01 Nov 2010
Basquiat as Boone as Warhol
I just finished writing an entry on Jean-Michel Basquiat's strange portrait of Mary Boone when I realized I had missed something. It's an example of, no matter how much you see in truly poetic art, there is always something more. In this case, I
31 Oct 2010
Analyzing Freud and the Queen
Britain's press went nuts when Lucian Freud gave the Queen a tiny portrait of herself, just 9" x 6", and notably ugly at that. She had spent hours posing for him over 19 months. She could not have been amused. Now we reveal on the site, for
30 Oct 2010
The Frick’s Fiction
The Frick Collection's Portrait of Philip IV by Velazquez is described as one of the best portraits he ever painted. It is indeed magnificent and has just opened as a one-painting exhibition, accompanied by new explanations of what
27 Oct 2010 | 2 Comments
Van Gogh’s Nose
Noses are important in art history. Ovid's middle name was Nose, or naso in Italian, and his Metamorphoses were for centuries artistic fodder for painters and sculptors alike. Maybe that's why Michelangelo was so interested in his own nose, tell
27 Oct 2010 | 2 Comments
Van Gogh’s Eyes
Cruising along the Lungotevere on a Vespa I had time to admire the vast self-portrait of Vincent on the back of a Roman tour bus. The poster, promoting yet another one-man show of his work, had a glorious reproduction of the artist in which ever
29 Sep 2010
Rubens’ Commander is Rubens
A Rubens was recently sold at Christies described as Portrait of a Commander, three-quarter-length, being dressed for battle though any keen user of this site would recognize the image as Portrait of Rubens as a Commander being painted by two of
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
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
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
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
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
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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