scholarly journals Obsidian and Obsidian-like Glass Tesserae: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Study the Dedication Wall Mosaic in the Church of St. Mary of the Admiral in Palermo (12th Century)

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 403-416
Author(s):  
Valentina Cantone ◽  
Rita Deiana ◽  
Alberta Silvestri ◽  
Ivana Angelini

AbstractPliny the Elder testifies that roman workshops used volcanic glass (obsidian), but also produced and used a dark glass (obsidian-like glass) quite similar to the natural one. In the context of the study on medieval mosaics, the use of the obsidian and obsidian-like tesserae is a challenging research topic. In this paper, we present the results of a multidisciplinary study carried out on the Dedication wall mosaic, realized by a byzantine workshop in the 12th century in the Church of St. Mary of the Admiral in Palermo, and where numerous black-appearing tesserae, supposed to be composed of obsidian by naked-eyes observation, are present. Historical documents, multispectral imaging of the wall mosaic, and some analytical methods (SEM-EDS and XRPD) applied to a sample of black tesserae, concur in identifying here the presence of obsidian and different obsidian-like glass tesserae. This evidence, although related to the apparent tampering and restoration, could open a new scenario in the use of obsidian and obsidian-like glass tesserae during the Byzantine period in Sicily and in the reconstruction of multiple restoration phases carried out between 12th and 20th century AD on the mosaics of St. Mary of the Admiral.

Zograf ◽  
2006 ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Gkioles

This article offers a detailed presentation of the Athens church of the Mother of God, known by the name of Kapnikarea, which originates from the middle of the Byzantine period. Initially, the Kapnikarea was the katholikon of the monastery but today it is a building complex, consisting of three chronologically different ensembles. They are the Church of the Presentation of the Virgin, erected just after the mid-11th century, the exonarthex probably dating from the beginning of the 12th century, and the smaller northern church dedicated to St. Barbara, built during the Ottoman epoch.


Detection and reorganization of text may save a lot of time while reproducing old books text and its chapters. This is really challenging research topic as different books may have different font types and styles. The digital books and eBooks reading habit is increasing day by day and new documents are producing every day. So in order to boost the process the text reorganization using digital image processing techniques can be used. This research work is using hybrid algorithms and morphological algorithms. For sample we have taken an letter pad where the text and images are separated using algorithms. The another objective of this research is to increase the accuracy of recognized text and produce accurate results. This research worked on two different concepts, first is concept of Pixel-level thresholding processing and another one is Otsu Method thresholding.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Guo ◽  
Yutian Qin ◽  
Yanfei Zhu ◽  
Xiaofei Zhang ◽  
Chang Long ◽  
...  

Selective organic transformations using metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and MOF-based heterogeneous catalysts have been an intriguing but challenging research topic in both the chemistry and materials communities.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7 (105)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Natalia Zhigalova

In this article, the author turns to an examination of the status of the Jewish community in Thessalonica in the late Byzantine period. The author concludes that both in the Byzantine era and during the Venetian rule in Thessalonica, the Jewish community of the city was subjected to numerous restrictions and prohibitions on the part of the official authorities. The reason for this was the initial isolation of the community, as well as the fact that the Jews, in contrast to the rest of the townspeople, owned vast financial resources and rented trading floors, ousting local entrepreneurs from there. The Jewish community in Thessalonica, quite numerous by the standards of contemporaries, in the XIV and XV centuries was in a state of permanent conflict with the church authorities of the city and, probably, had some influence on the communities of Judaizing Christians.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5 (103)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Oleg Rodionov

The article deals with one of the oldest manuscripts containing a significant part of the theological chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes, one of the most important hesychast authors of the late Byzantine period. Codex Vatopedinus gr. 610 was written in the late 14th c. It contains a great amount of quotations excerpted from Patristic literature. In the second part of the codex, one can find the chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes; these 92 chapters were retrieved from a greater collection containing now about 200 chapters. The article discusses the content of the Vatopedi manuscript, pointing out to the use of many Patristic fragments included there in different works by Kallistos Angelikoudes. This may shed light on the origin and purpose of the manuscript. A further study of the history of the text of these chapters allows us to assess the place of the Vatopedi codex in the manuscript tradition of Kallistos Angelikoudes’ literary legacy. The Church Slavonic translation of this collection of Angelikoudes’ chapters made by Paisius Velichkovsky in the 1770—1790s reproduces many peculiarities of the Greek text contained in the Vatopedi manuscript and was presumably based on a copy of that codex.


Author(s):  
Jianwu Lin ◽  
Mengwei Tang ◽  
Jiachang Wang ◽  
Ping He

With Private Funds having a new type of license for asset allocation practice in China, comprehensive asset allocation cross private equity and stock market has received more attention. However, most of the studies focus more on the stock market, and asset allocation models for private equity market that are mainly made based on experience. Thus, the joint allocation of assets crosses both markets making it a challenging research topic. This paper introduces the Black–Litterman model into the private equity market, realizing the transition from qualitative models to quantitative models. It lays a solid quantitative ground for the mixed asset allocation model in both the markets.


Author(s):  
Mark Collard ◽  
John Lawson ◽  
Nicholas Holmes ◽  
Derek Hall ◽  
George Haggarty ◽  
...  

The report describes the results of excavations in 1981, ahead of development within the South Choir Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, and subsequent archaeological investigations within the kirk in the 1980s and 1990s. Three main phases of activity from the 12th to the mid-16th centuries were identified, with only limited evidence for the post-Reformation period. Fragmentary evidence of earlier structural remains was recorded below extensive landscaping of the natural steep slope, in the form of a substantial clay platform constructed for the 12th-century church. The remains of a substantial ditch in the upper surface of this platform are identified as the boundary ditch of the early ecclesiastical enclosure. A total of 113 in situ burials were excavated; the earliest of these formed part of the external graveyard around the early church. In the late 14th century the church was extended to the south and east over this graveyard, and further burials and structural evidence relating to the development of the kirk until the 16th century were excavated, including evidence for substantive reconstruction of the east end of the church in the mid-15th century. Evidence for medieval slat-bottomed coffins of pine and spruce was recovered, and two iron objects, which may be ferrules from pilgrims' staffs or batons, were found in 13th/14th-century burials.


Author(s):  
Miri Rubin

‘The “Middle Ages” in our daily lives’ discusses some of the legacies of this period: universities, the printed book, and song. The 12th century saw increased specialization in centres of learning under the auspices of emperors, kings, and popes. Universities were first created in Bologna and Paris, and offered the highest training in medicine, church law, and civil law. It trained those who went on to become the highest state officials and prelates of the church. The culture of young adulthood fostered in universities, and the possibilities for social mobility they afforded, is still seen today. The development of the printed book and the combination of poetry and music in song is also considered.


Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xian-Qin Ma ◽  
Chong-Chong Yu ◽  
Xiu-Xin Chen ◽  
Lan Zhou

Person re-identification in the image processing domain has been a challenging research topic due to the influence of pedestrian posture, background, lighting, and other factors. In this paper, the method of harsh learning is applied in person re-identification, and we propose a person re-identification method based on deep hash learning. By improving the conventional method, the method proposed in this paper uses an easy-to-optimize shallow convolutional neural network to learn the inherent implicit relationship of the image and then extracts the deep features of the image. Then, a hash layer with three-step calculation is incorporated in the fully connected layer of the network. The hash function is learned and mapped into a hash code through the connection between the network layers. The generation of the hash code satisfies the requirements that minimize the error of the sum of quantization loss and Softmax regression cross-entropy loss, which achieve the end-to-end generation of hash code in the network. After obtaining the hash code through the network, the distance between the pedestrian image hash code to be retrieved and the pedestrian image hash code library is calculated to implement the person re-identification. Experiments conducted on multiple standard datasets show that our deep hashing network achieves the comparable performances and outperforms other hashing methods with large margins on Rank-1 and mAP value identification rates in pedestrian re-identification. Besides, our method is predominant in the efficiency of training and retrieval in contrast to other pedestrian re-identification algorithms.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document