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.
Ed Simon
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for LitHub, and the author of Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (2024).
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.