There is perhaps no other reason to write about Nero than the fact that the Great Fire of Rome occurred in July, starting on July 18th to be precise, and ending on July 27th, 64 A.D., once little or nothing was left of the built environment in ten out of fourteen districts of what was…
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Autour des expositions Napoléon n’est plus et Napoléon ? Encore ! Au Musée de l’Armée, Paris, 2021 A l’occasion du bicentenaire de la mort de Napoléon, à qui sont consacrées plusieurs expositions, il n’est pas inintéressant de réfléchir à son image : comment elle a été construite de son vivant puis dans le siècle qui a suivi sa…
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One of the most exciting contemporary achievements in the art of stained-glass can be found on the windows of the cathedral Saint Cyr et Sainte Julitte of Nevers, now a sleepy small town in the centre of France. Stained-glass is an often-neglected art form, probably because it is intimately linked to the universe of religious…
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There is an ancient covenant between art and immortality. A brief visit to any castle or museum on the Old Continent will immediately reveal a key dimension of painting or sculpture, and that is conferring immortality – or perhaps only a temporary victory over time, which is but death in waiting – to an event…
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In his masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes wrote the following: “Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds…
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(Article in French here-below / Article en français ci-dessous) Museo del Risorgimento, Torino Are selfies an art form by themselves, part of the wider realm of photography, or a mere manifestation of narcissism and self-consciousness mostly of interest to psychoanalysis ? This question is not going to be answered here. Although a clue may be…
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Ca’Pesaro, Venice, 2019 Ca’ Pesaro has taken the bold and useful step, on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, to organize a large retrospective – the first Italian one – of an unjustly neglected painter of the first half of the twentieth century, Arshile Gorky; the last such event is probably the Tate Modern retrospective…
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…and the rebellion against the straight line Exhibition curated by Alistair Hicks, Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp, 16 March – 25 May 2019 The idea of the exhibition is particularly interesting, and to some degree provocative as the title suggests. The well-know 1908 essay of Adolf Loos, “Ornament and crime”, identified simplicity, “purity”, as the key…
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Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, 16 March – 9 June 2019 The National Gallery of Umbria presents an original exhibition on the iconology of soap bubbles, a hitherto rather neglected topic of art history. The first meaning of the soap bubble is that of a vanitas, a symbol of the frailty of life and constant proximity…
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National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2019 The ambition of the exhibition is contained in the museum’s statement: “From early mechanised human forms to today’s cutting-edge technology, this major exhibition reveals our 500-year quest to make machines human.” There is more to this than it appears: why on earth should robots be human-like, if their purpose…
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