Fresco fragment from Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross, portraying Constantine’s victory over Maxentius in 312. In Arezzo, Italy, Cappella Bacci. I took hundreds of photographs while I was away, but the one I keep returning to is this fragment. A segment from one of the more damaged frescos by Piero della Francesca […]
Antiquities
- Antiquities
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Outside the Line of Time
Passageway in Jerusalem I just returned from journeying eastward. We spent our first week in Israel for a wedding (mazel tov, Idan and Shelly) and then to Rome for a crash course in all things Roman thanks to our favorite art historians, daughter Kellin and her husband Sean. Roman ingenuity and technological prowess are staggering […]
- Aesthetics
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Pieced Cloth
Fragment of cloth in the Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably, be undone. –Jacques Derrida, Positions Sometimes it isn’t just about the whole cloth. This past weekend I thought a lot about fragments, about the shards of incompleteness that are “continually, […]
- Antiquities
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Powers of Life and Death
Lights at a roadside shrine In his introduction to Tantra Song (written about previously here) Lawrence Rinder invites us into the world of Tantric images by describing how he feels when he is out in the countryside, looking at the trees and the stars: I have little idea what I am looking at, even though […]
The Gift of Time
Two women stroll among the walls of Halebid, built in the 9th century Sharing experiences from travels is a bit like sharing dreams: The iconography and narrative are personal and not well suited for public discourse. So other than sharing the rudimentaries, my report on my time in India will be succinct. A phrase or […]
- Antiquities
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History in a Box
A shamsa (literal meaning, “sun”) from the Met’s new Islamic Art wing One of my favorite books right now is Between Artists: Twelve Contemporary American Artists Interview Twelve Contemporary American Artists. I have so much more to say about this book, and hopefully I will write about it in more detail later on. But right […]
Eternally Artful
Some images never grow old, never fade in color on that screen of our life that lives at the back of the mind. Some of the images that live on for me were created 18,000 years ago, in southern France. I remember the first time I saw ever saw cave painting art. I was a […]
Gimbutas’ Old Europe
Female Figurine (front and back), Cucuteni, Drăguşeni, 4050-3900 BC, Botoşani County Museum, Botoşani (Photo: Marius Amarie) Anthropomorphic Vessel, Gumelniţa, Sultana, 4600-3900 BC, National History Museum of Romania, Bucharest (Photo: Marius Amarie) John Noble Wilford has written a fascinating article in the Science section of the New York Times (its location in the paper is telling) […]
Venus of Hohle Fels
The latest “venus figurine” find from the Hohle Fels cave in Germany is an extraordinary portrayal of the female form. Wow. This one is a knock out. So expressive, so wildly physical. What baffles me is the word used in much of the press coverage of this 35,000 year old sculpture: pornographic. Hello? Pornographic because […]
Palm Leaf Painting
(detail) One of the most beguiling things I found while in India was palm leaf “books,” made from thin strips of dried palm leaves and threaded together to fold up accordion-style. Copies of this ancient tradition have been made into tourist souvenirs, but the early versions that we saw in museum collections are stunning. We […]