
Images: Gustave Courbet
Take a look through some of the best paintings of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Is the general claim true, that in … Continue Reading Images: Gustave Courbet
Take a look through some of the best paintings of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Is the general claim true, that in … Continue Reading Images: Gustave Courbet
Picasso’s Blue Period–or basically anything he did before Cubism–has always struck me as more powerful than anything he did later, … Continue Reading Picasso’s Blue Sympathies
Manet’s 1862 painting The Old Musician is a great human riddle. Just what everybody is doing here, and why they’re … Continue Reading Manet the Mystic
The affront that many of Caravaggio’s greatest paintings presented to their first audience must have been astonishing: casting a local … Continue Reading Caravaggio’s Dirty Feet
from John Richardson’s biography of Picasso: When questioned much later about his earliest sexual experience, Picasso claimed that his sex … Continue Reading Picasso & Sex
As I’ve written elsewhere: “Except for his earliest work, there were no grand subjects in Vermeer, and very little else … Continue Reading Vermeer’s Window on the Left, Vermeer’s Late Afternoon Light
For some reason the Mérode Altarpiece, painted in the late 1420s by Robert Campin, has become an obsession of mine. … Continue Reading The Mysteries of Mérode
I first came across Claude Lorrain’s fantasies of classical Greece and Rome on the cover of an old paperback of … Continue Reading Claude Lorrain’s Nostalgia for What Never Was
It’s too bad Nicholas Poussin’s Shepherds of Arcady/Et in Arcadia (Even in Arcadia, there am I) can’t get much attention … Continue Reading The Painting that Lit a Million Conspiracy Theories
from Thomas Cahill’s Heretics and Heroes: In a collection of travel essays published in 1925, Aldous Huxley had called Piero … Continue Reading Aldous Huxley Saves the Day
Click on each picture to enlarge, or watch the video:
Click on each picture to enlarge, or watch the video:
Click on each picture to enlarge, or watch the video:
Click on each image to enlarge, or watch the video:
Click on the image to enlarge, or watch the video:
One of the great jazz standards of Medieval & Renaissance art, here’s only a selection of all the depictions of … Continue Reading Images: The Saint & the Lion
The way I heard it, Salvador Dali saw a reproduction of Millet’s Angelus in his classroom during childhood, and it … Continue Reading Images: The Painting Salvador Dali Couldn’t Get Away From
The French painter and model Victorine Meurent (1844-1927) appears in some of the most famous of Édouard Manet’s paintings. Click … Continue Reading Images: Manet’s Muse, Victorine Meurent
The number of Rembrandt’s self-portraits alone far outnumber the entire output of many artists. Here is only a fraction of … Continue Reading Images: Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits
From Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of da Vinci, here is about as concise and colorful a summary of how true … Continue Reading Michelangelo & Leonardo da Vinci