The Jacobean Grand Tour: Early Stuart Travellers in Europe
Although the eighteenth century is traditionally seen as the age of the Grand Tour, it was in fact the continental travel of Jacobean noblemen which really constituted the beginning of the Tour as an institutionalized phenomenon. James I's peace treaty with Spain in 1604 rendered travel to Catholic Europe both safer and more respectable than it had been under the Tudors and opened up the continent to a new generation of aristocratic explorers, enquirers and adventurers. This book examines the political and cultural significance of the encounters that resulted, focusing in particular on two of England's greatest, and newly united, families: the Cecils and the Howards. It also considers the ways in which Protestants and Catholics experienced the aesthetic and intellectual stimulus of European travel and how the cultural experiences of the travellers formed the essential ingredients in what became the Grand Tour.
Andrew Marvell: Traveling Tutor
It is well known that Marvell tutored the daughter of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, at Nun Appleton at the start of the 1650s. This article attempts to shed light on his less well-known stints of tutoring young gentlemen in the late 1640s and mid-1650s. It establishes the distinctive characteristics of the traveling tutor, responsible for the education and governance of a young gentleman on the tour. And it considers the opportunities for advancement, in both private and public service, presented by such responsibilities, briefly examining the successful careers of other such tutors. Curricular traces of Marvell’s tutoring are found in his poetry and prose, and the suggestion is advanced that Marvell’s experience was thought to have prepared him for, and may have led him to expect, a high-profile public career: a career which did not, in the end, materialize.
Multi-layer inpainting on Chinese artwork
Digital inpainting uses spatial or frequency information to restore partially damaged/removed photos and artworks. Most restoration algorithms take a picture as a single layer. We propose a new approach, which subdivides a Chinese painting into several layers. Each layer is inpainted separately. The layer fusion mechanism then finds the optimal inpaint among layers, which are restored layer-bylayer. We apply the algorithm on Chinese and western drawing. The result shows a high PSNR value as well as a high user satisfaction. The demonstration of our work is available at: http://www.mine.tku.edu.tw/demos/inpaint.