With its tenderly human tableaux painted on a golden background, the St. John Altarpiece, attributed to Francescuccio Ghissi (active 1359–1374), was a gem of Italian art at the dawn of the Renaissance. But at some point in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, the altarpiece was sawn apart to separate its nine constituent panels.
Of an artist dying young
Frédéric Bazille at the National Gallery of Art.
Old guard avant-garde
In the Berkshires, two blue-blooded artists made a home for modernism in America.
Mad as Hellas at the Onassis Cultural Center
We think of the art of ancient Greece as the epitome of serene beauty and refinement, but a new exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York reveals how often deep, even combustible, feelings were expressed in the artifacts of the Hellenic civilization.
All along the watchtowers at Yale
“From being the homes of great lords in the Middle Ages to being either homes of modern aristocrats or ruins (many castles were destroyed during the English Civil War), castles became both symbols of democracy and warnings to aristocrats that you had to always respect the power of the people.”
A Romare Bearden survey at the Taubman
Like his art, Bearden’s life was about changes of context.
A hallucinatory Old Master at the Met
The Flemish artist Hercules Segers—now the recipient of his first exhibition in America, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—was probably the oddest European painter and printmaker of the seventeenth century.
Pocket-size punch
These tiny triumphs speak to human ingenuity, boundless reservoirs of patience, and painstaking craftsmanship in efforts where the slightest error will ruin the whole.
An art brut debut at the American Folk Art Museum
Zinelli painted for up to eight hours a day, producing nearly nineteen-hundred works of art.
The Magazine Antiques tour of TEFAF
Our sharp-eyed correspondent Marisa Bartolucci has been in Maastricht, prowling the aisles at The European Fine Art Fair—the premier selling exhibition best known as TEFAF.