Museum-goers, this author included, are often guilty of walking past still life paintings of food, dismissing them as dull and anodyne. Yet, taking in the context of when they were created, these works of feasts and even ordinary fare are often as political as they are historical.
Interviews & Essays
“Madonna and Child” is a 16th-century painting by Renaissance artist Antonio Solario, also known as Lo Zingaro, whose other works can be found in London’s National Gallery. After being acquired in 1872, the painting safely resided in the civic museum of Belluno, a quaint town nestled in northern Italy’s Dolomite mountains.
So much of what we know about art comes from art historians, but how much do we know about the art historians themselves?
Franz von Stuck (1863-1928) was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, and architect.
In the second installment in our series on jewelry’s place in art history, we’re exploring jewelry collecting in the Renaissance, a time when jewels were considered as valuable to possess and display as painting and sculpture.
The course of this global pandemic has left many feeling shattered and searching for distraction. Derived from two small Japanese words meaning golden and joining, kintsugi is fundamentally about ‘beautifully mending a broken thing.’
When we think of Leonardo da Vinci’s most notable works, it would be easy to assume the women behind the Mona Lisa or Lady with an Ermine were his muses. One may therefore be surprised to discover that his pupils, Gian Giacomo Caprotti and Francesco Melzi, have the honor of this distinguishment.
Summertime’s gardens have long inspired artists and botanists. Botanical illustration emerged around the time of Plato, more than 2,000 years ago. The medium launched not as a fine art, but as a record-keeping device and a teaching tool. At the time, botany and medicine essentially were one and the same.
Since its 1996 debut, Pokémon has grown into a worldwide, pop-cultural phenomenon. For Japanese fans, however, Pokémon carries far more cultural significance due to its strong connection to the still widely practiced Shinto faith.
Can the visual arts capture movement in stillness? This slideshow traces the representation of dance, particularly of dancing groups, through western art history with special attention paid to the trope’s Grecian origins. Maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, and Nymphs, usually following Hermes or Pan, are among the most popular dancing Greek figures.
