This is an account of how the monument that human ingenuity could build to itself came into being.During the 13C the prosperous Florence deemed that its small Cathedral needed more than just more repairs. Santa Reparata was then demolished and a new and considerably larger building was commissio...
Ross King, author of the pop-histories "Brunelleschi's Dome" and "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling," writes another great story that combines artistic and political intrigue. This is a tale of the 1860s in France, when Edouard Manet and the not-yet-named Impressionists challenged the artistic...
Interesting and very different from what I expected. Realizing how difficult it was to paint anything -- the pigments, additives, etc. needed and the precise making of them and how much work, space, etc. that it took, it's a wonder we have so many gorgeous works. One of things that struck me ab...
The vehicles then wound their way through the country lanes to where Monet was hosting at his house what was, in effect, a road trip for the Académie Goncourt. “I’m counting on you,” he had written to Gustave Geffroy three days earlier, “to remind Descaves, Rosny, in fact everyone.”1Not all ten m...
He would have found that much had been accomplished on the cathedral. The tambour, or drum, had been constructed between 1410 and 1413, with walls fourteen feet thick in order to support the weight of the cupola. In 1413 a large new crane had been built to raise materials, and two of the three tr...
As in 1864, more than 100,000 people poured through the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne on their way to the Hippodrome de Longchamp. And, as in 1864, the winner of the Epsom Derby was again the favorite—only this time the Derby champion was a French horse named Gladiateur. Known as "The ...
To paint the coats of arms of Lodovico Sforza and his two sons on the wall of the refectory, Leonardo needed to construct a system of scaffolding that allowed him to ascend to a height of more than thirty feet.This necessity of climbing ladders and working at altitude, often on awkward surfaces, ...
Of vastly more consequence was the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York City. Opening on February 17 in the 69th Regiment Armory Building, it quickly came to be known as the Armory Show. As one critic at the Albright exhibition predicted, the “wildest and most incomprehensible fligh...
