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 […]
By Patrick Hunt – How many books do we read that fulfill three major vital requisites: open up realms of unexplored territory, correct long-held misapprehensions, and unearth and carefully document sources of some of what we take for granted? When Hilary Mantel [1] states Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell (Viking, 2018) […]
By Andrea M. Gáldy – When Captain James Cook left for the first of his three expeditions to the Pacific in 1768, he stood in a long line of naval explorers looking for new routes and continents. His ship was appropriately named Endeavour and the task ahead was daunting. Cook […]
By P. F. Sommerfeldt – The names Palekh and Kholuy, like Fedoskino and Mstera, may be only obscure villages in the Vladimir-Suzdal Ivanovo region of Russia to many people, but their rich legacy of lacquerware is anything but obscure. I first fell in love with Russian lacquerware when we lived […]
By Adrian Arima – How long have humans brewed beer? Patrick McGovern, the world’s foremost historian of ancient brews, hints in Ancient Brews (2017) that this activity has been around possibly at least for 11,000 years based on vessels from Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia (Turkey). How sophisticated was brewing in […]
By Alessandra Scola- Villa Monastero is one of the several monumental villas mostly built or enlarged between the 17th and 19th centuries on one of the long coasts of Lake Como (also known in antiquity as Lago Lario) the deepest Italian lake. The villa is located in Varenna, an enchanting […]
Fig. 1 Pont du Gard side view (photo P. Hunt, 2015) By David S. Spain, Ph.D. – One of the favorite examples of Roman aqueduct technology is the famous Pont du Gard in southern France. The arcaded Pont du Gard is part of the 50 km long aqueduct from springs […]