16th c. Engraving of The Lanzi (Lancers) of Cosimo I de Medici (courtesy Uffizi Gallery) By Andrea Gáldy – In sixteenth-century Florence, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici succeeded his murdered predecessor Alessandro in 1537 and, even...
Gustav Klimt, Music, 1895 (image public domain) By Malia Maxwell – To read the poet Sappho (Archaic Greek, 7th-6th c. BCE) is to embrace painful incompletion. Little of her work remains, and what we do have left carries with it...
Hell, detail in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dull Griet, 1561 By Patrick Hunt – Gehenna is an old Hebrew toponym (place name) that began as a literal, physical location – the Valley of Hinnom – and gradually...
Fig. 2 Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, ca. 1595, Capitoline Museums, Rome (Image in public domain) By Andrea M. Gáldy - Around the mid 1610s, Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629),...
Peter Paul Rubens, The Defeat of Sennacherib, ca.1612-14, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (Image in public domain) By Patrick Hunt – Historians know disease often stalks armies in history. [1] The specter of invisible pathogens...
16th c. Engraving of The Lanzi (Lancers) of Cosimo I de Medici (courtesy Uffizi Gallery) By Andrea Gáldy – In sixteenth-century Florence, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici succeeded his murdered...
Gustav Klimt, Music, 1895 (image public domain) By Malia Maxwell – To read the poet Sappho (Archaic Greek, 7th-6th c. BCE) is to embrace painful incompletion. Little of her work remains,...
Hell, detail in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dull Griet, 1561 By Patrick Hunt – Gehenna is an old Hebrew toponym (place name) that began as a literal, physical location –...
Fig. 2 Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, ca. 1595, Capitoline Museums, Rome (Image in public domain) By Andrea M. Gáldy - Around...
Peter Paul Rubens, The Defeat of Sennacherib, ca.1612-14, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (Image in public domain) By Patrick Hunt – Historians know disease often stalks armies in history....
James Gillray, "Britannia Between Scylla and Charybdis" 1793 (public domain) by Patrick Hunt How often do we use idioms as part...
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Photo in public domain) By Patrick Hunt – Most...
Castle Vaduz, Liechtenstein (Photo in public domain) By A.C. Williams – The feudal age of castles is well represented in the Rhine Valley...
Recent Stories
By Andrea Gáldy – In sixteenth-century Florence, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici succeeded his murdered predecessor Alessandro in 1537 and, even though the murderer was a close relative, knew very well what he needed to do to stay alive and in office. He had inherited a guard staffed by Italians and headed by Pirro Colonna […]
By Malia Maxwell – To read the poet Sappho (Archaic Greek, 7th-6th c. BCE) is to embrace painful incompletion. Little of her work remains, and what we do have left carries with it the stain of absence. While no amount of longing for a “completed” text can fill in her fragmented work, a reader of […]
By Patrick Hunt – Gehenna is an old Hebrew toponym (place name) that began as a literal, physical location – the Valley of Hinnom – and gradually transformed into a metaphor for hell through various processes including religious defilement. One of the immediate problems of any hermeneutics about Gehenna is the religious literariness of the […]
By Andrea M. Gáldy - Around the mid 1610s, Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629), Gerard van Honthorst (1592–1656) and Dirck van Baburen (c.1592/93–1624) spent time in Italy, particularly in Rome, where they came face to face with Caravaggio’s work. Similar to what happened to Caravaggisti from other parts of Europe, the three young painters from Utrecht […]
By Patrick Hunt – Historians know disease often stalks armies in history. [1] The specter of invisible pathogens haunting ancient warfare may have at times seemed instead like a punitive deity taking sides. Sometimes it’s merely a much simpler question of contagion and the inability to protect against it. While there is insufficient documentation to […]
By Andrea M. Gáldy – The art world likes to regard Leonardo as someone born a genius with pen and brush in his hands and plans for superlative works of art already forming in his brain. Nonetheless, Leonardo like everyone else had to learn his trade. He was apprenticed to a master able to teach him […]
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – In the 10th-11th century when Norway was transitioning from a pagan Viking land to embrace early Christianity, churches were built out of wood in much the same way ships were constructed. I was recently in Norway (June 2019) on a National Geographic Expedition and marveled at how these churches were […]
By Patrick Hunt – Otzi the Iceman from the Alpine Tyrol, found at the Similaun-Tisjoch summit of the Otztal Alps in 1991, is now the most famous “mummy” of all time, eclipsing the mummy of Ramses II from New Kingdom Egypt (circa 1300 BCE) not only in what science can reveal from examining his preserved […]
By Andrea M. Gáldy – Leonardo is dead, but he has never been as popular as now. Almost exactly 500 years ago, he died in France. By then, Leonardo had long left his native Vinci, had been apprenticed to Verrocchio in Florence and had spent time working in Rome, Milan and Venice as well as […]
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is well known as a Neoclassical engraver of Roman monuments and shadowed architectural fantasies (such as invented or imaginary carcere or “prisons”). But his work as a pioneer in archaeology is not as familiar, although his work provides ample details about the state of Roman ruins […]
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