is going to start a new English course with a new family tomorrow.
Palma is the capital and largest city of Balearic Islands. It is situated on the south coast of Mallorca on the Bay of Palma. The Cabrera Archipelago, though widely separated from Palma proper, is administratively considered part of the municipality.
Palma was founded as a Roman camp upon the remains of a Talaioticsettlement. The city was subjected to several Vandal raids during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, then reconquered by the Byzantine Empire,thencolonised by the Moors, who called it Medina Mayurqa, and, in the 13th century, by King Jaume I.
After the conquest of Mallorca, the city was loosely incorporated into the province of Tarraconensis by 123 BC; the Romans founded two new cities: Palma
on the south of the island, and Pollentia in the northeast -on the site
of a Phoenician settlement. Whilst Pollentia acted as a port to Roman
cities on the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, Palma was the port
used for destinations in Africa, such as Carthage, and Hispania, such as
Saguntum, Gades and Carthago Nova. Though present-day Palma has no significant remains from this period, occasional archaeological finds are made in city centre excavations.
With Margalida and Tomeu, Giants of Palma
Though the period between the fall of the WesternRoman Empire and the Muslim conquest is not well understood, due to lack of documents, there is clear evidence of a Byzantinepresence in the city,as
indicated by mosaics found in the oldest parts of the Cathedral, which
was in early medieval times part of a paleo-Christian temple.
Between 902 and 1229, the city was under Islamic control. It remained the capital of the island and it was known as Medina Mayurqa, which in Arabic means City of Majorca.
On 31 December 1229, after three months of siege, the city was reconquered by King Jaume I and was renamed Ciutat de Mallorca. In addition to being kept as capital of the Kingdom of Mallorca, it was given a municipality that comprised the whole island. The governing arm was the University of the City and Kingdom of Mallorca.
After the death of King Jaume I, Palma became joint capital of the Kingdom of Mallorca, together with Perpignan. His son, Jaume II of Mallorca,championed
the construction of statues and monuments in the city: Bellver Castle,
the churches of St. Francesc and St. Domingo, reformed the Palace of
Almudaina and began the construction of the Cathedral of Mallorca.
In 1391, anti-Jewish riots broke out. The Jewish community of Inca was completely wiped out, as were those of Sóller, Sineu, and Alcudia. In spite of the governor's prohibition on leaving the island, many Jews fled to North Africa. The remaining Jews were forced to convert under threat of death.
Abraham Cresques was a 14th-century Jewish cartographer of the Majorcan cartographic school from Palma; Cresques is credited with the authorship of the famous Catalan Atlas.
The river that cut through the city gave rise to two distinct areas within the city; the Upper town and Lower town, depending upon which side of the river one was situated. Palma's Silk Exchange, a masterpiece of the Gothic architecture in Mallorca. Built between 1420 and 1452.
The Grandma with 'Els Xeremiers', Majorcan Giants
The city's advantageous geographical location allowed it extensive commerce
with Catalonia, Valencia, Provence, the Maghreb, the Italian republics
and the dominions of the Great Turk, which heralded a golden age for the
city.
The
17th century is characterised by the division of the city in two sides
or gangs, named Canamunts and Canavalls, with severe social and
economical repercussions. During this period the port became a haven for pirates. During the last quarter of the century, the Inquisition continued its persecution of the city's Jews, locally called xuetes.
The fall of Barcelona in 1714 meant the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and the defeat and destruction of the Crown of Aragon, and this was reflected on the Nueva Planta decrees, issued by Philip V of Spain in 1715. These occupation decrees changed the government of the island
and separated it from the municipality's government of Palma, which
became the official city name. By the end of the 19th century, the name
Palma de Mallorca was generalised in written Spanish, although it is
still colloquially named Ciutat in Catalan.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Palma became a refuge for many who had exiled themselves from the Napoleonic occupation of Catalonia and Valencia; during this period freedom flourished, until the absolutist restoration.
The patron of Palma is Sant Sebastià (January, 20). The city celebrates this festivity with traditional cultural events. Giants, bonfires, and local dancings (ball de bot) are enjoyed by everybody.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about one of her greatest passions, Mallorca. She has chosen the biography and adventures of Jaume Ferrer, the Mallorcan sailor and explorer who found the legendary River of Gold on a day like today in 1346.
Jaume Ferrer (1346) was a Mallorcan sailor and explorer. He sailed from Mallorca to find the legendary Riverof Gold on 10 August 1346, but the outcome of his quest and his fate areunknown. He is memorialized in his native city of Palma, Mallorca.
Very little is known about Jaume Ferrer except that he was a Mallorcan captain who set out in a galley in 1346 and sailed down the West African coast in an attempt to reach the legendary River of Gold. The results of this expedition, including whether Ferrer survived the journey, are unknown. Some recent research tentatively identifies Jaume Ferrer as Giacomino Ferrar di CasaMaveri, a second generation Genoese immigrant in Mallorca.
Virtually the only information for his expedition is the depiction and note given in the Catalan Atlas of 1375, attributed to the Mallorcan cartographerAbraham Cresques, correct patronymic: Cresques Abraham. In the bottom-left corner of the map, there is a brightly painted Aragonese-flagged vessel and a note indicating merely that Jacme Ferrerset out in an uxer on 10 August 1346 to search for the Riu de l'Or, River of Gold. An uxer is a single-mast, square-rigged and oar-powered cargo galley, with rounded stern and low prow, commonly used to freight horses.
The geographic position of the ship, below the Canary Islands, suggests Ferrer probably sailed past Cape Bojador, at that time the non plus ultra of navigation, beyond which European ships dared not sail. If Ferrer survived and returned, then his feat preceded, by nearly a whole century, the famous successful passage of that cape by the Portuguese explorer Gil Eanes in 1434.
There is a sliver of additional information found in a note in the secret archives of the Republic of Genoa, uncovered in 1802, which refers to the expedition, noting that Joannis Ferne, a Catalan, left the city of the Mallorcans in a galleass on 10 July 1346 but the vessel was never heard of again, that he went searching for the Riu Auri, River of Gold, because he heard that it was a collection point for aurum de paiola, perhaps gold nuggets, but Paiola has also been interpreted not as nugget, but as the name of a river island depicted in the 1367 Pizzigani map, that the people on the shores were all engaged in gold collection and that the river was wide and deep enough for the largest ships.
The River of Gold, frequently spoken of by trans-Saharan traders, was a reference to the Senegal River that flowed into the heart of the gold-producing Mali Empire. The Genoese note refers to it also by the alternative name of Vedamel -almost certainly a derivation from Arabic, probably Wad al-mal, river of treasure or possibly, by transcription error, Wad al-Nill, river of Nile -the Senegal was also long known as the Western Nile. Vedamel might also be the origin of Budomel, used by early Portuguese explorers in the 15th century to refer to a Wolof statelet on the Grande Côte, south to the Senegal River.
Despite the sparse information, Jaume Ferrer is memorialized in his native city of Palma, in Mallorca, by a street name, a statue in the Plaça de lesDrassanes and a relief in the town hall. The statue is a reproduction of one commissioned by the city hall and sculpted by Jacint Mateu around 1843, but replaced in 1914 by a copy with some modifications by Joan Grauches. The original is in the old Consolat de Mar building in Palma. The Atlas's ship is reproduced on a monumental sundial on the city's maritime promenade.
Today is Saint Clare of Assisi and Claire Fontaine is celebrating her feast day.
Claire has invited TheGrandma to visit the Monestir de Pedralbes, a monastery founded by James II for his wife Elisenda de Montcada in 1326 and housed by PoorClares, the community that was founded by Saint Clare of Assisi,and her most important legacy. During her visit to the Monastery of Pedralbes, Claire and TheGrandma has been remembering other important places built in honour to Saint Clare of Assisi.
Claire has remembered her last visits to the Santa Clara Convents in Palma and Naples, and The Grandma has been talking about the Santa ClaraConvent in Barcelona.
Before visiting the monastery with Claire, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.
Saint Clare of Assisi (16 July 1194 – 11 August 1253, born Chiara Offreduccio and sometimes spelled Clara, Clair, Claire or Sinclair) is an Italian saint and one of the first followers of Saint Francis of Assisi. She founded the Order of Poor Ladies, a monastic religious order for women in the Franciscan tradition, and wrote their Rule of Life, the first set of monastic guidelines known to have been written by a woman. Following her death, the order she founded was renamed in her honour as the Order of Saint Clare, commonly referred to today as the Poor Clares. Her feastday is on 11 August.
Old picture of the Monastery of Pedralbes
The Santa Clara Convent in Barcelona was a feminine convent built in what is now the Ribera district of the city of Barcelona. Very damaged during the siege of Barcelona (1713-1714) was definitively devastated by order of Philip V of Spain, as part of the Ribera district to build the citadel of Barcelona during the postwar years and some of its architectural remains were distributed in some remarkable buildings of the city. Traditionally, it is considered the first foundation of the Clarisses in the Iberian Peninsula, although its founding date has been strongly discussed.
The date of its founding of legendary and traditional character was 1233/1234 by Agnès de Peranda d'Assís, supposedly the daughter of Peranda and niece of Santa Clara d'Assís, the founder of the order- and Clara de Janua -this second would be Maria de Pisa according to other sources-, they arrived at the port of Barcelona, coming from the monastery of Saint Damià d'Assís, after embarking on Ancona and suffering a shipwreck. They arrived in a boat without rims or sails, with the idea of founding a monastery. The first documentation places the foundation around 1236/1237 by a bula of Gregori IX confirming the foundation initiated by several women headed by Berenguera d'Antic and Guillerma de Polinyà and ten other sisters.
In 1327, a fourteenth of these clan nuns founded the Monastery of Pedralbes. In 1691, during the French invasion, the convent left for a few days. During the Siege of Barcelona (1713-1714) the convent was very damaged and the nuns were temporarily welcomed in houses of relatives and friends with the intention of repairing the damage, which was not possible due to the destruction and devastation of a large part from the Ribera district to build the citadel of Barcelona.
The Monastery of Pedralbes is a Gothic monastery in Barcelona, Catalonia. The name of the site in the XIV century was Petras Albas, Latin for white stones. The original name devolved into the current one. The monastery was founded by Jaume II for his wife Elisenda de Montcada in
1326. It housed a community of Poor Clares, mostly members of noble
families. The
queen gave the monastery a series of privileges, including the direct
protection of the city of Barcelona, through the Consell de Cent, who had the task to defend it in case of
danger. Elisenda also built a palace annexed to the monastery, where she
lived after her husband's death in 1327. She died there in 1367. The
remains of the palace were discovered in the 1970s.
Visiting the cloister, Monastery of Pedralbes
During the Catalan Revolt (1640), the nuns were expelled, but later returned. A small number of nuns still reside in the complex. The monastery was declared a national monument in 1991.
Originally the monastery was defended by a line of walls, of which today only two towers and one gate remain. The church has a single nave, with rib vaults and a polygonal apse, and houses a Gothic retablo by Jaume Huguet. The façade is characterized by a large rose window. The cloister has three floors, and a length of 40 meters, with a central garden of orange trees and palms. It is formed by wide arches on columns, whose capitals are decorated with the emblems of the Kings of Aragon and the House of Montcada.
The sepulchre of Queen Elisenda, in alabaster stone, is located in one of the cloister's wings.
Also notable is the Chapel of St. Michael, housing several fresco paintings by Ferrer Bassa. Dating to 1346, they show the influence of the Italian painter Giotto. The former dormitory previously housed a permanent exhibition of painters such as Rubens, Canaletto, Tintoretto, Velázquez and Beato Angelico.
The Santa Clara Convent is located on Santa Clara Street in Palma, on the island of Mallorca. The first reference that exists in the convent of Santa Clara in Palma dates back to the 13th century, at the time of Jaume I. In 1256, Pope Alexander IV granted permission for the creation of a new monastery in Palma, request made by clarissa, Sister Caterina, abbess of the monastery of Santa Maria de Tarragona, who wanted to send a group of nuns to the island of Mallorca to found a new convent. Alexandre IV sent a letter to the Majorcan Franciscans, in which he will assist them at all times with the new Claretian nuns who had to settle in the capital of Mallorca.
Claire Fontaine visited Santa Clara Convent, Palma
On January 13, 1260, they settled in the center of the capital, on a land ceded for the construction of their convent. Catalina Berenguer and Guillermina, her sister, belonged to the nobility, and this made the convent progress rapidly. In 1837 the Franciscan nuns of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception of El Olivar went to the convent of Santa Clara. In the 17th century, great reforms were made, replacing the gothic part for one of the Renaissance and almost Baroque period. By 2007, the proceedings began to restore the convent completely.
The base of the building was built on remains of Muslim origin. Over the following centuries the convent was renovated and enlarged. And as witness of the extensions, there are round archways, blinded, from civil constructions, like the house of the family Montsó. The chapter room is from the 16th century, the cloister corridors contain gothic tombs of the abbesses. The current church is the third of the built in this convent. The four chapels on the left are rectangular with a back cover, and on the right there are several plants with a canopy cover. The cover of the rostrum has a double row with vault of three sections of edge. At the top of the altar there is an image of The Immaculate Conception and at the bottom one of Santa Clarad'Assisi. On the left side of the facade there is a quadrangular bell tower embedded in the wall, which stands out with three bodies. The portal dates back to 1671 and is thin. The entablature has a cornice topped by a broken fronton; In the center there is a medallion that has a relief that represents the image of Santa Clara.
Go forth in peace, for you have followed the good road. Go forth without fear, for he who created you has made you holy, has always protected you, and loves you as a mother.
The Grandma and ClaireFontaine have flown back from Palma to Barcelona.
This trip has been very exciting for The Grandma and she has preferred to stay at home resting and checking her last photos, videos and memories of the island.
During the short flight from Palma to Barcelona, TheGrandma has been studying a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practicemanual (Vocabulary 6).
Claire Fontaine is younger than The Grandma and she has continued her intensive and social life when she has arrived to Barcelona. Tonight, she has gone to Barts Theatre to listen to one of the most amazing and wonderful Galician groups, Luar Na Lubre, which has presented their new album RibeiraSacra in the Catalan capital. Claire has enjoyed the concert a lot and she has discovered new legends and sounds from the Galician lands.
Luar na Lubre is a Celtic music ensemble from Galiza. Luar is Galician for moonlight; lubre is a magical forest in which the Celtic druids cast their spells.
During its career, this musical group has spread Galician music and culture. The band became famous worldwide after Mike Oldfield took interest in their music. Oldfield fell in love with their song O son do ar, The sound of the air, composed by Bieito Romero. Oldfield's cover is on his Voyager album, entitled Song of the Sun.
In 1992 he offered help in their worldwide tour. Their tour together was called Tubular Bells 3.
Now it is one of the most famous groups from Galicia. Their first
singer Rosa Cedrón is also featured with Mike Oldfield in some songs
from his live concert at Horse Guards Parade, near St James's Park,
London.
Rosa Cedrón left the band in 2005 and Sara Vidal became the new singer (nowadays is Irma Macías). In 2010, the group's leader, BieitoRomero, said the group was "fully fit". The group recorded a version of Gerdundula by Status Quo.
The folk metal band Mägo de Oz made a cover of Luar na Lubre's song Memoria da Noite. The epic metal band Runic made a cover of LuarnaLubre's song Nau.
Celtic music is a broad grouping of music genres that evolved out of the folk music traditions of the Celtic people of Western Europe. It refers to both orally-transmitted traditional music and recorded music and the styles vary considerably to include everything from trad, traditional, music to a wide range of hybrids.
These styles are known because of the importance of Irish and Scottish people in the English speaking world, especially in the United States, where they had a profound impact on American music, particularly bluegrass and country music.
The music of Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Brittany, Galicia, Cantabria and Asturias and Portugal are also considered Celtic music, the tradition being particularly strong in Brittany, where Celtic festivals large and small take place throughout the year, and in Wales, where the ancient eisteddfod tradition has been revived and flourishes.
Additionally, the musics of ethnically Celtic peoples abroad are vibrant, especially in Canada and the United States. In Canada the provinces of Atlantic Canada are known for being a home of Celtic music, most notably on the islands of Newfoundland, Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island. The traditional music of Atlantic Canada is heavily influenced by the Irish, Scottish and Acadian ethnic makeup of much of the region's communities. In some parts of Atlantic Canada, such as Newfoundland, Celtic music is as or more popular than in the old country.
Further, some older forms of Celtic music that are rare in Scotland and Ireland today, such as the practice of accompanying a fiddle with a piano, or the Gaelic spinning songs of Cape Breton remain common in the Maritimes. Much of the music of this region is Celtic in nature, but originates in the local area and celebrates the sea, seafaring, fishing and other primary industries.
Today, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma have visited some old friends in CanAlcover, Palma, the headquarters of the ObraCultural Balear, OCB, that works for the Balear culture in the islands and promote it as a part of the Catalan culture.
Mallorcan language is a variant of Catalan that you can listen to only in a little part of Catalonia, Cadaqués, the town where Salvador Dalí died on a day like today in 1989. There are not strong links between Salvador Dalí and Mallorca except the common language and the Mediterranean culture but The Grandma has wanted to read more about this author and his controversial life while she was contemplating the endless horizon from the Port of Palma.
Before visiting Can Alcover, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 5).
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (11 May 1904-23 January 1989), known professionally as Salvador Dalí was a prominent surrealist artist born in Figueres, Catalonia.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, at times in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.
Dalí attributed his love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes to an Arab lineage, claiming that his ancestors were descendants of the Moors.
Salvador Dalí
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. To the dismay of those who held his work in high regard, and to the irritation of his critics, his eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork.
Salvador Dalí was born on 11 May 1904 on the first floor of Carrer Monturiol, 20 in the town of Figueres, in the Empordà county, in Catalonia.
In 1922, Dalí moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid and studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. A lean 1.72 metres tall, Dalí already drew attention as an eccentric and dandy. He had long hair and sideburns, coat, stockings, and knee-breeches in the style of English aesthetes of the late 19th century.
At the Residencia, he became close friends with Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca. The friendship with Lorca had a strong element of mutual passion, but Dalí rejected the poet's sexual advances.
In August 1929, Dalí met his lifelong and primary muse and future wife Gala, born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova. She was a Russian immigrant ten years his senior, who at that time was married to surrealist poet Paul Éluard.
In the same year, Dalí had important professional exhibitions and officially joined the Surrealist group in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris. His work had already been heavily influenced by surrealism for two years. The Surrealists hailed what Dalí called his paranoiac-critical method of accessing the subconscious for greater artistic creativity.
The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí
In 1931, Dalí painted one of his most famous works, ThePersistence of Memory,which introduced a surrealistic image of soft, melting pocket watches.
The general interpretation of the work is that the soft watches are a rejection of the assumption that time is rigid or deterministic. This idea is supported by other images in the work, such as the wide expanding landscape, and other limp watches shown being devoured by ants.
Dalí and Gala, having lived together since 1929, were civilly married on 30 January 1934 in Paris. They later remarried in a Church ceremony on 8 August 1958 at Sant Martí Vell. In addition to inspiring many artworks throughout her life, Gala would act as Dalí's business manager, supporting their extravagant lifestyle while adeptly steering clear of insolvency. Gala seemed to tolerate Dalí's dalliances with younger muses, secure in her own position as his primary relationship.
While the majority of the Surrealist artists had become increasingly associated with leftist politics, Dalí maintained an ambiguous position on the subject of the proper relationship between politics and art.
In 1940, as World War II tore through Europe, Dalí and Gala retreated to the United States, where they lived for eight years splitting their time between New York and Monterey, California. They were able to escape because on June 20, 1940, they were issued visas by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France.
Salvador and Gala Dalí crossed into Portugal and subsequently sailed on the Excambion from Lisbon to New York in August 1940. Dalí’s
arrival in New York was one of the catalysts in the development of that
city as a world art center in the post-war years. After the move, Dalí returned to the practice of Catholicism.
Salvador Dalí and Gala
In 1948 Dalí and Gala moved back into their house in Port Lligat, on the coast near Cadaqués. For the next three decades, he would spend most of his time there painting, taking time off and spending winters with his wife in Paris and New York. In 1968, Dalí had bought a castle in Púbol for Gala; and starting in 1971 she would retreat there alone for weeks at a time. By Dalí's own admission, he had agreed not to go there without written permission from his wife. His fears of abandonment and estrangement from his longtime artistic muse contributed to depression and failing health.
Gala died on 10 June 1982, at the age of 87. After Gala's death, Dalí lost much of his will to live. He deliberately dehydrated himself, possibly as a suicide attempt; there are also claims that he had tried to put himself into a state of suspended animation as he had read that some microorganisms could do. He moved from Figueres to the castle in Púbol, which was the site of her death and her grave.
Dalí's politics played a significant role in his emergence as an artist. In his youth, he embraced both anarchism and communism, though his writings tell anecdotes of making radical political statements more to shock listeners than from any deep conviction. This was in keeping with Dalí's allegiance to the Dada movement.
As he grew older his political allegiances changed, especially as the Surrealistmovement went through transformations under the leadership of the Trotskyist writer André Breton, who is said to have called Dalí in for questioning on his politics.
Today, The Grandma and Claire Fontaine have visited some of the most important places of Palma.
Last night, they celebrated Sant Sebastià,thepatron of the city, with thousands of Mallorcan people who danced near wonderful bonfires.
After visiting the Cathedral, one of the most incredible monuments of the island, they have returned to their hotel where they have rested a little. The hotel is located in Almudaina Street and it is an incredible Mallorcan palace.
The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 2).
Palma is the capital and largest city of Balearic Islands. It is situated on the south coast of Mallorca on the Bay of Palma. The Cabrera Archipelago, though widely separated from Palma proper, is administratively considered part of the municipality.
Palma was founded as a Roman camp upon the remains of a Talaioticsettlement. The city was subjected to several Vandal raids during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, then reconquered by the Byzantine Empire,thencolonised by the Moors, who called it Medina Mayurqa, and, in the 13th century, by King Jaume I.
After the conquest of Mallorca, the city was loosely incorporated into the province of Tarraconensis by 123 BC; the Romans founded two new cities: Palma
on the south of the island, and Pollentia in the northeast -on the site
of a Phoenician settlement. Whilst Pollentia acted as a port to Roman
cities on the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, Palma was the port
used for destinations in Africa, such as Carthage, and Hispania, such as
Saguntum, Gades and Carthago Nova. Though present-day Palma has no significant remains from this period, occasional archaeological finds are made in city centre excavations.
With Margalida and Tomeu, Giants of Palma
Though the period between the fall of the WesternRoman Empire and the Muslim conquest is not well understood, due to lack of documents, there is clear evidence of a Byzantinepresence in the city,as indicated by mosaics found in the oldest parts of the Cathedral, which was in early medieval times part of a paleo-Christian temple.
Between 902 and 1229, the city was under Islamic control. It remained the capital of the island and it was known as Medina Mayurqa, which in Arabic means City of Majorca.
On 31 December 1229, after three months of siege, the city was reconquered by King Jaume I and was renamed Ciutat de Mallorca. In addition to being kept as capital of the Kingdom of Mallorca, it was given a municipality that comprised the whole island. The governing arm was the University of the City and Kingdom of Mallorca.
After the death of King Jaume I, Palma became joint capital of the Kingdom of Mallorca, together with Perpignan. His son, Jaume II of Mallorca,championed the construction of statues and monuments in the city: Bellver Castle, the churches of St. Francesc and St. Domingo, reformed the Palace of Almudaina and began the construction of the Cathedral of Mallorca.
In 1391, anti-Jewish riots broke out. The Jewish community of Inca was completely wiped out, as were those of Sóller, Sineu, and Alcudia. In spite of the governor's prohibition on leaving the island, many Jews fled to North Africa. The remaining Jews were forced to convert under threat of death.
Abraham Cresques was a 14th-century Jewish cartographer of the Majorcan cartographic school from Palma; Cresques is credited with the authorship of the famous Catalan Atlas.
The river that cut through the city gave rise to two distinct areas within the city; the Upper town and Lower town, depending upon which side of the river one was situated. Palma's Silk Exchange, a masterpiece of the Gothic architecture in Mallorca. Built between 1420 and 1452.
The Grandma with 'Els Xeremiers', Majorcan Giants
The city's advantageous geographical location allowed it extensive commerce with Catalonia, Valencia, Provence, the Maghreb, the Italian republics and the dominions of the Great Turk, which heralded a golden age for the city.
The 17th century is characterised by the division of the city in two sides or gangs, named Canamunts and Canavalls, with severe social and economical repercussions. During this period the port became a haven for pirates. During the last quarter of the century, the Inquisition continued its persecution of the city's Jews, locally called xuetes.
The fall of Barcelona in 1714 meant the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and the defeat and destruction of the Crown of Aragon, and this was reflected on the Nueva Planta decrees, issued by Philip V of Spain in 1715. These occupation decrees changed the government of the island and separated it from the municipality's government of Palma, which became the official city name. By the end of the 19th century, the name Palma de Mallorca was generalised in written Spanish, although it is still colloquially named Ciutat in Catalan.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Palma became a refuge for many who had exiled themselves from the Napoleonic occupation of Catalonia and Valencia; during this period freedom flourished, until the absolutist restoration.
The patron of Palma is Sant Sebastià (January, 20). The city celebrates this festivity with traditional cultural events. Giants, bonfires, and local dancings (ball de bot) are enjoyed by everybody.
Yesterday, The Grandma celebrated Christmas Day on her own. She is not a believer although she enjoys this day in a cultural way.
In the morning, she went to homage her past relatives and friends in a quiet and large place in the most popular Jewish mountain of the city. In the same place, she also could homage other people who died on a day like yesterday, like Francesc Macià and Joan Miró.
After this emotive visit, The Grandma went to The Miró Foundation where she had a private visit to enjoy on a closed day for the public but open for her and her closer friends.
Christmas is a time where you receive news from people who you remember but one day you lost his/her clue until they appear again in your life. The Grandma received some news from Jordi, an excellent writer interested in environment, who shared some wonderful moments with The Grandma and other unforgettable friends, learning English under some amazing palm trees in the city of Cornelianus.
In the afternoon, The Grandma studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 53).
Joan Miró i Ferrà (20 April 1893-25 December 1983) was a Catalan, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma in 1981.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and declared an assassination of painting in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
Joan Miró
Born into a family of a goldsmith and a watchmaker, Miró grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighborhood of Barcelona. The Miró surname indicates Jewish roots, the terms marrano or converso describe Iberian Jews who converted to Christianity.
His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolors Ferrà. He began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion. To the dismay of his father, he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja in 1907.He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and he had his first solo show in 1918 at the Galeries Dalmau, where his work was ridiculed and defaced. Inspired by Fauve and Cubist exhibitions in Barcelona and abroad, Miró was drawn towards the arts community that was gathering in Montparnasse and in 1920 moved to Paris, but continued to spend his summers in Catalonia.
Miró initially went to business school as well as art school. He began his working career as a clerk when he was a teenager, although he abandoned the business world completely for art after suffering a nervous breakdown. His early art, like that of the similarly influenced Fauves and Cubists, was inspired by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. The resemblance of Miró's work to that of the intermediate generation of the avant-garde has led scholars to dub this period his Catalan Fauvist period.
A few years after Miró’s 1918 Barcelona solo exhibition, he settled in Paris where he finished a number of paintings that he had begun on his parents’ summer home and farm in Mont-roig del Camp. One such painting, The Farm, showed a transition to a more individual style of painting and certain nationalistic qualities. Miró annually returned to Mont-roig and developed a symbolism and nationalism that would stick with him throughout his career. Two of Miró’s first works classified as Surrealist, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and The Tilled Field, employ the symbolic language that was to dominate the art of the next decade.
In 1924, Miró joined the Surrealist group. The already symbolic and poetic nature of Miró’s work, as well as the dualities and contradictions inherent to it, fit well within the context of dream-like automatism espoused by the group.
Joan Miró
Much of Miró’s work lost the cluttered chaotic lack of focus that had defined his work thus far, and he experimented with collage and the process of painting within his work so as to reject the framing that traditional painting provided.
This antagonistic attitude towards painting manifested itself when Miró referred to his work in 1924 ambiguously as x in a letter to poet friend Michel Leiris. The paintings that came out of this period were eventually dubbed Miró’s dream paintings.
Miró married Pilar Juncosa in Palma (Majorca) on 12 October 1929. Their daughter, María Dolores Miró, was born on 17 July 1930.
In 1931, Pierre Matisse opened an art gallery in New York City. The Pierre Matisse Gallery, which existed until Matisse's death in 1989, became an influential part of the Modern art movement in America. From the outset Matisse represented Joan Miró and introduced his work to the United States market by frequently exhibiting Miró's work in New York.
Until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró habitually returned to Catalonia in the summers. Once the war began, he was unable to return home. Unlike many of his surrealist contemporaries, Miró had previously preferred to stay away from explicitly political commentary in his work. Though a sense of Catalan nationalism pervaded his earliest surreal landscapes and Head of a Catalan Peasant, it was not until Spain's Republican government commissioned him to paint the mural, The Reaper , for the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, that Miró’s work took on a politically charged meaning.
In 1939, with Germany’s invasion of France looming, Miró relocated to Varengeville in Normandy, and on 20 May of the following year, as Germans invaded Paris, he narrowly fled to Spain, now controlled by Francisco Franco, for the duration of the Vichy Regime’s rule.
In Varengeville, Palma, and Mont-roig, between 1940 and 1941, Miró created the twenty-three gouache series Constellations. Revolving around celestial symbolism, Constellations earned the artist praise from André Breton, who seventeen years later wrote a series of poems, named after and inspired by Miró's series. Features of this work revealed a shifting focus to the subjects of women, birds, and the moon, which would dominate his iconography for much of the rest of his career.
Joan Miró
In 1974, Miró created a tapestry for the World Trade Center in New York City together with the Catalan artist Josep Royo. He had initially refused to do a tapestry, then he learned the craft from Royo and the two artists produced several works together. His WorldTrade Center Tapestry was displayed at the buildingand was one of the most expensive works of art lost during the September 11 attacks.
In 1977, Miró and Royo finished a tapestry to be exhibited in the NationalGallery of Art in Washington, DC.
In 1981, Miró's The Sun, the Moon and One Star -later renamed Miró's Chicago- was unveiled. This large, mixed media sculpture is situated outdoors in the downtown Loop area of Chicago, across the street from another large public sculpture, the Chicago Picasso. Miró had created a bronze model of The Sun, the Moon and One Star in 1967. The maquette now resides in the Milwaukee Art Museum.
In 1979 Miró received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Barcelona. The artist, who suffered from heart failure, died in his home in Palma (Majorca) on 25 December 1983. He was later interred in the MontjuïcCemetery in Barcelona.
His early modernist works include Portrait of Vincent Nubiola (1917), Siurana (the path), Nord-Sud (1917) and Painting of Toledo. These works show the influence of Cézanne, and fill the canvas with a colorful surface and a more painterly treatment than the hard-edge style of most of his later works. In Nord-Sud, the literary newspaper of that name appears in the still life, a compositional device common in cubist compositions, but also a reference to the literary and avant-garde interests of the painter.
Starting in 1920, Miró developed a very precise style, picking out every element in isolation and detail and arranging them in deliberate composition. These works, including House with Palm Tree (1918), Nude with a Mirror (1919), Horse, Pipe and Red Flower (1920), and The Table-Still Life with Rabbit (1920), show the clear influence of Cubism, although in a restrained way, being applied to only a portion of the subject. For example, The Farmer's Wife (1922–23), is realistic, but some sections are stylized or deformed, such as the treatment of the woman's feet, which are enlarged and flattened.
Maria del Mar Bonet & Joan Miró
The culmination of this style was The Farm (1921–22). The rural Catalan scene it depicts is augmented by an avant-garde French newspaper in the center, showing Miró sees this work transformed by the Modernist theories he had been exposed to in Paris.
The concentration on each element as equally important was a key step towards generating a pictorial sign for each element. The background is rendered in flat or patterned in simple areas, highlighting the separation of figure and ground, which would become important in his mature style.
Miró made many attempts to promote this work, but his surrealist colleagues found it too realistic and apparently conventional, and so he soon turned to a more explicitly surrealist approach.
In 1922, Miró explored abstracted, strongly coloured surrealism in at least one painting. From the summer of 1923 in Mont-roig, Miró began a key set of paintings where abstracted pictorial signs, rather than the realistic representations used in The Farm, are predominant. In The Tilled Field, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter) and Pastoral (1923–24), these flat shapes and lines, mostly black or strongly coloured, suggest the subjects, sometimes quite cryptically. For Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), Miró represents the hunter with a combination of signs: a triangle for the head, curved lines for the moustache, angular lines for the body. So encoded is this work that at a later time Miró provided a precise explanation of the signs used.
Through the mid-1920s Miró developed the pictorial sign language which would be central throughout the rest of his career.
In Paris, under the influence of poets and writers, he developed his unique style: organic forms and flattened picture planes drawn with a sharp line. Generally thought of as a Surrealist because of his interest in automatism and the use of sexual symbols , for example, ovoids with wavy lines emanating from them, Miró's style was influenced in varying degrees by Surrealism and Dada, yet he rejected membership in any artistic movement in the interwar European years. André Breton described him as the most Surrealist of us all.
Miró's surrealist origins evolved out of repression much like all surrealist and magic realist work, especially because of his Catalan ethnicity, which was subject to special persecution by the Franco regime. Also, Joan Miró was well aware of Haitian Voodoo art and Cuban Santería religion through his travels before going into exile. This led to his signature style of art making.
In the final decades of his life Miró accelerated his work in different media, producing hundreds of ceramics, including the Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun at the UNESCO building in Paris. He also made temporary window paintings, on glass, for an exhibit. In the last years of his life Miró wrote his most radical and least known ideas, exploring the possibilities of gas sculpture and four-dimensional painting.
