"Fit Cradle of the Reviving Art": An inquiry into the the Evolving Material Reality of the Murals in the Camposanto of Pisa from the Perspective of their British Reception from the 17th to the 19th century

The Camposanto of Pisa is an extraordinarily complex and evocative monument, which has captured the imagination of pilgrims, both religious and secular, for centuries. The late Medieval and early Renaissance wall paintings that line the perimeter of the portico surrounding a vast inner courtyard, are unparalleled in early Italian art, not only for their striking variety of composition and narrative complexity, but also for the sheer grandeur of their proportion. However, the passage of time has scarred the structure of the Camposanto and inflicted terrible damage on its wall paintings. This thesis explores the material reality of the Camposanto as experienced over three centuries through the eyes of British travelers. In order to situate the Camposanto mural cycle within an historical and cultural context, the first chapter provides an overview of the construction and decoration of the monument. Notably, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), the Italian Humanist often recognized as the father of art history, included numerous descriptions of the Camposanto murals in his highly influential text Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori. Accordingly, the second chapter provides an analysis of Vasari’s descriptions and reflects upon the influence that the Renaissance author may have had upon the subsequent British reception of the Camposanto murals. The third chapter utilizes three centuries of travel writing in order to investigate the aesthetic impact of the Camposanto mural cycle upon British tourists from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century.

DESIGN OF A MINIATURIZED SOP INTEGRATED GNSS RF FRONT-END MODULE

Navigation devices used to be bulky and expensive and were not widely commercialized for personal use. Nowadays, all useful electronic devices are turning into being handheld so that they can be conveniently used anytime and anywhere. One can claim that almost any mobile phone, used today, has quite strong navigational capabilities that can efficiently work anywhere in the globe. No matter where you are, you can easily know your exact location and make your way smoothly to wherever you would like to go. This couldn’t have been made possible without the existence of efficient and small microwave circuits responsible for the transmission and reception of high quality navigation signals. This thesis is mainly concerned with the design of novel highly miniaturized and efficient filtering components working in the Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) frequency band to be integrated within an efficient Radio Frequency (RF) front-end module (FEM). A System-on-Package (SoP) integration technique is adopted for the design of all the components in this thesis. Two novel miniaturized filters are designed, where one of them is a wideband filter targeting the complete GNSS band with a fractional bandwidth of almost 50% at a center frequency of 1.385 GHz. This filter utilizes a direct inductive coupling topology to achieve the required wide band performance. It also has very good out-of-band rejection and low IL. Whereas the other dual band filter will only cover the lower and upper GNSS bands with a rejection notch in between the two bands. It has very good inter band rejection. The well-known “divide and conquer” design methodology was applied for the design of this filter to help save valuable design and optimization time. Moreover, the performance of two commercially available ultra-Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) is studied. The complete RF FEM showed promising preliminary performance in terms of noise figure, gain and bandwidth, where it out performed other commercial front-ends in these three aspects. All the designed circuits are fabricated and tested. The measured results are found to be in good agreements with the simulations.