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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Andrea M. Gáldy – Thomas Kren with Jill Burke and Stephen J. Campbell (eds.), The Renaissance Nude, Getty Publications: Los Angeles 2018. The Renaissance Nude, The Royal Academy of the Arts, London, 3 March to 2 June 2019, organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Royal Academy […]
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – When you are first driven through the park gatehouse for the Schlosshotel Kronberg nestled in the lower forested slopes of the Taunus Mountains of Germany above Frankfurt and see its grandeur of towers and steep roofs, it is fairly obvious it was originally a royal […]