The paper* proposes to the readers some impressions from the architecture of the medieval Palace of the Knights of St. John, called also “Palace of the Grand Master”. The text is divided into four chapters, entitled:
1. About the Architecture
2. 2. The Palace of Rhodes
3. 3. The Second Message.
4. 4. The Restorers.
The initial suggestion of the paper is: the architecture of the medieval fortification buildings, together with its practical purposes, evokes some feelings (or emotional dispositions). It is supposed that these feelings could be contradictory.
On the one hand, the dweller or the newcomer (nowadays the visitor) could be struck by the unusual highness and thickness of the walls, the narrowness of the passages and the windows, the lack of some elementary (from the modern point of view) safety and comfort measures; therefore he/she could be pushed to negative sentiments like fear, anxiety, feeling of dependence or helplessness.
On the other hand these severe conditions could evoke in the dweller (here we are thinking firstly about the medieval knights as Christian soldiers) other dispositions – bravery, military discipline, readiness for self-sacrifice or even for martyrdom.
At the last chapter some speculations are proposed about the way this ambiguity of feelings in front of a architectural work could be put in the context of the fascist world-view (the Palace was thoroughly restored by the Italian government of the island at the beginning of the Second World War) and therefore how a modern ideology could use the characteristics of a traditional art for its own purposes.
*the paper is published in:
Mediaevalia Christiana, 1: Power - Image - Imagining. 2005, Iztok-Zapad Publishing House
(Thomas Cole, The Architect's Dream. 1840. Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio)
From Web Gallery of Art - http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/cole/architec.html
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