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Remnants Of A Pre-industrial World – Derek Jeter
Think of a portrait as a landscape Mary Tompkins Lewis was announcing in the WSJ recently a new exhibition at the Frick Collection in NYC: A suntanned traveler from Southern California is currently...
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Sinners and Saints By Bruce Boucher
According to a legend popular in Caravaggio’s time, after Christ’s death his faithful female disciple Mary of Magdala moved to southern France, where she lived as a hermit in a cave at Sainte-Beune...
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El Greco The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586), A Vision of Faith — Mary...
El Greco (1541-1614) The Funeral of Count Orgaz, 1586. Oil on canvas, 460cm x 360cm. Location: S. Tome, Toledo, Spain His pictorial language defies the laws and logic of material reality to conjure...
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Old Subject, New Approach — Richard Cork
By breaking away from the domestic context favored in so many other treatments of the Annunciation, Jan van Eyck created an image packed with coded messages about the triumph of the new faith over the...
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The God of Beauty 1 – Paul Johnson
The Catholic ruler of a West African state has been much abused for building in his capital a huge cathedral only slightly smaller in size than St Peter’s itself. He should, it is argued, have spent...
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The God of Beauty 2 – Paul Johnson
There is, indeed, a certain holiness about the body, in both its male and its female varieties, and it is with some reverence that we should approach it — there is a connection with the divine. That...
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The Power Of Art — Gregory Wolfe
A Blue tit at a reflection pool at the Woodland Feeding Station Hide in Worcestershire UK. “We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to...
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Gustave Courbet: Woman with a Parrot – 1866 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Courbet was no stranger to controversy. He was a man of strong political views which occasionally erupted into activism, in particular during the revolutionary year of 1848 and the Commune in 1871. He...
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Alonso Berruguete’s ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’ — Mary Tompkins Lewis
Ms. Lewis teaches art history at Trinity College, Hartford. A recent article reblogged from the WSJ. **************************** The ancient story of Abraham and his beloved young son Isaac is...
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Beauty and Desecration 1 — Roger Scruton
The West’s great landscape painters, like the eighteenth-century JMW Turner, capture the intimations of the eternal in the transient. We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness....
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