Hello, DU! Here’s your Friday Afternoon Challenge: Double Take!

[Iterate]

58. 2a and 2b are...

more easily solved than people think.

I thought someone else might recognize it in the morning and answer, but since no one has, here it is with its awkwardly arrived conclusion.

I had picked out a few elements from the motif in 2a and did what our little primate brains must do, which is to force a narrative, however wrong, onto a few observations when the background is strong and observations are thin. As an aside, I think that bit of metacognition alone qualifies your weekly thread for GD, because it's what people do here, argue a narrative that explains an observation.

In this case the "background" was a biennial immersion into British history. I had seen the image, and I read it this time as 18th or early 19th century and British. Needless to say, it was quite a challenge to give it more context than that. So I gave up. It was the right move.

Looking again, the level of refinement, a queen who copies, collects art, and isn't Prussian, a crucifix at the end of a marble hall, I mindlessly went to the Hermitage site.

2a is the The Raphael Loggias in the Hermitage. I'll let the site do the heavy lifting of describing it:

"This splendid gallery is a reproduction of Raphael's celebrated Loggias, erected in the Vatican Palace and painted by Raphael and his pupils. The Hermitage copy of the Vatican frescoes was produced in tempera by a group of artists under Cristopher Unterberger. The vaults of the gallery are decorated with paintings based upon Biblical stories. The walls are covered with human and animal forms interwoven with flowers and foliage. Such decorative ornamentation was found in the ruins of Nero's Golden House and was called grotesques. The Raphael Loggias in the Hermitage reveal the links of 18th-century Classicism with Renaissance and Classical art. "

Link with panoramic view:
http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/08/hm88_0_1_31.html

2b is the copied Loggia by Raphael in the Apostolic Palace in Rome. There's much more to his story, but time is short,

It only makes sense that the neoclassical would be part of a "double-take".

Thanks so much for these threads. You never know what people will learn from your posting.