The Pastoral Concert

Ranged around the walls of the Hall of Psyche in the Palazzo Te in Mantua, framing images of frolicking naked gods, goddesses, and nymphs, is an...

ÉDOUARD MANET GREW up on the rue des Petits-Augustins (now the rue Bonaparte), more or less across the street from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts he never attended. The address was a short walk down the quay and across the bridge from the Palais de Justice where Manet’s father worked; indeed, many judges and magistrates lived nearby. As a family of a certain social standing,...

~~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,...

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....

The paragone between painting and sculpture was an issue that increasingly concerned Renaissance writers on art. Whether a painting could communicate expressive meaning as effectively and as affectingly as a poem had, however, been a recurrent theme in intellectual debate from at least the time of Dante. In his celebrated comment on Giotto’s new ascendancy over Cimabue in Purgatorio XI, Dante makes a clear comparison between these two painters and the two great poets of …