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Artifacts of Material History“Eccentric” British Museum Favorites
1 week agoBy P. F. Sommerfeldt – I spend a fair amount of time in museums, perhaps too much, but I usually don’t need a deep reason to enter a museum whether I’ve been there often or not to revisit favorite objects or works. Because a museum is literally a “House of […]
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ArtMusic in Vermeer: A Selection of Brilliance in The Music Lesson and The Guitar Player
2 months agoBy Patrick Hunt – Introduction Significant prior studies have summarized and at times specifically delineated the ways Vermeer employed music in his carefully-wrought and subtly staged mise-en-scène genre paintings. One of the most recent and fairly comprehensive is Marjorie Wieseman’s excellent Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure, […]
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ArtPrado Museum Madrid Favorites
3 months agoBy P. F. Sommerfeldt – A day at the National Prado Museum in Madrid is never enough, but there are always my landmark works of art to see when there. More Titians than one can easily count, and the Velazquez portraits are a Spanish Baroque force majeur, and the Goya […]
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Artifacts of Material History, ControversiesPossible Chinese Silk in Bronze Age or Iron Age Jericho: the “Babylonish” Garment from Shin’ar in Joshua 7 ?
3 months agoBy Patrick Hunt – One of the more intriguing passages of the Hebrew Bible, Joshua 7: 10-23 & ff. describes the sin of Achan and his “accursed” secret purloined material spoliation after the taking of Jericho by the Israelites, a narrative with controversial historicity. Regardless of when it can be […]
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PhilosophyHumanitas
4 months agoBy Walter Borden, M.D. – Before the beginning there was mythology, mysticism, a miasma of beliefs. Might was right, savagery ruled. It was truly dark. Then, in the 6th century BCE, a burst of light, a blossoming, a cultural epiphany, the birth of the first Enlightenment in classical Greece. The light was the […]
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