26 Sep 2010

Face It! Anthea is Parmigianino

Fifteen years ago a computer scientist named Lillian Schwartz published her discovery that the proportions of the Mona Lisa’s face matched those of Leonardo in his famous Self-Portrait almost exactly, too exactly to be coincidence.1 Art hi

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15 Sep 2010

Sense and Nonsense about Caravaggio

Every writer from Caravaggio's day to our own has spoken of the artist's astonishing realism. One critic wrote a century after his birth that Caravaggio:

"recognized no other master than the model, without selecting [as artists

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04 Sep 2010

The Error of “Errors”

Allowing an art lover to interpret art on their own is the purpose of this site and we reveal many ways to do so. This tip, though, is so effective at finding a route into the artist's meaning that I reveal with it some hesitation: the artis

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03 Sep 2010

Window of a Roman Art Gallery

I have been arguing for years that the concept every painter paints himself is alive and well in the art world, even if art scholars are unaware of it. So I was particularly delighted when I came across this notice posted on the window of an art

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10 Aug 2010

Ambiguities in Art

Everyone who has ever studied art knows that one of the common characteristics of great masterpieces is that they do not make sense. For instance, just as Velazquez in Las Meninas paints a picture from an impossible viewpoint so the mirror in Ma

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22 Jul 2010

Don’t you find it odd that….?

Don’t you find it odd that, according to the conventional paradigm, a visual artist active between the Renaissance and 1900 had only two choices? He or she could either illustrate a story (biblical, historical, literary etc.) or copy natur

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