By 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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Prado Museum Madrid Favorites
By 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 […]
Humanitas
By 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 […]
Memory, Meaning and Leaving a Mark: Eagle Pub, Cambridge
By Timothy Demy – You can’t help but look up. The ceiling is covered with decades-old graffiti. It is not the profanity or pop art so often seen today on buildings, fences, and other public and private places. It’s not even the famous “Kilroy was here.” It is the names […]
Temple of Zeus at Aizanoi, Turkey
By Jess Taylor – In late summer 2007 we decided to drive due south from Istanbul to Antalya. On day three, driving deep into central Turkey from Iznik – the modern name for ancient Nicaea but later famous for its Iznik ware porcelain in the Ottoman period – we detoured […]
Madeline Miller’s CIRCE : A Review
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – I’ve always found the Homeric sorceress Circe in the Odyssey to be fascinating in her power that transcends the feminism of any era. Having looked at many artists over five hundred years in their attempts to depict Circe, I was generally frustrated with nearly all […]
Christopher Hitchens and the Korean Tea-bowl
By Leanne Ogasawara – 1. A glance at Hobson-Jobson, the historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words in use during the British rule in India, will show that the word “loot” comes into English from Hindi, ultimately deriving from Sanskrit. It entered the English language around the time of the Opium Wars, when the […]
African Paleolithic Artifacts: Questions with Quartzite Tools from Northcliff, South Africa
By Garth C. Hall – This paper addresses the African stone age somewhat myopically, focusing on artifacts and not much on the hominins who made and used them. It also focuses geographically on South Africa, yet, at least in the Early and Middle Stone Ages, the literature indicates that the […]
Selected Collections of the Morgan Library and Museum, New York
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – The Morgan Library and Museum – formerly known as Pierpont Morgan Library – on Madison Avenue has to be one of my favorite visits in New York City. A world-class collection of medieval manuscripts and related medieval relics is certainly known and appreciated, but there’s […]
An Interactive Mapping App for “An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis”
By Jess Taylor – Mapping the Greek Polis (Poleis in plural) Where were the ancient Greek cities located? What was their sphere of influence? And what did it mean to be a polis? A pioneering body of work analyzed 1,035 ancient Greek settlements from the archaic and classical periods (c. […]