Birth of Venus

Between 1902 and now, the French definition of the author has gone vague: the author is a general case, an orphan; some say corpse. It is a definition too diffuse to be useful; worse, it has stripped the author of distinction. As if in flight from such a fate, lately...

What separates the woman with whom I have spent most of my life or my closest friend from others whose paths have crossed mine for shorter or more scattered times...

One of the most famous scandals in the history of art broke out when Edouard Manet’s Olympia (​Plate 5​) was first exhibited in the Salon of 1865...

~~After playing a role in visualizing the French Revolution, color was subject to its own upheaval in the nineteenth century, first in materials, then in making. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, chemistry had replaced alchemy. Building on the classification of the elements and using modern experimental scientific methods,...

~~John Vanderlyn had the world ahead of him. It was the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the young American who was living in Paris had already won acclaim for two powerful history paintings that had proven him to be not only up-to-date in his pictorial aesthetics but also strikingly political.

James McCabe, the American visitor, was convinced that Louis Napoleon had enacted Meryon’s “Loi Solaire.” His account of Second Empire Paris is especially revealing when placed alongside Henry Tuckerman’s. Tuckerman saw through the sheen of imperial splendor to the authoritarian power it disguised....