Art
Caravaggio Made Darkness Visible
In his violent, carnal visions, sparks of divinity may glow even from within the blackest confines of our fallen reality.
Ed Simon
Art
Matthias Grünewald’s Gruesome Good Friday
The 16th-century “Isenheim Altarpiece” confronts us with the reality of suffering, violence, and death in a century where violence is both omnipresent and obscured.
Art
How Giuseppe Arcimboldo Made the Familiar Bizarre
The artist’s perplexing paintings should be viewed not as mere visual puzzles, but instantiations of an occult philosophy.
Art
Albrecht Dürer, a Humanist Messiah
He believed, and demonstrated, that individuals could ascend to divine realms of knowledge.
Art
The Temptations of Pieter Bruegel the Elder
His 1559 masterpiece “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” is an argument in paint for moral and spiritual ambivalence.
Opinion
How Bosch Experienced his Own Kind of Hell
Bosch was the inventor of the modern Western imagining of the demonic while transcending that tradition — all because of bad weather and moldy bread.