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 […]
Other News
Music in Vermeer: A Selection of Brilliance in The Music Lesson and The Guitar Player
By 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, […]
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 […]
Possible Chinese Silk in Bronze Age or Iron Age Jericho: the “Babylonish” Garment from Shin’ar in Joshua 7 ?
By 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 […]
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 […]
Olaf and the Axe Iconography in Norway – Undredal, 12th c. Stave Church Depiction?
By Patrick Hunt – Olaf Tryggvason Olaf I Tryggvason (ca. 960-1000 CE) was the Viking king who forcibly began to Christianize the people of Norway at the end of the 10th century, a change suggested at times by his detractors as conversion forced at swordpoint. If depicted as a bloody […]
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 […]
Vikings Renavigated in RIVER KINGS Book – A Review
By Patrick Hunt – Vikings continue to be a magnetic topic, especially in light of new discoveries of ships, burials and sites that enable us to concentrate more on their far-flung commercial savvy and technology than the weary and skewed caricature of merely violent rapacity. Anyone who has been to […]
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 […]