Neoromanian style picture frames – 2

I published in February this year an article about Neo-Romanian style picture frames, which was exceedingly popular among my blog readers. The present one is its second part, showing another two exquisite such artefacts from the prized collection of architect Madalin Ghigeanu to whom I am grateful to allowing the publication of their images on Historic Houses of Romania blogsite.

The picture frame illustrated above is on the same pattern as the one described in the precedent article, as Brancovan church portals. The Byzantine arch is adorned with geometrised Georgian and Armenian latticework motifs inspired from the Curtea de Arges cathedral, supported by two short columns decorated with the rope symbol (they can also be interpreted as a mixed representation of the ethnographic motif of the rope and Solomonic column shaft). The pediment of the arch contain two beautiful six ray solar discs inspired from the Indo-European ethnography. Fittingly the photograph hosted by this frame is that of Crown Princess Marie in the 1890s, in a Romanian peasant costume (it is from Arges ethnographic area in southern Romania, given to her as a present by Queen Elisabeth of Romania, a keen promoter of the Romanian national identity in art and architecture; ref: “Marie of Romania. Images of a Queen”, author Diana Mandache, Rosvall Royal Books 2007 http://royalromania.wordpress.com/about-me/).

The second frame has an ethnographic character, decorated with pleasant to the eye combinations of half and quarter solar disks. Its sides are arrayed in an attractive “H” shape. The picture inside that “H” is that of Queen Marie of Romania and her youngest daughter Princess Ileana in peasant costumes at Bran Castle, their property in the Transylvanian Alps, on the former border between the old princedoms of Transylvania and Wallachia.