Digital Earth in a Transformed Society

<p>Last September, about 400 delegates gathered in Florence, Italy from all over the world, to attend the 11th International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE11). The Opening Plenary session (held in the historic Salone dei Cinquecento at Palazzo Vecchio) included a celebration ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the International Symposium on Digital Earth, which was initiated in Beijing, China in November 1999 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).</p><p>In the framework of ISDE11, about 30 sessions illustrated the various challenges and opportunities in building a Digital Earth. They included five Grand Debates and Plenary sessions dealing with issues related to: “Trust and Ethics in Digital Earth”; “Digital Earth for United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”; “ISDE in a Transformed Society”; “Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Transformation”; and “New Knowledge Ecosystems.” Moreover, ISDE11 endorsed and approved a new Declaration by the International Society for the Digital Earth (i.e. the 2019 ISDE Florence Declaration) that, after 10 years, lays the path to a new definition of Digital Earth that will be finalized in the first months of 2020.</p><p>This presentation will discuss the main outcomes of ISDE11 as well as the future vision of Digital Earth in a Transformed Society.</p>

A Firenze messe le basi per una Piattaforma internazionale per una corretta gestione delle risorse idriche sotterranee

II 10 dicembre, in occasione della Giornata dei Diritti umani si è tenuto a Firenze, nella monumentale Sala dei Cinquecento di Palazzo Vecchio, il 1° Workshop su: “Uso delle risorse idriche sotterranee in periodi siccitosi. Esperienze dalla Toscana al resto del mondo”, organizzato dalla Sezione Italiana dell’Associazione Internazionale degli Idrogeologi (IAH) con Aquifera onlus e patrocinato, oltre che dalla Regione Toscana e dal Comune di Firenze (che ha gentilmente concesso l’uso della sala), dalla Società Geologica Italiana (SGI), dal Consiglio Nazionale dei Geologi (CNG) e dal’IAH-Burdon Groundwater Network for International Development [...].

A local Renaissance: Florentine Quattrocento palaces and all’antica styles1

Florence is a city which demonstrates the power of Local Renaissance traditions and how they could delay the introduction of all’antica architecture. Authoritative medieval communal buildings, particularly the Palazzo Vecchio, established an architectural vocabulary which was appropriated for palaces, which, as a rule, were provided with massive rusticated ground-floors or, later, with rusticated corners running up their full height; the majority of Florentine palaces of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento are of this type and were notable for the absence of the orders. The resistance to the orders is remarkable since painters and sculptors had frequently represented buildings, usually biblical or antique, with orders on the façades: and the use on palaces of stucco decoration which represented the orders may have predated the only example of a palace façade decorated with three different orders, Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai. The power of this tenacious tradition of palace façade- building is powerfully demonstrated by the fate of the Palazzo Rucellai, which, assessed in terms of its influence in Florence, was a failure; no architect copied it. Other examples of attempts to adjust, enrich or disrupt the local tradition of façade-building – particularly Palazzo Medici Riccardi and the Palazzo Bartolini Salimbeni - are discussed.

Freeing Leonardo da Vinci’s Fight for the Standard in the Hall of the Five Hundred at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio

In June 2017, the author wrote an article in the International Journal of Social Science Studies in which he hypothesized that the Hall of the Five Hundred at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio has been protecting the central piece of Leonardo da Vinci’s mural Battle of Anghiari: The Fight for the Standard (La lotta per lo stendardo) under Giorgio Vasari’s painting Battle of Marciano for 512 years now. On the evening of August 10, 2017, the author read a veiled message left by Vasari: The vertical line that passes through the center of the Battle of Marciano also passes through the center of the Fight for the Standard. On the evening of August 15, the author read a second secret message left by Vasari: The bottom of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari aligns with the floor of the Hall of the Five Hundred. Beyond previous hypotheses, the author envisions here that, after drilling a 1/2-inch hole at 0.915 meters from the floor, on the vertical line that leaves the virtual larynx of the screaming supine soldier in the Battle of Marciano, a laparoscope will point at the virtual larynx of the yelling prostrate soldier in the Fight for the Standard. Our wild assault against the wild and against humanistic intelligence is unsustainable. From a humanistic standpoint, the quantum-computing search to see again the classical-computing conflict attached to the Fight for the Standard will lead to a global Renaissance: The union of ancient knowledge about social values with modern scientific and technological skills will dispel global warming and fundamentalist-driven terrorism, while freeing our descendants to explore the cosmos in the next 7000 years.

Giorgio Vasari and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Medicean Appetite for Peace and Glory

<p>This study examines the literary and visual connections between war and peace as a cultural diplomacy made by both Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). The approach here is iconographical, focusing on three points. First, Machiavelli’s notions of condottiere, virtù, and war and peace in The Art of War (1521) are discussed in relation to Renaissance imagery, particularly in that produced as a result of Medicean patronage. Second, Vasari’s battle cycle in the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio (1555-60) in Florence is examined within the context of peace as revealed in Renaissance art and emblems. Finally, Vasari’s assimilation of Machiavelli’s notions of the art of war are interpreted in relation to the painting cycle, which visually embodies the paradox of war and peace discussed in Machiavelli’s writing. </p>