Our growing archive of info about art, design, and culture.
Few royal portraits announce themselves with quite the confidence of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s Louis XIV (1638–1715), King of France. The king stands beneath a vast red curtain, wrapped in blue velvet and ermine,…
A farmer loses a hammer in an English field. A friend arrives with a metal detector to find it. Instead, the soil begins giving up Roman coins, silver spoons, gold jewellery, and…
Berlin was collapsing in the spring of 1945, but beneath its bombed streets another city existed. Museum treasures had been packed into concrete bunkers, bank vaults, cellars, mines, and emergency depots. Paintings…
A young woman sits at a small round table with a glass beneath her hand. She wears a dark dress, a pale bow at her throat, and a white apron across her…
You can sometimes spot inexperienced design before reading a single word. The typography gives the game away. A restaurant reaches for Papyrus to announce “authentic tradition.” A café discovers Lobster and suddenly…
Imagine entering a ruined kingdom at sunset. Mountains turn purple on the horizon. Grass moves in the wind while a distant melody rises almost too quietly to notice. Beyond the valley stands…
A Gothic cathedral catches the light while a storm retreats across a darkened sky. Below it, a ruler and his entourage approach a castle, a river winds through the countryside, and a…
Stand before a Pictish stone in the Scottish landscape and something curious happens. You recognize animals, weapons, riders, crosses and familiar geometric shapes, yet the stone refuses to give up its whole…
The Great Sphinx of Giza has spent part of its extraordinary life disappearing. Desert sand repeatedly swallowed its paws and climbed its enormous limestone body, leaving later generations to uncover a monument…
Master Theodoric presents us with one of the great puzzles of medieval art. We can still stand before the extraordinary paintings associated with his workshop and study the heavy faces, brilliant colors,…
Drama in art doesn’t require a battle, a storm, or someone collapsing onto a velvet chaise. Often it comes from much smaller decisions: where the light falls, what gets hidden, how much…
The Royal Palace of Madrid does not ease quietly into the skyline. It commands it. Rising above the western edge of old Madrid, the vast stone palace looks across the Campo del…