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Five Old and Broken Statues, Models of Perfection 20 Aug 2013 | 01:08 am
In Michelangelo’s time people were crazy about the past. They worshipped old Rome; they considered it a better world where people were wiser, braver, and more beautiful. An example: In 1487, when Mic...
Nude Drawing 14 May 2013 | 04:10 pm
Life drawing sessions haven’t changed in centuries. There are good sketches of them by many of the great artists. But in particular there is a wonderful painting in the Louvre by an eighteenth-century...
Dante: Michelangelo’s Bedtime Reading 9 Mar 2013 | 05:31 pm
Nowadays it’s hard to understand how that long poem, how any poem, could have meant so much to people. Educated men and women knew many verses of the Divine Comedy by heart. Even private letters are f...
St. Peter’s Chair 11 Feb 2013 | 11:10 am
Bernini’s next job was to do something with St. Peter’s chair. It wasn’t really St. Peter’s but it was a very old chair. St. Peter’s Stool , Vatican (see a larger version) By Bernini’s time it was tak...
Few Can Beat Old Bruegel 5 Sep 2012 | 12:00 am
Nobody puts a world in a picture like Pieter Bruegel. Look at this winter scene. Pieter Bruegel’s Return of the Hunters (Wikimedia public domain photo) You are alive in 1565. You lived in old Flanders...
The Prado Museum, Madrid 31 Jul 2012 | 10:30 pm
A vitalist like Ernest Hemingway stayed away from museums. He liked to meet the living, not the dead; he avoided the catalogued and the stuffed. Bill Davis, Rupert Bellville, and Ernest Hemingway dini...
Andrea del Sarto’s Evil Angel 10 Jul 2012 | 02:04 pm
Lucrezia by Andrea del Sarto She hangs on a wall of the Prado Museum in Madrid, ever bewitching. Who painted her? Her husband, Andrea del Sarto, who was crazy about her, to his great bad luck. He was ...
That Dalí Was Such a Clown 20 Mar 2012 | 12:14 am
Salvador Dalí and Man Ray, Paris, by Carl Van Vechten (public domain photo) Did you hear about his little number at art school, for his final exam? “Choose a period in art history and tell us about it...
Velasquez Dreamed of Becoming Somebody 8 Mar 2012 | 07:35 pm
Nobody is ever happy. Take Diego Velasquez. He could paint better than anyone. All the painters in Spain envied him. Here is one of his early works, a boy and an old woman in the kitchen cooking eggs....
Oscar Wilde’s Grave 16 Feb 2012 | 01:05 am
You are a sculptor and Oscar Wilde’s friend Robert Ross asks you to make a monument for his grave. You remember Oscar’s wit as you heard it in his play The Importance of Being Ernest, and a story you ...
