It’s all very well and good to know things, but I didn’t want to find myself turning into one of those highly tedious people confidently ambling through museums coolly declaring - or even thinking - things like, “The International Gothic influences are plain to see in the foreground figures, but they clearly lack the fully fleshed-out development of their counterparts in Martini and Memmi’s pioneering Annunciation.”

I’d seen this sort of thing before in other contexts - cosmologists who rarely look up at the night sky any more, biologists who speak matter of factly about evolution’s mesmerizingly awesome complexity - and I didn’t want to lose that visceral sense of amazement I’d so often felt standing before an incomparably beautiful work of art or - even worse still - somehow become intellectually convinced that it wasn’t actually as incomparably beautiful as I’d once “naively” thought.

As time went on, I’d felt a few danger signs, particularly when it came to things like altarpieces. If you see enough Annunciations, or Maestà or Assumptions of Mary, your mind naturally starts drifting a bit, comparing and contrasting the particulars of what’s in front of you with all the similar scenes you’ve seen before, rather than simply absorbing it for what it is.

Which is why, I think, I’ve long been particularly captivated by frescoes. Even frescoes of standard devotional scenes tend to exhibit far more variety than their “moveable” counterparts, their diverse size and shape necessarily tailored to the particular spatial constraints, and their overall thematic orientation typically requiring an awareness of, if not actual correspondence with, pre-existing features of the surrounding artistic environment.

Meanwhile, from the viewer’s perspective, stepping into a room lined with frescoes tends to involve a much deeper level of personal engagement, as the art pressing in from all sides compels us to immediately grapple with its overpowering presence. Aside from the usual questions of quality - the craftsmanship and technical expertise, the appropriate (or inappropriate) use (or non-use) of specific devices and materials - frescoes naturally trigger a heightened attention to the specifics of the story on display: What’s going on here? What am I looking at, exactly?

This can, of course, happen with any artwork, but frescoes, particularly a comprehensive, thematically-linked series filling an entire room, prompt these sorts of questions like nothing else. By identifying the story being told, and the particular way in which it’s depicted, we get a unique window into the specific circumstances behind the work’s creation, the personal motivations driving those who commissioned it.

Art historians often spend years trying to track down, through a careful perusal of the associated documentation, the identity of the often shadowy figure or figures thought to be responsible for the development of a particular fresco “program”. Such investigative work - an elaborate sort of academic treasure hunt - is clearly a vital step towards developing the appropriate historical context for the work in question.

But my interests lie in a different direction, for a rather different type of treasure hunt: harnessing my new-found art historical knowledge to search for tell-tale indicators of an artist’s unique style, in the hopes of stumbling on beautifully revealing details that I would otherwise likely miss.

The other day, we dropped by Foligno’s Palazzo Trinci to check out its many notable Renaissance frescoes.1 The Trinci, I learned, were the ruling family of Foligno from the 1390s to 1439, having raised themselves to political dominance through the actions of the condottiero Ugolino III. And it was Ugolino who arranged for the centrally-located Palazzo Trinci to be built, hiring Gentile da Fabriano to paint its many frescoes from 1410-1412.

This came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I wasn’t aware that Gentile da Fabriano had done any frescoes. In truth, I didn’t know much about da Fabriano at all, other than the fact that he was responsible for the creation of the magnificent 1423 Adoration of the Magi, now in the Uffizi Gallery, the one that every art history textbook you come across will smoothly inform you represents “the acme of the International Gothic style in Italy”.

Well, whatever. Regular readers of this Substack might recall2 my deep scepticism of the utility of pseudo-descriptive terms like “International Gothic”, which, so far as I can determine, seems to boil down to nothing more than an ability to routinely create finely-crafted gold haloes with nice punchmarks (which explains why I’ve sarcastically invoked the term twice in this piece), but none of that, of course, should take anything away from Gentile da Fabriano’s spectacular Adoration of the Magi, which has long struck me as one of the most breathtaking examples of the genre, with its phenomenally intricate details, dazzling colours, and resplendent array of horses. Particularly, in fact, the horses.

Almost nobody painted Renaissance horses like Gentile.3 I’m not actually a horse guy, as it happens, so I can’t testify to their rigorous anatomical verisimilitude or anything like that, but for me, at least, Gentile da Fabriano’s equine efforts have always represented nothing less than the sine qua non of horsedom.

And here’s the thing, here’s where I’m going with all of this (lest you think that I’ve completely lost the plot): if you look very closely at Gentile da Fabriano’s frescoes on the walls of the Palazzo Trinci Loggia (which, as it happens, has been covered for centuries and is thus technically no longer a loggia), which all depict stories concerning Romulus and Remus and thus have nothing whatsoever to do with the Adoration of the Magi,

you will discover a horse in the “Execution of Rhea Silvia” scene that is wearing exactly the same type of moon-shaped headdress as a horse on the right hand side of his famous Adoration of the Magi painted a decade or so later.

Isn’t that cool?

Howard Burton

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You may also be interested in reading the essays below about the Stendhalian power of getting close and personal with Italian art.

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But not always.

A few days ago we visited the Pinacoteca Comunale in Città di Castello. This north-Umbrian town is not on most of the major tourist routes, but for me it was something of a pilgrimage, as months of research for my first art film on Raphael1 had drilled home to me its deep, coming-of-age significance for the 17-year-old phenom from Urbino. It was, after all, the place where he fulfilled his first recorded commission – the so-called Baronci altarpiece – followed by two others for neighbouring churches.

These days, however, none of those first three masterpieces remain in Città di Castello: the Baronci altarpiece was severely damaged in a 1789 earthquake and the surviving fragments are dispersed between Brescia, Naples and Paris, while the other two – the Mond Crucifixion and The Marriage of the Virgin – are displayed in the National Gallery and the Pinacoteca di Brera respectively.

All that tangibly remains of Raphael’s formative time in Città di Castello is the two-sided processional banner he painted for the town’s Confraternita della Trinità: now badly damaged, long since cut apart and mounted as two separate, albeit physically fused, panels.

Meanwhile the other, related, work I was looking forward to seeing in the Pinacoteca was Luca Signorelli’s famous Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

Signorelli, I knew, had spent considerable time in Città di Castello, having developed close personal ties to the ruling Vitelli family of condottieri, as witnessed by the extant portraits we have of the dynasty’s founder Niccolò Vitelli and two of his sons.

And as it happens, Città di Castello’s Pinacoteca is now housed in the extensive palazzo that was the home of Niccolò’s grandson Alessandro Vitelli, with its comprehensive exterior sgraffito grotesques designed by Giorgio Vasari and executed by his workshop.2

Signorelli’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is dated to 1498, during the same period that he was working on his famous fresco series on the life of Saint Benedict at Monte Oliveto Maggiore (later completed by Sodoma). The next year, roughly when Raphael arrived, he left Città di Castello for good to paint his spectacular fresco series in the cathedral’s San Brizio Chapel,3 but his lingering presence in the city was clearly felt. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian hung in Città di Castello’s church of San Domenico (in whose Gavari Chapel Raphael’s “Mond Crucifixion” would soon be placed); and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum contains a wonderfully vivid drawing by Raphael sketching one of its archers right next to a preparatory sketch of the God the Father figure bending down to extract a rib from Adam for his processional banner.

Which is all to say that, well before we drove into Città di Castello, I was unhesitatingly convinced that our visit was going to be all about Raphael and Luca Signorelli.

But, as you’ve probably guessed by now, it turns out I was wrong (a fairly common theme throughout this Substack).

Of course the Raphael banners were very much worth seeing up close,4 and Signorelli’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian even more so – particularly its many remarkably compelling details.

But to me the real show-stoppers, what I will long remember Città di Castello’s Pinacoteca for, were two artworks I had no idea existed.

The first was a stunning Maestà that, for all the world, looked exactly like something that Duccio would have created. The label told me that it was by “the Maestro di Città di Castello”, but that meant nothing to me. If it wasn’t actually Duccio, it might as well have been. Simple as, like the British say.5

And then I came upon the stunningly intricate and extraordinarily beautiful Madonna and Child with Two Angels by Neri di Bicci.

From the deeply thoughtful yet compellingly individuated expressions on each angel, their wings duly closed upwards to convey profound contemplation and divine submission rather than angelic locomotion, to the mesmerizingly golden patterns on the robe, pillow and haloes, to the indescribably captivating face of the Madonna that constantly brought to my mind similar images crafted by Filippo Lippi,

I simply couldn’t take my eyes off it. The minutes ticked by and I remained rooted to the floor, transfixed, unable to move on to sample the famous Raphael and Signorelli works that I had allegedly “come there for”.

I mean, really. What a country.

Howard Burton

You may also be interested in reading the following essays:

There’s much more to say here, of course - there is always much more to say here - but this week’s post is about a rather different sort of emotional response: the joys and frustrations encountered in order to personally encounter those masterpieces in the first place.

I should, of course, begin with the obvious: Italy is positively saturated with tourists, particularly in the summer, which clearly puts a tremendous strain on everything and everyone, a state of affairs considerably exacerbated by the seemingly never-ending, mind-shattering heat that we are all subjected to these days. Long, long gone is the joyful prospect of rambling haphazardly through unfamiliar streets in search of serendipitous encounters: every visit, seemingly every hour, must now be planned out in detail so as to avoid the terrifying scenario of finding yourself stranded in some sun-blasted piazza, unable to sufficiently cool down your overheated brain to find a way to navigate back to safety.

We still meander, Irena and I, but almost all of our exploratory wanderings are now limited to the hours of 6-8 am, when the heat is still manageable and the streets are often deserted. We’ve always liked to get up early and watch towns slowly come to life, but that’s pretty well the full extent of the exploratory options left to us these days.

Evening temperatures don’t typically fall below 30 until 8pm or so (no, all you Americans out there, I won’t “translate that into Fahrenheit” for you: it’s high time you learned the way the rest of planet earth measures temperature, particularly since your rampagingly selfish actions are playing such a non-trivial role in dangerously increasing it), and the prospect of wading through loud, steaming, mobs of foreigners, aggressively chomping on their pizzas in garbage-strewn cobblestone streets is not terribly enticing. To put it rather mildly.

I should add, for completeness, that the vast majority of these foreigners are actually Italian. Of course, there are countless Germans, British, Americans and even a few French throughout - not to mention, of course, the omnipresent Dutch (are there any Dutch left in The Netherlands, I wonder? There is not one place I’ve been to in France or Italy that is not positively saturated with Dutch license plates), but as Rai TV is consistently informing us, some 27 million Italians are currently on holidays these days. We non-Italians tend to forget about this, because we unthinkingly conclude that if someone is prattling away effortlessly in Italian, they are somehow “local”. But come August, more often than not, that’s simply not the case.

Which is all to say that you’d have to be a pretty unempathetic soul not to appreciate how enormously taxing all of this has to be on the people who actually live in a “tourist destination” - which, when it comes to Italy, is pretty well everywhere (amusingly, the institutional structures that are most focused on assessing the extent to which a place is, or is not, “loaded with tourists” are themselves tourist-oriented: every tourist guide I’ve ever seen enthusiastically directs its readers to “less touristy” destinations that are both “genuine” and “real finds”). And somehow, inexplicably, most Italians manage to survive this unrelenting foreign onslaught with both their sanity and sense of humour fully intact. Quite frankly, I don’t know how they do it.

So that’s the vital starting point for what follows: it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the entire country is under siege, tourist-wise, and it’s far from clear how it should be dealt with. Some, like my fellow Substack art-focused writer Michele Dantini (see here), believe that the time has come for drastic action to stop “overtourism”, firmly advocating the universal implementation of a “chilometro zero” approach to travelling. Personally, I’m unconvinced, both theoretically and practically. But I sure understand why he’s proposing it. And I’m deeply sympathetic to his all too evident frustration.

So it’s complicated. Aside altogether from the obvious economic interests at play for a country whose GDP has such a large tourist-related component, there are broader cultural concerns too. After all, the primary reason so many people flock to Italy’s shores is because they feel motivated to personally interact with vital aspects of its incomparable centuries-long parade of cultural magnificence. And however tedious some of these people might seem to me and you, as they aimlessly drift through museums glued to their phones before occasionally popping up to block our views of the surrounding masterpieces with a prolonged selfie, it’s very much worth remembering that at least they are actually in museums.

These are, in other words, the good tourists. They are motivated, however superficially and perfunctorily, to at least slightly improve their lives through encountering some of history’s most celebrated artistic creations. They are not simply mindlessly fornicating away their time in Ibiza. Put another way: if we alienate all of these people, we are all surely, irrevocably, lost.

And a significant number of Italian cultural institutions are, it must be admitted, doing precisely that.

A few days ago, we were in Spello, whose primary cultural accomplishment, the dominant reference point that makes it a destination for any artistically-inclined tourist, is Pinturicchio’s frescoes in the Baglioni Chapel of the Collegiate church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Created in 1501 by Pinturicchio and his workshop towards the apex of his fame (in between his frescoes in the papal apartments for Alexander VI and his work in Siena on the Piccolomini library and much more), these are truly marvellous works of art that merit a close, prolonged look. But that’s precisely what the folks in charge of admissions to Santa Maria Maggiore are keen to avoid. Visitors are charged 3 euros each to the otherwise decidedly unimpressive church (there are two other frescoes inside that, quite frankly, I could have painted, that are hugely implausibly claimed to have been done by Perugino) before being told that they are only permitted to enter the chapel for ten minutes. Even worse still, photography is strictly, vehemently, prohibited (I tested this by unobtrusively taking a quick video on the other side of the church and immediately found myself confronted by a finger-wagging apparatchik who had glimpsed my transgression through one of the many surrounding video cameras lining the walls).

Why?

Well, there is no reason, of course. Other than, perhaps, to ensure that the church can somehow extract yet further revenues from art-inclined people through “licensing” their images via rapacious IP extortionists like Getty and Alamy (a disturbingly widespread practice throughout the Italian peninsula, incorporating many of its most renowned cultural institutions, such as the Uffizi Gallery - see this related Substack piece from last August, if you dare). It is, in short, simply disgraceful. Pinturicchio deserves far better. And so, of course, do you.

In our relatively short time here, we’ve witnessed several similarly infuriating instances throughout Tuscany and Umbria, occasions when tourists are clearly viewed as nothing more than local revenue-generating devices, to be duly ripped off as quickly, and dismissively, as humanly possible.

But that, importantly, is hardly the end of the story. Not by a long shot.

The other day, for example, we visited Perugia’s Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. This is simply a fantastic museum. Not only is there vastly more wonderful art within its walls than I had naively appreciated (and I really mean vastly - this is what happens when you have centuries of the highest level of artistic production coupled with innovative, motivated curators), but I frankly can’t remember ever having had a better museum experience anywhere.

From the judiciously spaced positioning of the artworks, to the carefully considered lighting, to the thoughtful written descriptions, to the compelling multi-media displays, to the frequent opportunities to comfortably sit down and quietly engage with the art, to the wonderfully, uniformly appropriate climate controls (Yes! Italy is indeed capable of doing air conditioning properly!), I can’t recommend this museum enough. Every museum director should check this place out: it is, quite simply, quietly setting the standard of what a top-quality gallery should be.

Well, you might say, it’s a question of scale. The Perugia museum is a national one, while the Spello collegiata that so infuriated you is obviously tiny and struggling. Have a little understanding for smaller places.

But that argument simply doesn’t hold water. Aside from the obvious point that many larger museums are incorrigibly lazy and similarly exploitative, only maintaining their dominance through the inestimable value of their many world-class holdings (yes, I’m most definitely looking at you, Uffizi Gallery), there are also many smaller museums we’ve recently encountered that are warm, intimate, and - quite simply - lovely, such as Arezzo’s Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, Sansepolcro’s Museo Civico and Cortona’s Museo Diocesano.

One of the most illuminating visits we’ve had so far has been to the tiny town of Monterchi to visit the Musei Civici Madonna del Parto, a former schoolhouse which contains precisely one work: Piero della Francesca’s enchanting, restored fresco of the Madonna del Parto, once housed in a nearby church. I was, I must confess, at first quite sceptical at the prospect of an entire museum dedicated to a single work, but it proved to be exceptionally memorable: a unique opportunity to quietly commune with one of the most moving works of art one could ever encounter.

And then there was the Museo della Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Valdarno: a quaint, out of the way place that nonetheless contains a wonderful Fra Angelico Annunciation and a few compelling works by Lo Scheggia and others.

Once more we were there right when it opened, whereupon the woman at the desk shamefacedly informed us that she didn’t know how to turn on the lights (it was her first day, apparently). So we wandered around, alone and in the dark, for 45 minutes or so, pressing our noses up to the surrounding artwork. Eventually, of course, she figured it out (I believe she actually called in someone else who knew where the right switches were), so we spent half of our time in the dark and another half in the light. When we finally left, she profusely apologized for the inconvenience, but she needn’t have bothered. We had a wonderful time. When the lights finally came on, we got to test our dusky predictions; in fact, we probably ended up seeing much more this way than had everything been working perfectly when we arrived.

Both the Musei Civici Madonna del Parto and the Museo della Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie cost roughly twice as much as Spello’s collegiata, but we didn’t feel ripped off in the slightest. It’s not about the money. It’s about the experience.

Howard Burton

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Recent essays that might be of interest as well:

On the one hand, this is a fairly obvious point: why else would so many foreigners haul themselves off to Italy to sample its myriad cultural offerings, often battling oppressive heat and equally oppressive hordes of tourists in order to do so?

And yet, it’s all too easy to forget just how different being there can impact our personal impressions, even – or perhaps especially – for those of us who should know better.

A few months ago, I had a most enjoyable podcast conversation with Syracuse University art historian Sally Cornelison, discussing her latest book, Vasari and the Sacred Image: Renovating Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo (see below). I knew very little about Vasari as an artist before reading it; and felt gratified that, through reading Sally’s book and chatting with her about it, I had significantly increased my knowledge of this often woefully underrated artist.

But what I hadn’t appreciated, and something very much worth commenting on, is that doing all of that only took me half the way towards my current level of understanding. Because, as it happens, we’re staying in Arezzo these days; and I’ve now had many opportunities to directly sample much of the art we discussed during the podcast – not only Vasari’s remarkably detailed two-sided altarpiece and de facto tomb monument that’s the principal focal point of Sally’s book,

but also several related masterpieces - most significantly Pietro Lorenzetti’s majestic polyptych that, as Sally emphasized, Vasari implicitly referenced.

Through my recent studies, I’d seen many images of Lorenzetti’s so-called Tarlati altarpiece before I arrived in Italy, and could confidently tell you who was being represented in each of its 15 separate panels and why, but what I simply had no real appreciation of before I came to Arezzo was how indescribably beautiful it is (particularly in its recently restored state, thanks to the dedicated efforts of the Italian RICERCA team of Paola Baldetti, Marzia Benini and the late Isabella Droandi). For that I simply had to see it with my own eyes.

And here’s the thing. If you’re in Arezzo you can easily do this. For hours. By yourself. For free. Just get up early and walk into the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pieve in the heart of the town; and there you will find it, waiting for you, with alternating panels of golden background quietly shimmering in the light.2

The first time we experienced it I simply didn’t believe it. “That must be a copy,” I knowingly informed Irena. But of course it isn’t. It’s the genuine article, firmly ensconced in the same place it was placed slightly more than 700 years ago. Well, more or less: Vasari moved it to a side chapel during his 16th-century remodelling, and it was returned to a significantly restructured high altar after another explicitly “retro renovation” in the second half of the 19th century.

Which brings up another point very much worth stressing. As magical as it is to feast your eyes upon the inimitable (and somehow photographically uncapturable) subtleties of the actual artwork, it’s equally transformative to do so in that very location it was intended to be displayed.

This is most naturally the case with frescoes, but it’s also true for many sculptures and panel paintings (including, but hardly limited to, altarpieces), mosaics, intarsia, and, of course, architecture: a great many works of art were explicitly designed to be placed in direct correspondence, or “conversation”, with artistic environments crafted by illustrious predecessors. And you miss all of that – or at least most of it – when you simply trek through a museum or gallery chock-full of art, no matter how great that art might be.

It’s not that you shouldn’t go, of course, or that you shouldn’t dive into books or online pictures to enhance your understanding. Just don’t confuse it with the real thing.

Howard Burton

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Below you can watch my recent conversation with Sally Cornelison: Vasari, Reconsidered. As always the video is illustrated with many visuals to illuminate the artworks under discussion. You can also watch the conversation on our Exploring Art History Spotify channel HERE.

As many of you know, we’re based in Italy until early fall to do research and filming/photography of Italian medieval and Renaissance artworks for upcoming art films. We feel very privileged to have those opportunities, and despite the fact that we have some knowledge about the sublime works we encounter, we’re still taken aback by the incredibly powerful effect of being alone in a room with some of the most exquisite art ever created. Instead of starting to film right away we take our time to get close up and personal with art for our very personal enjoyment while figuring out how to translate those experiences into films for both armchair travellers and more serious art lovers.

Something we didn’t quite expect is that we regularly find ourselves completely alone for large periods of time in a museum or church, able to fully immerse ourselves with the beauty and power of art. There is a lot of talk about mass tourism in Italy (which we’ve also certainly seen much evidence of), but our frequent impression is that the majority of tourists seem much more focused on buying souvenirs (a souvenir of what? I often wonder) and eating/drinking to experience the ‘real’ Italy thereby missing out on the unique treasures Italy has to offer.

Beato Angelico’s Annunciation of Cortona

During a recent filming trip to Cortona, we visited the Museo Diocesano, which is located right across the Duomo. It houses a fantastic collection of works of art by the likes of Pietro Lorenzetti, Bartolomeo della Gatta, Luca Signorelli and Sassetta. We’ll return soon to Cortona to do more filming and photography, but today I’d like to highlight the museum’s showpiece work: Fra Angelico’s so-called Cortona Annunciation, a spectacularly beautiful and reflection-inducing masterpiece.

Guido di Pietro was born in 1395 or so in Mugello, outside of Florence, and later changed his name to Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, an explicit reflection of the town where he joined the Dominican Order. Widely acknowledged – both then and now – to be one of the greatest artists of the early Renaissance, he sought to reconcile the new artistic principles of perspectival composition and a focus on the human figure with traditional medieval values, such as the didactic function of sacred art and the mystical significance of light.

Officially beatified by Pope John Paul II on 3 October 1982, even though he’d long been referred to as Beato (Blessed) after his death both for the emotional religiosity that pervades all his works and for his personal qualities of humanity and humility, Italians today know him as Beato Angelico.

Angelico painted at least five Annunciations, three on panels - one for the Convent of San Domenico in Fiesole (c. 1426, now in the Prado), one in San Giovanni Valdarno (1430-32), one in Cortona (1433-34) - and two in fresco some years later for the Convent of San Marco in Florence. One of the key topics in Christian art and iconography, the Annunciation is described in the Gospel of Luke: the moment when the Archangel Gabriel announces to Mary that she would conceive and bear a son through a virgin birth and become the mother of Jesus Christ, the Messiah and Son of God, marking the Incarnation.

Fra Angelico’s Cortona Annunciation was commissioned by Giovanni di Cola di Cecco, a cloth merchant, for Cortona’s San Domenico church. The panel was once thought to be the first of Angelico’s Annunciations – a belief no longer widely adhered to – but it is without a doubt one of his most sublime creations.

Beauty is in divine details

The Archangel and the Virgin are depicted inside a classic portico, while an opening on the left shows Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The figure of Isaiah, whom Christians believed prophesized the birth of a Saviour through a virgin birth, is depicted in a tondo in the centre of the portico, while the predella below features traditional stories from the Life of the Virgin with an additional image of The Virgin’s Apparition to Saint Dominic.

The Archangel bows with gentle humility before the Virgin Mary to honour the woman chosen to become the Mother of Jesus. Gabriel’s radiant wings and shimmering gold were designed to reflect candlelight to remind worshippers that this was more than a painting - it was an invitation to contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation. Even though we saw the painting with far from perfect museum lighting, we were able to be able to be alone with this masterwork and get up quite close to see the incisions in the gold that create this remarkable effect.

The announcement of the virginal conception takes place in a Corinthian portico with large arches. Gabriel, wearing a joyful pink robe woven with gold, has just arrived and catches Mary with her book still open, resting on her knees, in keeping with the traditional device of depicting Gabriel interrupting the Virgin in her reading. The small size of the open book on her lap resembles a contemporary Book of Hours used for private devotion. Mary is aware of what awaits her and she accepts the divine decision by submitting with a hint of bowing and with her arms crossed on her chest.

Reading between the lines

To better manifest the mystery of the supernatural human conception/incarnation of God the Son in the virginal womb of Mary, Angelico has made the verbal exchange between the two protagonists visible through several inscriptions in gold letters that flow from their mouths.

As you might expect, the dialogue consists of quotes from Luke's Gospel. Gabriel’s words are written on two lines, reading from left to right, while Mary’s words are between those two lines, written upside-down to emphasize the viewpoint of their heavenly recipient.

Archangel: "Spiritus sanctus superveniet in te" (The Holy Spirit will descend upon you.) Madonna: "Ecce ancilla Domini, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum" (Behold the handmaid of the Lord, let it come upon me that which your word proclaim.)
Archangel: "Virtus Altissimi obumbrabit tibi" (The virtue of the Most High will spread its shadow over you.)

In addition to words, the Archangel expresses himself with highly eloquent gestures: with his right hand, he points to Mary, gazing intently at her, while with his left he points to the dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit, which, with outstretched wings, haloed in its own divine light but without the usual ray of light descending from above, awaits the Virgin's response.

The hortus conclusus

Beyond the loggia opens a lush garden of spring blooms enclosed with a wooden fence, the so-called hortus conclusus, whose white roses symbolize Mary’s purity and chastity, while an array of different symbols refer to Christ's Passion, his future sacrifice on the cross: red roses, four-leaf clovers and the palm tree, signifying martyrdom.

In the upper left corner, we see Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Note how the Angel banishing them from Paradise is armed with a sword but places a friendly hand on Adam’s shoulder to foreshadow the redemption of their Original Sin through Mary’s acceptance of Gabriel’s message.

A few days later, we visited a second of Fra Angelico’s tempera on wood Annunciations a short drive away in San Giovanni Valdarno – another spectacularly beautiful painting (that we also had the joy of experiencing alone for an hour or so), but one which somehow didn’t move us as much as the one in Cortona.

Below, for completeness, are his three other Annunciations: the Prado panel painting and the two San Marco frescoes.

Our recent experiences convinced us that it would be fun to make a short comparative film on all five. Sounds like a good idea, you think?

Irena Burton-Nottrot

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All inhabitants of Siena are born into a contrada, a social unit which has its own church, an administrative centre, a flag, a museum, a symbolic animal, a fountain, racing colours, and more. They started in the Middle Ages as rival military companies. Initially, there were 59 contrade within the city of Siena. Today there are 17 contrade left and their importance and relevance are still very much alive. They are held together by a strong sense of history and civic pride.

Most of the contrade have an allied contrada and adversary contrada, typically a neighbour. To name an example, the Chiocciola (snail) contrada’s rival is Tartuca (Tortoise). Its allies are Istrice (Porcupine), Pantera (Panther) and Selva (Forest).

Before 1558, the contrade organized popular spectacles on the day after the official Assumption celebrations which took place in the Piazza del Campo, commonly referred to as Il Campo. They started with bullfights – expensive affairs that not all contrade could participate in. Elaborate costumes and macchine were required: the latter were large wooden structures made to look like birds and other animals. They were very sturdy and hard-pressed bullfighters could jump into as a temporary refuge.

In the painting below, Vincenzo Rustici portrays the procession of the contrade before a bullfight. Members of each contrade form a spiral procession winding around Il Campo. Each competing contrada is parading with its macchina while waving their unique flags. It seems that the macchine were human-powered since there are no horses visible. Take a close look at the goose, elephant, and snail.

Today ten of the seventeen contrade participate in the “Palio’, a traditional but dangerous horse race held twice a year in July and August which has been going on since 1581. The jockeys ride bareback circling Il Campo for three laps and the full race usually lasts for less than 90 seconds. It is a particularly treacherous race and horses often finish riderless - they are not required to have a rider to win the race.

From a personal perspective I have no interest in attending the Palio myself after having watched a film1 and read detailed accounts about this event which highlight the mistreatment of horses and the regular outbreaks of violence between partisans of rival contrade. For visitors the most enjoyable part of the experience is usually the 2-hour pageant rather than the one-and-a-half minute of furious riding.

Today not only the victories at the Palio but all major events such as baptisms, deaths, marriages, church holidays and wine or food festivals are celebrated only within one’s own contrada. Anyone not born a member of a contrada or adopted into one - which apparently does regularly happen - will never be fully accepted as being truly Sienese.

However, for someone born in a contrada, it will be their home forever. In Hisham Matar’s wonderful book, A Month in Siena, he tells the story of Jordanian refugees settled in the contrada of the Torre.

When they came home from the hospital with their newborn son they noticed a blue ribbon on the stairs. Later that day a delegation of contrada officials visited them to officially enrol their son into the Torre. No matter what the future will bring to this family, their son is growing up belonging somewhere.

Irena Burton-Nottrot

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For essays about Siena’s magnificent art, check out some of the essays below:

While Vasari’s motivation was to detail del Sarto’s remarkably accomplished painterly technique, the story equally serves another purpose: vividly illustrating how just how dauntingly difficult it can sometimes be to accurately determine who made what particular work of art.

Artistic connoisseurship has a long and fascinating history, as shown by Peter Burke in his recent book, The Connoisseur: A Cultural History.1 Ever since King Charles I playfully removed the labels of an incoming shipment of paintings to test the ability of his chief architect Inigo Jones to correctly identify the artists,2 the notion of some superhuman connoisseur with an unerring eye has firmly captured our collective imagination.

But what makes all of this particularly interesting, at least to me, is that such phenomenally acute art assessors have actually existed – never infallible, of course, but consistently exhibiting penetrating judgements that, more often than not, would be triumphantly verified years later through the discovery of corroborating historical documents or detailed scientific analysis (or both).

Indeed, the history of art has witnessed numerous examples of such illustrious savants, like Wilhelm Bode, Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi and Federico Zeri. That the majority of these superstar connoisseurs also made millions by publicly leveraging their diagnostic skills within a rapidly expanding art market, naturally increased their personal mystique along with their pocketbooks, but all of that is quite beside what is surely the most interesting question: How, on earth, did they do it?

It’s far from obvious – particularly since connoisseurship has long shrouded itself in mystery, often deliberately so, with unhelpfully opaque words like “intuition” and “instinct” routinely invoked to justify all manner of aesthetic judgements.

Over the years, there have been occasional attempts to give the domain a more rigorously objective basis – most famously by the 19th-century anatomist and art theorist Giovanni Morelli, who pioneered a method for detecting the identity of artists by focusing on minor, usually anatomical, details of their figures (ears and thumbs in particular). But on the whole it’s safe to say that the art of connoisseurship has long eluded any formal scientific understanding of its operating methodology.

Why?

Well, first of all, as Burke duly points out, successful art connoisseurship requires a highly unique combination of skills: a practical knowledge of artistic techniques, a deep awareness of cultural context, and, likely most of all, a supremely developed, exceptionally capacious and continually-trained visual memory. All of that, and doubtless much more besides, goes into what is somewhat glibly referred to as “having a good eye”.

Such a complex web of human actions does not easily lend itself to rigorous scientific analysis; and it’s hard not to believe that most great connoisseurs, anxious to project the image of being possessed with a quasi-miraculous power of divination, were very happy to keep it that way.

Slowly but surely, however, science is getting the upper hand. Beginning with Alan Burroughs’ pioneering use of X-rays a little more than a century ago, a veritable barrage of hugely illuminating scientific methods have steadily intruded upon art scholarship, shedding incomparably valuable light on the nature of underdrawings, pentimenti, paint composition, brushwork techniques and much, much more.

And now, of course, there is AI.

Surely, you might well be thinking, this rapidly developing technology, with its world-beating capacity for pattern recognition, represents the death-blow for old-school human artistic connoisseurship.

Well, yes and no.

It’s unquestionably true that the days of scientifically illiterate connoisseurs are long behind us: all modern art historians intent on pushing the boundaries of our current understanding will henceforth have to familiarize themselves with AI models, just as they have with X-rays, infrared reflectography, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and dozens of other analytical techniques that have entered the art-historical toolkit over the decades.

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But it’s also very much worth emphasizing that every one of those sophisticated AI training models focused on detecting subtle aspects of an artist’s individual style is wholly dependent on the entire history of the past art-historical judgements that preceded it, just as any future breakthroughs in our understanding that come to light through newly discovered documentary sources or revised interpretations of technical analysis will also, necessarily, be fed right back into those evolving AI datasets.

It is, in short, very much a two-way street; and anyone who thinks that the shiny black box of AI will magically churn out flawless artistic authentications completely independent of scholarly analysis is just as deluded as those who were convinced that charismatic connoisseurs of centuries past could never err.

Which brings me to a topic I often think about, but I almost never hear mentioned, locked in as we are to our media-driven oscillation between the two sensationalistic extremes of “AI will solve all our problems” and “AI will enslave humanity”: perhaps, through the advent of technologies like AI, we’re finally getting closer to appreciating how, exactly, great connoisseurs of the past like Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi were able to come up with their revelatory insights in the first place.

Maybe, in other words, it’s not so much about art at all. Maybe it’s more about understanding ourselves.

Howard Burton

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This podcast is also available on our Spotify channel HERE, while the audio version is available on the usual audio channels.

The first order of business is to offer a sincere thank you to all of you who have supported Irena and me throughout the year. We had no idea what to expect when we began this journey, but we’re naturally very pleased that some 1400 of you now subscribe to our weekly offerings, particularly since I perversely went out of my way to befuddle you right at the very beginning.

My first article, America’s Descent: Redescending,1 appearing not coincidentally on July 4, 2025, was all about promoting our just-released documentary, Descent: How America lost its mind, soul & moral compass, which I promptly followed up with 14 more pieces, three per week, detailing my profound frustration at America’s inexplicable spontaneous self-combustion in lurid detail.

This was not, of course, a particularly intelligent thing to have done. Anyone familiar with the basics of branding will tell you that, as a new entity, it’s paramount to firmly establish at the outset who you are and what you represent, and by emphatically slotting ourselves in the virulently anti-MAGA corner of Substack with our first 15 posts, we naturally muddied the waters considerably, given that I’d never planned to focus my writerly outpourings on the profoundly depressing miasma that is the current American political arena (broadly defined).

Truth be told, I’m not even sure why I made Descent in the first place. It didn’t take particularly long to do (the film essentially consists of a collage of news clips), and it just kind of poured out of me. I’d been watching from the sidelines as a country I’d long respected slid irrevocably into soul-destroying incoherence through the machinations of a deliberately divisive profit-hungry media, and all I could think was that someone should make an objective account of things before all documentary records vanished into the mindlessly polarized aether. So I did.

And then, having done that, it only seemed reasonable to try to give some written account of my motivations through our newly created Substack which was called Behind The Lens at the time. Well, that’s my story, anyway.

Of course it was simply inane. Nobody cared what I wrote in that incredibly crowded space, saturated as it is with all manner of people screaming from the rooftops; and all I was doing was ensuring that my real passion of late – making films about art – was irrevocably buried in a sea of toxic American tribal warfare. Meanwhile, naturally enough, the only people who subscribed to our just-launched Substack were those who constantly wanted to talk about American politics (broadly defined). I wasn’t simply shooting myself in the foot. I was shooting myself in the head.

From such inauspicious beginnings I began to tack wildly from one topic to the other:2 one day complaining about the terrible IP policies of Italian museums,3 the next day reflecting on the many false stereotypes concerning “the arts” vs “the sciences”.4

And then, in a sudden fit of artistic focus, I dedicated the entire month of September to a barrage of 9 separate posts on Sofonisba Anguissola, in order to promote the release of our latest Renaissance Masterpieces film on her Chess Game.5

So back to the art world once and for all, then?

No such luck.

October and November were filled with the occasional art-relevant post interspersed with ruminations on money and science,6 the problem with professional labels,7 and – in yet another lamentable climb back onto my sociopolitical soapbox – a piece on the venal stupidity of an American media machine that was seriously mooting the possibility of one Donald J. Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize.8

Something, clearly, had to be done.

Enter Irena, who coolly informed me one day in late November (I think it was right after my post on the joys of autodidacticism9) that she had summarily changed the name of our Substack to Exploring Art History. Henceforth I could write about whatever I wanted. As long as it was about art.

It was in December, then, that Exploring Art History really began, with each week’s post well and truly art-related. And – surprise, surprise – it was precisely at this point that our subscription numbers started to climb.

Of course, stubborn fellow that I am, I had the odd relapse or two, most recently when I urged international visitors to give the Met’s comprehensive Raphael: Sublime Poetry exhibit a pass (while urging US-based art lovers to go).10 But my editor (Irena) was forced to accept it. It was about art, after all (sort of).

A few months later, we began producing our Exploring Art History podcast, determined to combine my previous experience of hosting filmed conversations with the new “video podcast” format that so naturally lends itself to art-friendly discussions through the enhanced capacity to display images.

There were the inevitable bugs to be worked out – the audio, some of you might have noted, was sometimes problematic (an issue later solved by creating multiple recordings) – but on the whole I think it’s worked out quite well. I’ve had the opportunity to chat with lots of thoughtful people doing highly stimulating, art history-related things. One of my initial fears – that it would be difficult to have a sufficiently relaxed, informal conversation online – thankfully turned out to be unfounded. Everyone, it seems, is completely used to remote chats these days – one of the very few positive developments that we owe to Covid.

Meanwhile, I began writing Substack posts on particular aspects of these encounters that I found most intriguing or deserving of emphasis. And once again the lesson: different media enable different exploratory possibilities. Sometimes film/video works best. Sometimes the written word prevails. I’m still trying to figure out when it’s best to use which one, but I’m guessing that I’ll never have that completely worked out.

One thing I have concluded, though, is that, as fun as they are to do, I really have to start seriously slowing down with these podcasts. My principal preoccupation these days is to construct a comprehensive platform of art films, from focused explications of specific works and artists to cinematic depictions of artistic landmarks that are loaded with a simply breathtaking number of in situ masterpieces.

And in order to do all that, I really have to stop holding and producing so many podcast conversations. So from now on, we’ll switch to monthly releases, albeit sometimes with a longer run-time than the one hour I’m currently limiting them to.

We also need to start travelling more to film all that art: throughout Italy, in particular, where we currently find ourselves.

In a couple of weeks, Irena (who does all the Substack notes), will take over most Monday slots during July and August to share personal tales of our summer hunt for masterpieces, while I focus exclusively on putting together more films (and working on my lousy Italian).

All of which means that you’ll be spared my ranting sociological digressions for at least another few months.

You’ve certainly earned the break.

Howard Burton

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Part of this is surely linked to the name itself – or, more generally, the problem with naming genres. It might have been fairly straightforward to appreciate what “modern art” was in 1929 (doubtful, in fact, but remotely plausible) when New York’s Museum of Modern Art was launched with the explicit intent to create “the greatest museum of modern art in the world by helping people understand and enjoy the visual arts of our time”,1 but it’s awfully hard to objectively conclude that the visual arts of the 1920s are reflections of our own modern world a century later.

Trivially, tautologically, and seemingly ever faster, time marches on; and there’s a natural limit to the number of posts you can successively preface any given adjective with (post-modern, post-post-modern) before things begin to look downright silly and you lose all descriptive power whatsoever.

Recognizing this, the art world has largely switched to the tag “modern and contemporary art” to categorize works created since (more or less) the dawn of the 20th century, thereby somehow encompassing Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus, Fluxus, Pop Art, Installation Art, Performance Art, Video Art and hundreds of other labels and movements under one enormous, increasingly opaque tent.

Some go even further back. Wikipedia’s page on Modern art, for example, defines “the modern period” as being from the 1860s to the 1970s (with everything since dubbed “contemporary” or “Postmodern”), originating with Manet’s 1863 Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, while mentioning Francisco Goya (1746–1828) as “considered by many as the Father of Modern Painting without being a Modernist himself” – which strikes me as roughly equivalent, and just as unhelpful, as regarding Aristotle as the Father of the Industrial Revolution.

Well, you might say, Wikipedia should hardly be the arbiter of such a subtle topic. Maybe not. But where better to turn to? As it happens, that same Wikipedia page leads off with declaring that “modern art is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation”, justifying the claim with an explicit reference to Ernst Gombrich’s now canonical The Story of Art.2

But what can such a heavy-handed phrase actually mean? After all, didn’t a “spirit of experimentation” also permeate the works of Giotto, or his 14th-century Sienese contemporaries, or Massaccio’s pioneering frescoes, or Paolo Uccello’s fixation with linear perspective, or Parmigianino’s mannerism or Caravaggio’s naturalism or Velázquez’s realism or Delacroix’s orientalism or Renoir’s impressionism, or pretty well everything notable ever done in the entire history of art (along with a huge number of not so notable things)?

Well, definitions are notoriously problematic. But my biggest problem with the vast majority of such modern/contemporary artworks is simply their profound indifference – and often downright hostility – to beauty. It’s hard to avoid concluding that, for the better part of the last 100 years or so, artists haven’t felt the slightest obligation or desire to produce something beautiful.3

Beauty, however problematic it is to adequately define in its own right, is clearly no longer part and parcel of the artistic experience. These days we turn to art to shock, to provoke, to make political statements, to depict our seemingly limitless capacity for avarice, cruelty, superficiality and hypocrisy. But beauty? The art world has decidedly moved past such a quaint, old-fashioned, pre-modern notion – a development that surely would have driven one of the greatest American painters in history absolutely crazy.

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was not only a remarkably innovative and wide-ranging artist across many different styles and media, he was also an eloquent theorist, emphatically announcing his unique aesthetic philosophy in his famous Ten O’ Clock Lecture of February, 1885.

For Whistler – an artist whose works spanned a wide range of genres, from a Courbet-inspired realism to Anglo-Japanese interior design to his compellingly meditative nocturnes – art was not a vehicle for social justice, or moral elevation or personal development. The goal of art, all art, was simply to create beauty.

Whistler scholar Linda Merrill has recently written a wonderfully detailed book rigorously analyzing the Ten O’ Clock Lecture and placing it in its full sociohistorical context,4 and I had the great pleasure of chatting with her about it on our Exploring Art History podcast.

Linda, professor of art history at Emory University, admitted that for years she’d avoided a detailed plunge into Whistler’s Ten O’ Clock, which had long struck her as over-written, before recognizing its potential for illuminating fundamental aspects of the unique cultural world of late Victorian England.

Which is a completely reasonable reaction for a specialist in 19th-century Anglo-American art and literature like Linda. But I was transfixed by something else: to what extent might Whistler have been right in his diagnosis? Maybe there was a link between his finely crafted message and the wholesale upending of the prevailing aesthetic landscape that would shortly follow.

“What do you think Whistler would say,” I asked her, “if he came back and looked at the world of art today?”

“He would say, ‘Nobody cares about beauty’”, she responded immediately, “That’s just no longer the most important thing in art.”

Exactly.

As I write these words, a comprehensive Whistler exhibition is being held in London, his home for over 40 years. It’s at the Tate Britain – not, it goes without saying, the Tate Modern, a place he surely would have avoided like the plague.

Shame, that.

Howard Burton

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In last week’s post on Donatello’s famous statue of David1 I explored one such example, where a statue which, to Quattrocento Florentines, straightforwardly represented the purity and power of their republic triumphing over adversity, has somehow over time become near-universally regarded as a paean to homoeroticism.

In many cases, like Donatello’s David, the contemporary end point of such interpretational trajectories are impossible to predict: a seemingly random consequence of changing societal values, academic fashion, the disproportional impact of particularly influential figures, and many more factors besides, resulting in art history’s own intriguing version of “the butterfly effect”.

Of course there must have been occasions when it was abundantly clear to the artists that the projects they were working on would one day be associated with substantially different meanings from those originally intended, such as rapidly commissioned statues publicly depicting the magnificence of powerful rulers which likely wouldn’t last beyond the next successful insurrection of one of their many enemies.2

And then there are times when artists did their utmost to take legacy matters into their own hands: explicitly crafting a detailed image for posterity that may or may not have had anything to do with the actual facts on the ground.

In the opening tale of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, we encounter a wicked little notary from Prato called Ciappelletto who spends his life wantonly cheating, murdering and fornicating. At the end of his life, however, he manages to convince a credulous friar of his holiness to the extent that the friar buries him in his monastery, where he quickly becomes venerated as a saint.

Jan de Jong, art historian at the University of Groningen, repeatedly invokes the story of Ciappelletto throughout his captivating book on Roman tomb monuments3 to pointedly illustrate the sometimes significant disparity between reputation and reality that lies at the heart of these often elaborate structures.

Tomb monuments have long captured the attention of art historians through their sculptural particulars, but by focusing on the revealing combination of text and image and examining monuments of women, couples and children along with the more established examples of popes and cardinals, Jan offers a much more intimate and moving glimpse of 15th and 16th-century Roman society than normally obtained through a detached examination of architectural details, one brimming with many instances of quietly profound artistic understanding.

Perhaps my favourite example of his unique treatment is this tomb monument for Alfonsina de’ Medici Orsini.

Located in the middle of the nave of Santa Maria del Popolo – famous for its Bramante-designed apse, spectacular stained glass windows by Guillaume de Marcillat, Raphael-designed (and Bernini-finished) Chigi Chapel, paintings by Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci and much, much more – this quietly arresting monument was erected by Alfonsina’s daughter, Clarice.

Unlike standard tomb monuments that prominently intrude into space,

this one takes the viewer emphatically in the other direction, inventively directing our attention downwards to where Alfonsina’s body is buried, while its accompanying Latin inscription4 movingly detailing Clarice’s grief:

In exchange for the gift of your milk and for so many labours,

Alfonsina, your grateful daughter furnishes this tomb for you:

Your daughter who wishes to be confined with you under this block of marble,

And who calls Lachesis hard and fate cruel.

You dwell in the Elysian fields with your son and husband,

I am left alone in human misfortune.

But I will not be given a long delay.

If Clotho will refuse to cut the sad thread, my grief will cut it.

This powerful elegy, replete with classical illusions and unusually bereft of any standard Christian references to death and the afterlife, offers a vastly more genuinely emotional experience than the majority of standard invocations typically inscribed in its more grandiose counterparts.

Meanwhile, Clarice’s words are additionally reinforced by the monuments’ unique architecture.

To read those lines describing how she wishes to be confined with her mother, Jan notes, the viewer has to stand at the foot of the incrusted marble slab, where they’ll be presented with the illusion of looking into an open vault:

“Combining this illusionistic depiction with Clarice’s complaint in elegiac couplets, they will ‘see’ poetry and picture in the right perspective, realizing that they are looking at the space reserved in Alfonsina’s crypt, where Clarice desires ‘to be confined with her mother under a block of marble’.”

Not too many people, I’m guessing, pay much attention to Alfonsina de’ Medici Orsini’s tomb monument as they busily make their way through Santa Maria del Popolo to check out the many vastly more famous artworks scattered throughout the basilica.

Which is yet another instance of how history can subtly distort our historical understanding: sometimes, we simply forget.

Look around. Great art could be right under your feet.

Howard Burton

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You may also be interested in reading the following essays:

Art historians, on the other hand – well, most of the time, anyway – at least have some concrete work left behind to examine. They may not know who created it exactly, or under what circumstances, but if you find yourself face to face with some 500-year old statue, you naturally feel more emboldened to theorize about the particulars associated with its creation than speculate about its long lost counterpart. Particularly, of course, if you’re someone who’s intimately familiar with the artist’s life and œuvre and thus ideally placed to make revealing comparisons.

But sometimes that, too, can backfire, particularly if all that expertise somehow prevents you from gaining a broader, more accurate perspective on things.

A few months ago I was reading Jill Burke’s intriguing book, The Italian Renaissance Nude, and stumbled upon a particularly captivating comment about Donatello’s famous statue of David.

This is, of course, not only a famous statue today, it had become a veritable sensation pretty well immediately after its creation, rapidly establishing itself as an iconic Quattrocento masterpiece that significantly influenced some of the most famous artists in the Renaissance. No controversy there.

Rather more ambiguous, however, is what it actually represents.

If you open up any book on Donatello’s David, you’ll quickly learn that, like many of Donatello’s works, it’s saturated with homoerotic imagery – from the boy’s androgynous form to his ostentatiously firm, round buttocks to – most conspicuously of all – the feathers of Goliath’s helmet that provocatively stroke his inner right thigh.

Indeed, I’d read this sort of thing so often and so consistently that the first word that would have sprung to mind had you asked me, a few months ago, to describe Donatello’s David, would most certainly have been “homoerotic”.

And then I read Jill Burke’s The Italian Renaissance Nude, where she calmly pointed out that the firebrand Florentine preacher Girolamo Savonarola had triumphantly placed Donatello’s David in the Piazza della Signoria, directly in front of the short-lived revolutionary government that he was strongly associated with.

This was profoundly puzzling. How on earth was it possible that Savonarola – the famously incendiary friar who initiated the famous “Bonfire of the Vanities” in the same Piazza, a figure who consistently represented himself as having been sent by God to cleanse Florence of its perniciously immoral tendencies, most definitely including male homosexual activity1 – would have opted to prominently display such an avowedly homoerotic statue in the city’s most famous public square?

Well, it wasn’t.

The only possible explanation is that, for Savonarola and his late 15th-century Florentine contemporaries, Donatello’s David was not considered “homoerotic” in the slightest.

Now understand that I hardly present myself as an expert on homoeroticism, the sexual proclivities of Donatello, the pederastic implications of eagle feathers, or any of that. Nor am I triumphantly announcing some emphatic counter-claim to the current scholarly consensus, boldly averring that Donatello’s David is, in fact, not the slightest bit homoerotic at all.

I’d just like to know why none of the many detailed analyses of Donatello’s David I’ve read over the years ever bothered to mention that, despite our present-day conviction that this statute represents the acme of homoerotic desire, the most virulently polemical anti-homosexual figure in Florentine history obviously thought about it quite differently.

Isn’t it the business of history to put ourselves into the hearts or minds of those being investigated?

Howard Burton

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Find out about how many artists of the time found men more beautiful and proportional to model for them than women and how that affected the art we admire today. The conversation also examines changing beauty standards for women during the Renaissance related to the newly fashionable statues from Antiquity. This video podcast is illustrated with many images to highlight the wide range of artworks under discussion.

**This illustrated video podcast is also available on our Spotify channel HERE, while the audio version is available on the usual audio channels.

It’s only after having attained a significant amount of knowledge that we find ourselves with sufficient confidence to turn our attention back to critically assessing some of those judgements previously taken for granted, but by then we typically don’t bother. Indeed, most of the time the thought of doing so never enters our head, as the initial interpretation has become so ingrained in our minds that we typically don’t even recognize it as an “interpretation” at all.

Of course, in the course of our educational journeys, we sometimes run into clear differences of opinions between domain specialists. When researching my detailed filmic biography of Raphael, for example, one particularly intense fault line I quickly ran into was the debate surrounding whether Raphael was, or wasn't, formally a student of Perugino,1 while my background reading on Botticelli's Primavera for our Renaissance Masterpieces film exploring that painting, presented me with a spectrum of views concerning the commissioning of the work: many believed that it was explicitly created as a wedding present for the 1477 marriage between Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici and Semiramide Appiani, while almost as many others clung to – often equally vehemently – a number of entirely different theories.2

Such differences in expert perspectives can certainly be challenging to work through for an outsider like myself, but they have the distinct benefit of immediately imposing themselves on your consciousness and forcing you to find a way to deal with them – either plonking for a particular interpretation or, if you can’t bring yourself to come to one distinct conclusion, simply presenting the scholarly divergence as you find it: “Some people say X, others say Y”.

But by far the more challenging situation occurs when you later discover that you’ve unthinkingly swallowed a widely accepted view that might well turn out to be completely wrong.

This, too, I’ve experienced on several occasions.

While most seemed willing to blithely accept Vasari’s story that Raphael formally apprenticed with Perugino, almost everyone seemed equally straightforwardly determined to emphatically reject Vasari’s account of the underlying message of Raphael’s celebrated School of Athens, which he controversially describes as, “theologians reconciling philosophy and astrology with theology”.

In fact, the scholarly consensus on Vasari being laughingly misguided on this point is so strong that in my first film on Raphael, I saw no reason to investigate the situation further and simply unreflectively parroted the “Vasari was completely out to lunch here” party line.

A year or so later, however, when researching the more focused Renaissance Masterpieces film on The School of Athens, I encountered a small number of sophisticated counter-arguments to this standard picture3 that I found, quite annoyingly, unable to entirely dismiss.4 In the end, I didn’t find myself 100% persuaded either way,5 but their well-articulated views had certainly sowed enough doubt in my mind to force me to publicly announce them as a distinct possibility in the new film, Raphael’s School of Athens (2025).6

More recently still, I’ve found myself forced to rethink yet another visual description I’ve uncritically swallowed, that of the identity of the sisterly protagonists in Sofonisba Anguissola’s Chess Game, the topic of our third Renaissance Masterpieces film.

The standard account is that, along with the family maid on the right edge of the painting, the girls depicted are, from left to right, Lucia, Europa and Minerva, a correspondence which seems palpably reinforced by another painting by Sofonisba currently in the Milwaukee Art Museum: a girl similar to the right hand chess player in The Chess Game, who sports a medallion delineating attributes of the Greek goddess Athena, or Roman Minerva.

So what’s the problem?

Well, as recently pointed out to me by the estimable art historian Michael Cole – whose recent book, Sofonisba’s Lesson, is by far the most comprehensive and penetrating account of Sofonisba scholarship to date – there’s another, highly relevant, family portrait by Sofonisba in Denmark’s Nivågård’s Malerisamling Museum that considerably muddies the waters, given that the girl in this painting looks very much like a slightly older version of the youngster gleefully surveying the scene in the The Chess Game.

And this girl in the Niva portrait was explicitly described by none other than Giorgio Vasari (yet again!) as not Europa, but “Minerva, who was distinguished in painting and in letters”.

“Well,” you might reasonably conclude, “that untrustworthy Vasari must have simply goofed once more, this time cavalierly confusing the little Europa with her older sister Minerva.” But, as always, things turn out to be considerably more complicated than that.

In the first case, it’s worth emphasizing that Vasari wasn’t simply idly opining from on high somewhere: we know that he wrote his account after having made the effort to personally visit with Sofonisba’s father in the Anguissola family home in Cremona, where he gazed critically upon both The Chess Game and the Niva family portrait; so his words should carry considerable weight here.7

And then there’s the fact that, as Cole astutely points out, the extant documentary record provides no concrete proof whatsoever that Minerva was actually older than Europa at all; indeed, it seems that the primary basis for these convictions simply circles back to the sisterly attributions that we’ve long made to the figures in Sofonisba’s famous Chess Game. Meanwhile, several established scholars are on record as stating their conviction that it’s actually Minerva who’s the smiling youngster in the painting, in accordance with her visual resonance with the later portrait of her brother and father.

So it’s complicated.

Meanwhile, things might be even more complicated still, because it’s not just that all six of the Anguissola sisters8 bore a confusingly uncanny resemblance to each other, it’s also the case that, thanks to Sofonisba’s remarkable pedagogical efforts (a central point of Cole’s impressive monograph that I duly highlighted in our film), all of them somehow became accomplished artists in their own right. Which is to say that, not only are we far from certain which Anguissola sister is being depicted in the Milwaukee portrait, say, we’re equally unsure of who the actual painter was.9

The moral of the story?

If you want to learn about art, read as much as you can as carefully as possible, but always remember to keep both your mind and your eyes wide open.

Howard Burton

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🎬 Please note that our recent Ideas Roadshow art films, Raphael: A Portrait, Botticelli’s Primavera and Sofonisba’s Chess Game, are available for paid subscribers to Exploring Art History. 🎬 Visit HERE for a full overview.

Below is a selection of related essays that you might like to read:

This notion of an all-important “real world” distinct from abstruse scholarly inclinations has long confused me, given that it’s near-universally acknowledged that the most influential humans in history include people like Thucydides, Plato, Shakespeare and Machiavelli. But somehow, if you spend your days carefully poring over the words of these overwhelmingly impactful people, you’re wilfully removing yourself from “the real world”.1

A large part of the problem, I think, is what the insightful British historian David Cannadine once described to me as ‘our contemporary geographical and temporal parochialism’: the unthinking conviction that the only time and place worth paying attention to is the here and now – a parochialism, he maintained, that the historical enterprise is ideally suited to combat, by forcing us to “get ourselves outside of ourselves”.

In other words, it’s not just – as defenders of the humanities are so apt to invoke in our hyper-parochial age – that examining past people and societies will help us better appreciate “where we came from” (although that too, of course). It’s that those who lived in other times and places are often very much worth paying attention to in their own right, simply because they created remarkable things, both physical and abstract.2

I inevitably found myself thinking about all of this during my recent discussion with Princeton University’s charismatic architectural historian Sam Holzman, a veritable one man wrecking crew of the standard “musty irrelevant academic” stereotype that all those “real-world” advocates constantly trot out. Because it’s not just Sam’s inspiring combination of irrepressible dynamism and rigorous scholarship,3 it’s his constant determination to place himself in the world of those exceptional craftsmen, whose primary distinguishing feature is that they happen to have lived thousands of years ago.

Which goes a considerable distance towards explaining why a scholar of ancient Greek architecture like Sam would decide to take the time and effort to learn how to carve stone himself:4

“I was about halfway through my dissertation, writing about stuff carved out of marble, and I thought, ‘You know, I’m writing about something I’ve not tried, and I really ought to do that.’ Through my work as a volunteer with the Parthenon Restoration Service I got to know some of the marble carvers who work there, and I started to sort of shadow them before ultimately doing some of my own carving.

“When you start learning how to do stone carving, you discover as you are hammering across the veins that they have different hardnesses: you can feel it like you’re going over speed bumps as you chisel across those things that look like they’re just different colours. They have a slight difference in geochemistry to them and you feel it with your chisel.

“You discover so many things from doing this. I didn’t even think about the fact that different kinds of stone have a smell, because some kinds of marble and limestone have sulfur in them, and you smell that immediately. There are all kinds of aspects to this that you just don’t think about when you are just looking at the finished product – things like the veins in the stone, how far you can push it to make a span, an intuition about where something’s going to crack and how to take preventative measures.”

The concrete research impact of Sam’s decidedly hands-on, empathetic approach is not difficult to spot, yielding a range of penetrating insights: from the stylistic motivations of ancient capital designers to discovering an ancient Greek instance of flat-arch construction that was long thought to have been invented several centuries later by the Romans.

And then there was the curious case of a little dolphin clamp:

“I was in Romania at the site of the ancient Greek city of Istrus, at what was once the mouth of the Danube river. There’s a beautiful Ionic column capital that cracked right down the middle, and they repaired it with a giant clamp, like a huge iron staple in the two halves to hold it back together again, and then they put a cosmetic patch over it, and it’s in the shape of a dolphin.

“I thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not how these things are supposed to work.’ To my mind, there’s nothing else that looks like this, but it’s an invitation for us as art historians, as scholars of antiquity, to think about how ancient craftspeople thought about these repairs a little bit differently: they were laying in value. If you couldn’t make something look completely invisible, why not make it look beautiful? And that’s what I think they did in this case.”

There’s a good chance that few of these insights would have occurred to Sam had he not made the conscious effort to get into the hearts and minds of those remarkable ancient artisans through picking up a hammer and chisel himself – a decision which, intriguingly, naturally catapulted him into the realm of their contemporary counterparts:

“In my view there are actually two parts to the whole experience: one is trying it yourself, trying your hand at it. But the other part is talking to contemporary practitioners. I’ve had a lot of conversations with stone carvers who are active in Greece, and I’ve learned an enormous amount from them.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty “real world-like” to me. At least the only sort of world I’d like to live in.

Howard Burton

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Regular readers of Exploring Art History might not be the slightest bit surprised by this, given my penchant for bringing in widely different, seemingly stream-of consciousness, reference points – like starting a post on Linda Nochlin’s celebrated 1971 article launching the discipline of feminist art history with a description of my shock when first encountering Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity.1

Some might view this as pretentious, or a paean to “interdisciplinary” values (or, of course, both). But it is neither. As someone who’s spent a good chunk of his life ruminating over scientific issues (both personally, and as a practicing sociologist of science for the better part of a decade),2 I naturally make links between different aspects of my past experiences. If these sometimes seem a bit more of a stretch than most, it’s simply because of the curious nature of my personal career trajectory – I never imagined that I would somehow end up spending my days making films on different aspects of art history – but life is full of surprises for all of us.

As far as interdisciplinarity goes, well, it’s not a word that I’ve ever been a fan of (indeed, I’m not even entirely sure that it is a word, but that’s a rant for another day), as it’s long struck me as one of those typically semantically bankrupt terms that academic administrators regularly trot out to sanctimoniously reaffirm their self-proclaimed “vision”. 3 But what could it possibly mean? A closer examination quickly reveals: not much. Because in order for an action to be truly “interdisciplinary”, it must, tautologically, transcend prior “disciplinary boundaries” – thereby somehow linking (or at least shedding valuable light on) two or more areas previously considered to be “in fundamentally disparate silos”.

Well, who, in his right mind, would believe that such “fundamentally disparate silos” are anything more than unreflective limitations of our world views, anyway? After all, that is precisely what we mean when we talk of someone making a great discovery – that he or she has found a way to meaningfully link two things together that for a long time appeared to have little to do with one another.

Here’s a revealing example from the history of physics. For centuries, everyone knew that two key terms invoked in our mathematical description of moving bodies, so-called “inertial mass” and “gravitational mass”, magically appeared to possess the same value, despite the fact that they reflected two very different processes – one associated with the law of inertia and the other associated with gravitational attraction. But it was left to Einstein (yes, Einstein again) to make the vital conceptual leap by postulating a deep, fundamental equivalence between the two, thereby setting the stage for the flowering of the general theory of relativity, unquestionably one of the single greatest accomplishments of our species.4

What shall we call Einstein’s insight? A probing act of interdisciplinary research overcoming the previously established divide between general Newtonian dynamics and his gravitational theory? Of course not; see how silly that sounds? For me, he was simply engaging in an explicit act of rethinking, a deliberate paring away of decades, sometimes centuries, of accumulated biases and assumptions in order to make a new start, to re-imagine an “established” picture anew.

The main problem with embarking on such a deliberate practice of comprehensive rethinking is that it is extraordinarily difficult – requiring an unrelenting desire to rigorously inform oneself of all the subtleties of our current understanding while investigating a wide range of prospective new ideas and interpretations, necessarily leading the researcher well outside of any reasonable comfort zone. It is, in other words, hardly something that can be brought into being simply by announcing some shiny new “interdisciplinary research program”.

It is a question of character: a willingness to constantly probe one’s own beliefs and assumptions so as to develop deeper and more profound insights. A few have it. Most don’t.

Which brings me, in my own meandering way, to Susanna Berger, Walter Burke Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia University. Susanna has recently published The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture,5 one of the most stimulating books I’ve read in a long, long time. Weaving together visual theory, literature, intellectual history, and much, much more, The Deformation describes in compelling detail how many deeply sophisticated, often illusionistic works of 17th-century art and architecture were explicitly constructed in accordance with an overarching religious philosophy that required them to be actively “reformed” into clarity by the discerning viewer. It’s a truly fascinating thesis, all the more so for someone like myself who knew absolutely nothing about this subject before opening the book.

The broader domain of artistic perspective in which the book is naturally placed, however, is something I’ve long been attracted to – with its intriguingly overlapping strands of art history, mathematics, optics and cognitive science combining to provoke an almost limitless number of deep, foundational questions about the nature of both representing, and beholding, the external world.

Given the breadth of its subject matter, The Deformation will surely be trumpeted by at least some of its supporters as “interdisciplinary” – thereby, I’m convinced, damning it with some pretty faint praise. Far better to just call it what it is: a deeply thoughtful and incisive work very much in the tradition of some of the most penetrating pioneers of art history, such as Martin Kemp and Erwin Panofsky – scholarly precedents that Berger naturally invokes on a regular basis, to the reader’s manifold benefit.

Because that’s another thing that such illuminating works do: they repeatedly direct you to celebrated precursors that you should be familiar with, and sometimes even convince yourself that you are, but often turn out not to be.

So it turned out to be with Panofsky’s groundbreaking 1956 article, “Galileo as a Critic of the Arts” that was frequently cited at key moments throughout The Deformation.6

I don’t have a background in art history, and so have no easy way of assessing to what extent today’s art history students are genuinely aware of Panofsky’s ideas, but I can unhesitatingly declare that they most certainly should be. Of course he has long been firmly ensconced in the art historical pantheon as one of the greats of the field, but in my experience familiarity with a name is not the same thing as familiarity with the actual writings. For my part, I’d read some of his work on Dürer, and was familiar with some of his essays, such as the highly intriguing, “Perspective as Symbolic Form”, but had never come across “Galileo as a Critic of the Arts”, and found myself naturally intrigued by the title.

I knew that Galileo came from a humanist family (his father was a highly regarded musician and music theorist) and that he expressed many of his key research insights through the trendy literary form of a Renaissance dialogue, but all of that, I assumed, was simply a form of “cultural window dressing” for someone whose driving motivations were exclusively scientific in nature.

Well, not necessarily, it turns out. Panofsky begins his piece by informing us that, while it was “well known” that Galileo was a huge fan of the influential poet Ludovico Ariosto and a scathing critic of his later contemporary Torquato Tasso (”well known” to him and his circle, presumably, but certainly not to me), he also had strong views on “other arts”, and was close friends with the Florentine painter Lodovico Cigoli, who had famously (again, not to me) incorporated Galileo’s realistic depiction of the moon seen through the telescope in his Assumption of the Virgin fresco in the dome of the Pauline chapel in the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore.7

So that was all very interesting, in the general “spot the influence” sort of way that is the stock and trade of any good art history tour guide.

But Panofsky, typically, went far deeper than simply pointing out how Galileo’s research might have naturally rubbed off on his painterly friend. His main focus was to depict core aspects of Galileo’s “aesthetic judgements” – judgements which, he claimed, could be directly traced to his scientific orientation.

In particular, aside from his virulent antipathy towards Torquato Tasso’s poetry, Galileo was also strongly disparaging of the contemporary trend of “illusionistic art”, such as the “anamorphoses” that Susanna Berger extensively tackles in The Deformation: carefully constructed images that can only be “resolved” when looked at from specific angles, such as the famous skull (that one I did know about) between the two figures in Hans Holbein’s National Gallery painting, The Ambassadors.

Well, everyone likes to have strong views. But Panofsky’s point is not so much that Galileo was an opinionated fellow, but that his disdain for such perspectival illusions was very much of a piece with his irritation at Tasso’s continual allegorical bombardment throughout his poetry, where nothing was what it seemed and so much was forced to somehow represent something else.

That was both illuminating and eminently comprehensible. Here was Galileo, the shining exemplar of a bold, new scientific “tell it like it is” realism, naturally repelled by any fancy-pants diversions that might direct our attention away from the coolly detached investigation of nature that we now identify with being necessarily associated with genuine scientific progress. So much, so expected.

But then it got really interesting. Because Panofsky’s point isn’t simply that all of that shape-shifting artistic trickery of the age naturally clashed with Galileo’s straightforwardly empiricist temperament, but that things were vastly more subtle, given that Galileo’s actual temperament was hardly as “straightforwardly empirical” as modern scientific lore currently maintains (think of the timeworn image of him dropping balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which, in fact, he almost certainly never did).

In particular, Panofsky (now effectively teaming up with the equally impressive historian of science Alexandre Koyré) asks the provocative question of why Galileo so resolutely ignored Johannes Kepler’s discovery of the planets’ elliptical orbits throughout his entire life. Such behaviour hardly smacks of what anyone might reasonably associate with “a diehard, straightforwardly empirical temperament”.

Indeed, the answer, according to Panofsky and Koyré, seems to be that Galileo rejected Kepler’s conclusions because they didn’t square with his flagrantly a priori convictions that, at its heart, all motion – including, incidentally, all motion of humans and animals (a view independently purported by Leonardo da Vinci over a century earlier), was necessarily based upon systems of circles – a shape long believed throughout history, due to its pleasing symmetry properties, to be the “naturally perfect” form. Ellipses, in other words, were “deformed circles”, and thus couldn’t possibly represent the ultimate, underlying expression of real physical movement.

Well then, you might conclude, it must have been Kepler who was the “straightforward empiricist”, given his willingness to accept non-circular orbits. Not really, says Panofsky (and Koyré). Kepler was a product of the old, medieval Platonically-inspired philosophy that happily accepted that real objects, mired as they are in the imperfect physical realm8 might well deviate from their ideal trajectories due to the presumed impact of their corruptible, earthly material, while Galileo, modernist that he was, emphatically rejected the existence of such an ideal ethereal world to begin with.

To Galileo the real, physical world was all there was. But that hardly meant that the appropriate way to describe it didn’t involve a particular, circumscribing, aesthetic orientation – one that, as Panofsky so revealingly demonstrated, was also strongly represented in Galileo’s approach to literature and art.

Fascinating stuff. But to me, at least, the story doesn’t end even there. Because as tempting as it might be to position Galileo, “Early Modern” fellow that he was, as “a key figure in the slowly emerging scientific worldview naturally tainted with the prejudices of his time”, it’s well worth asking to what extent scientists today approach their subjects with particular “aesthetic orientations” representing specific a priori beliefs.

To what extent, for example, might a modern theoretical physicist be willing to ignore the notion of gauge invariance – or, even more generally still, an underlying action principle? That is not to say, of course, that these are blind, arbitrary prejudices, akin to naively believing in the power of circular symmetry – they are clearly not. They are invoked, now almost always unthinkingly, because history has shown that they have worked remarkably well.

But they are aesthetic judgements all the same.

Howard Burton

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What, on earth, could possibly be the common denominator that somehow linked all of those very different pursuits together? Was it, in short, even a thing – and, if so, how?

What I didn’t expect was that the author had long been struggling with the very same question – so much so, in fact, that he nearly didn’t write the book at all.

This was a bit of a shock, because if there’s one person you would unhesitatingly conclude would know everything there is to know about illustration, it would be D.B. Dowd, writer, curator, Professor of Art and American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and faculty director of its Modern Graphic History Library – a library that, as it happens, is named in his honour. Oh, and he’s a gifted illustrator himself as well.

And yet, for all of that, Douglas struggled mightily with the very idea of writing a history of the field.

“When I was first asked to write a history of illustration, I said no. And the reason I said no was that I’m really not convinced that illustration has a history. It has a past, but I didn’t feel as if it had developed a historiography. It didn’t have a theory of itself.”

When he was approached again a few years later, he was still hesitant, but this time didn’t reject it outright, instead electing to give the matter some thought.

“For some time I’ve had a kind of abiding frustration with the fact that illustration doesn’t have enough of a literature. And because it doesn’t have enough of a literature, it’s often written about in the context of what it isn’t. It isn’t, for example, a Kantian disinterested aesthetic experience. It isn’t one of the seven Liberal Arts. In fact, its mongrel status seems to be fundamental to what it is.

“So I said to myself, ‘I’m going to think about this for a month. And if I can come up with a thesis after a month, then I’ll agree to do it. And if I can’t, then I won’t.”

During that month of thinking, he found himself reading Alberto Manguel’s innovative A History of Reading – an experience which, as it happens, strongly pushed him towards the light:

“Ultimately, the core aspect of illustration to me is reading. It’s connected to reading. If you’re not reading, it’s just artwork.”

“Just” artwork? Those might well sound like fighting words to followers of Exploring Art History, but Douglas certainly isn’t dismissive of either illustration or the broader notion of art. He’s simply trying to flesh things out, as openly and honestly as he can – a task that, given his unique career trajectory, he’s particularly well-suited to:

“I always knew that I was an artist and a writer, but I wasn’t really acculturated to fine art as a young person: I didn’t take the art history survey, for example. But I also didn’t go to design school and illustration.

“So I didn’t imbibe any of the biases of art, which are quite substantial, nor did I absorb the resentments that have often attended the field of illustration.”

And one troubling consequence of such resentments largely brought about by participating in a domain often minimized or even sneered at by self-proclaimed “serious artists and serious art historians”, Douglas believes, is a widespread unwillingness to take oneself to task for past moral transgressions.

“I think that the boosterism within the field of illustration has often caused it to be less attentive than it might be to the harms that illustration has sometimes been engaged in, like images of the Jews of Europe and the Middle East, indigenous Americans and blacks after slavery.

“There’s a tendency to just kind of wave all that off and say, ‘It would be better if we didn’t have to look at that.’ But it’s important to realize that the very cultural impact of these depictions occurs because illustration is invisible. It doesn’t have the status of art. You don’t look at it and stroke your chin. You just absorb it.”

In Leo Tolstoy’s famous essay, What is Art?, he defines art not through standard aesthetic criteria, but by its capacity to invoke an emotional response, with “good” art distinguished by its ability to generate morally elevated sentiments that, “replace lower feelings, less kind and less needed for the good of humanity, by kinder feelings, more needed for that good.”

By Tolstoy’s criteria, illustration is art1 but rarely good art. For D.B. Dowd, meanwhile, illustration shouldn’t be regarded as part of the formal domain of art history at all; its proper place is squarely within cultural history.

It makes you think.

Which is the whole point.

Howard Burton

Below you can watch my recent conversation with D.B. Dowd.

• For your convenience we have embedded the podcast video below. We’ve produced carefully edited English subtitles that are the basis for all translated captions on YouTube. If you’d like to watch on your laptop, please click on “Watch on YouTube” on the cover below to activate the subtitles.

• You can also watch the conversation on our Exploring Art History Spotify channel.

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The first time I encountered Einstein’s original 1905 paper on special relativity, for example, I was shocked by the form of its argument that, in all its penetrating simplicity, was very differently expressed than how I had learned it some 80 years later. And while the many layers of elegant geometrical formalism that had accreted upon it over the decades unquestionably placed the theory’s key conceptual insights firmly within the larger domain of fundamental physics, they also, revealingly, “airbrushed away” key aspects of its pioneering spirit.

This sort of thing happens quite often in the humanities too. How many of us, unthinkingly relying upon some superficial bullet-point framework of a few characteristic insights of history’s most renowned thinkers (Plato believed X, Hume said Y, Kant responded with Z), find ourselves taken aback when we go to the original source material and discover numerous occasions when these celebrated authors express substantially different, much more nuanced, views than what we had naively expected.

Exactly this sort of thing happened to me when I finally got around to reading Linda Nochlin’s trailbrazing 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” 1

Somehow, unreflectively, I thought I knew what it was about: that centuries of a rigidly male-dominated societal structure was directly responsible for the palpable lack of accomplished women artists throughout history.

This is not, as summaries go, wildly off-base. And yet it so palpably lacks the vital nuance that makes this paper so deserving of being read.

After all, the idea that women, people of colour, and a whole host of others, have been actively, systematically, discriminated against for centuries is hardly a newsflash to anyone who’s been paying the slightest amount of attention to human history (or, for that matter, human present): How on earth could that not have led to a drastic diminishment of a wide range of potential cultural accomplishments, very much including, but by no means limited to, works of art?

And that, in short, is why it took me so long to get around to reading Nochlin’s article: why bother reading something that you already know? Well, that’s not entirely true: there were other reasons too. I’d often heard that this piece had done nothing less than “launch the discipline of feminist art history”, and the phrase “feminist art history” had long given me considerable pause, with its unsavoury combination of academic trendiness and obfuscating unintelligibility.2

I have an innate distaste for all such strongly agenda-driven academic movements – Marxist history, queer theory, neo-conservative economics – that seem tautologically designed to reveal far more of the dogmatic predilections of their investigators than any objective truths associated with their alleged subject matter. Indeed, many of these fashions are clearly premised on the notion that no such objective truth exists in the first place; and it seems pretty obvious to me that no meaningful middle ground can possibly occur with someone who clings to such a profoundly different notion of the research enterprise.

So I tend to steer very clear of the whole business; and for many years consequently gave “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” a deliberate pass.

But that was a mistake, because it turns out that Nochlin’s article crackles with profound insights, from its initial invocation of John Stuart Mill3 , to its highlighting of specific training techniques, such as drawing nude models, that female artists were long denied access to, to a clear-eyed analysis of the societal trope of “feminine well-roundedness” that simultaneously redirected women from the single-minded pursuit of excellence while condescendingly framing their artistic accomplishments as mere dilettantism.

But for me, perhaps the most memorable aspect of “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” is when Nochlin examines the case of Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), a bonafide artistic success story who nonetheless was unable to escape the psychological torments of feeling compelled to routinely demonstrate her standard, societally imposed “feminine” qualities:

“The voice of the feminine mystique, with its potpourri of ambivalent narcissism and guilt, internalized, subtly dilutes and subverts that total inner confidence, that absolute certitude and self-determination, moral and esthetic, demanded by the highest and most innovative work in art.”

It is surely hard enough for any artist, in any circumstance, to martial the necessary self-belief to eventually triumph against the odds. That virtually all women, no matter how strongly supported they are by friends and family,4 are burdened with a significant additional layer of societally-imposed self-doubt, goes a considerable distance towards explaining why the number of truly great women artists is vastly less than it should be.

Because, vitally, Nochlin doesn’t deny that this is the case. This, too, was a surprise. I had naively expected that she would claim that there were many women painters whose artists accomplishments objectively ranked alongside their great male counterparts but, owing to our omnipresent gender biases, they’ve been systematically overlooked. But she does no such thing.

“The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been.

“That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same.”

Somewhat ironically, this is the only one of Nochlin’s claims that didn’t entirely convince. I’ll unhesitatingly agree if one sets the bar at Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and perhaps at Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, but personally, give me an Artemisia Gentileschi or a Clara Peeters over a de Kooning or Warhol any day. In my view, in other words, there have been lots of great women artists deserving of widespread appreciation. If we limited ourselves to just looking at the works of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, we’d run out of worthy subject matter pretty darned quickly.

As it happens, Nochlin herself played a seminal role in bringing many of these long-neglected painters to public prominence through the landmark 1976 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Women Artists, 1550-1950, that she co-curated with Ann Sutherland Harris.5

Meanwhile, a steady outpouring of scholarly work, led by the likes of Mary Garrard, Elizabeth Cropper, Federika Jacobs, Michael Cole and Christopher Marshall, has shone a great deal of much-needed light on many important details.

And while much remains, perhaps forever, shrouded in obscurity (women artists have disproportionately suffered far more than men when it comes to misattributions of their work6 ), a good deal of valuable information about both these women and their long-neglected works has now, gratefully, come to light.

So much so, in fact, that I recently decided to make a film solely dedicated to the accomplishments of great women artists. But the closer I looked, the clearer it became that one couldn’t possibly cut it. So now I’m thinking of four, broken up into specific time periods. Or maybe even five.

Does that make me a feminist?

I don’t think so. I just like looking at captivating pictures.

Howard Burton

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You may also be interested in reading the following essays:

Some would say never: the job of a historian is to stick rigorously to what can be clearly and objectively established through the documented record. Engaging in any sort of speculation might be entertaining or amusing, but it certainly, necessarily, isn’t history.

But Bill Wallace disagrees. And so do I.

Wallace, Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the world’s leading specialists on the life and works of Michelangelo. His three most recent books on this iconic artist – his 2010 biography, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times, his compelling 2019 study of Michelangelo’s efforts to construct St. Peter’s Basilica (Michelangelo, God’s Architect) and his detailed 2026 investigation of Michelangelo’s rivalry with his famous Venetian contemporary Titian (Michelangelo & Titian) – have all achieved that rarest of feats: captivating a broad general audience while simultaneously being emphatically endorsed by specialist scholars.

And all three explicitly invoke, at various times and to varying degrees, Wallace’s descriptive power of imagination in order to make Michelangelo and his world vividly come alive.

How, you might well ask yourself, is this even possible? After all, once we start blurring the line between serious historical scholarship and novelistic reconstruction, don’t we naturally find ourselves irrevocably lost, unable to distinguish between established fact and fiction?

Not necessarily. It all depends, I think, on the level of intellectual honesty displayed by the author.

If I’m reading or watching something that’s riddled with confident assertions of obvious untruths and knee-jerk repetitions of clearly romanticized anecdotes – and works on the Italian Renaissance, as it happens, are particularly prone to that sort of thing1 – I’m going to move on, indignantly, very quickly.

But if some clearly credible and thoughtful type carefully lays out the established historical record before telling me, “OK, that’s what we know; now I’m going to indulge in a bit of speculation to imagine how some of the missing details came about, even though there’s no specific evidence to support what I’m about to suggest”, I’ll most happily read on, drawn in ever deeper to the captivating wonders of that very different time and place.

And I’m hardly the only one.

Shortly before I had my podcast conversation with Bill Wallace, I spoke with the renowned art historian Stephen Campbell about his wittily forceful “anti-biography” of Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life) that penetratingly deconstructs so much of the flatly erroneous mythology constantly circling around the figure of Leonardo. You might think, given Stephen’s determination to take irresponsibly fabricating biographers to task, that he’d be highly intolerant of Wallace’s biographical approach. But you’d be dead wrong.

“I think Bill Wallace is exemplary in terms of how to do life writing around figures from the pre-modern past“, he told me. “I consult his works on Michelangelo all the time.“

Meanwhile, when I questioned Bill directly about his historical approach, he spontaneously invoked an even greater academic authority still: the unimpeachable “historian’s historian” John Huxtable Elliott, whom I had the great pleasure of chatting with a decade or so ago.2

“I think of what I’m doing, in Titian & Michelangelo, as creating a very big picture, a kind of mosaic, in which we have lots and lots of documents. These are some of the best-documented artists of the Renaissance. So it’s a mosaic with lots of tesserae that are surviving. But of course it’s an old mosaic, and a lot of the tesserae are missing.

“But I think that, in certain cases, if you see the whole picture of what you’re trying to construct, you can imaginatively inform yourself of what the missing tesserae are most likely to be. This approach of trying to fill in the gaps with informed imagination I’ve learned from historians; and one in particularly whom I think very highly of is John Elliott, who describes it in his autobiography, History in the Making, where he writes:

‘I believe that theory is of less importance for the writing of good history than the ability to enter imaginatively into the life of a society remote in time or place, and produce a plausible explanation of why its inhabitants thought and behaved as they did.’

“So, those are the words of John Elliott, one of the most distinguished and most careful of documentary historians. What he’s trying to do is provide a plausible explanation. And I think that’s all I’m trying to do with my informed imagination approach: filling in those gaps that give us a plausible look at the whole picture. Because we have so much of the whole picture, we can usually cover the gaps.”

If you’re following squarely in the footsteps of John Elliott, I figure, you can’t go far wrong.

Howard Burton

Below you can watch the second part of my recent conversation with Bill Wallace from which I quoted above: MICHELANGELO: Contemporary Artistic Impact - A conversation with Bill Wallace, Part 2.

• For your convenience we have embedded the podcast video below. We’ve produced carefully edited English subtitles that are the basis for all translated captions on YouTube. If you’d like to watch on your laptop, please click on “Watch on YouTube” on the cover below to activate the subtitles.

• You can also watch the conversation on our Exploring Art History Spotify channel - enjoy and thanks in advance!

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But what is invariably overlooked, I maintained, and what does actually make the United States a truly exceptional place, is its position as a global attractor of the world’s top talent in virtually every known domain imaginable, from biomedicine to video games to medieval philosophy. And it does that principally through the preponderance of its top-flight universities that overwhelmingly dominate any international ranking table that has ever been constructed.

Take away America’s universities, in other words, and the United States simply becomes a cacophonous media-shouting, gun-toting, health care-denying, cruelly avaricious mess. Put them in, and that big, ugly picture becomes notably counterbalanced by the presence of the lion’s share of the world’s most insightful thinkers and creators who are quietly and diligently propelling humanity forward.

And for me, the one place that has long represented the acme of this other, often underappreciated, American ideal that has so conspicuously benefited the planet, is Princeton, New Jersey.

Back in 1999, when I somehow found myself building a research institute from scratch with private philanthropic monies,1 the obvious precedent to look to was Princeton’s fabled Institute for Advanced Study. Founded in the 1930s through a large donation from Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld, the IAS was originally envisioned as a medical school before its first director, Abraham Flexner, boldly molded it into by far the greatest independent centre of scholarship that the world has ever seen, whose seemingly endless list of world-leading researchers span a remarkably wide range of human endeavour, from mathematical physics to archaeology to anthropology to art history.2

But of course the IAS, for all of its extraordinary accomplishments, is hardly the only knowledge game in town, with Princeton University more than holding its own as a global icon of intellectual achievement. Even more impressively still, Princeton has long built a reputation of combining the highest level of cutting-edge investigation with a deep and abiding commitment to undergraduate teaching. Most top-flight universities struggle to simultaneously meet the needs of their students with those of their leading faculty, who often regard time spent in a classroom as a pointless drain on their lofty intellectual resources.

But anyone lucky enough to get a faculty position at Princeton is expected to be a top-flight researcher and passionately devoted to teaching. Period. It’s simply the culture of the place.

This sort of thing has long puzzled me. What is it, exactly, about one particular locale that gives it its “culture”? Why can’t other places simply take obviously worthy policies and procedures that they see operating somewhere and successfully copy them? I don’t know. But for the most part things don’t seem to work that way. Culture matters.

Which is why I’ve not been the slightest bit surprised to find myself overwhelmingly drawn to Princeton University Press (PUP) these days.

When you decide to create a new art history video podcast, the obvious starting point is to check out the recent publishing scene to get a sense of what new, interesting and accessible ideas are out there. Fortunately, there are several worthy publishers of art and architecture books among both the academic and trade presses: from Yale, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge to Paul Holberton, Thames & Hudson, Reaktion, Phaidon and Bloomsbury.

But PUP, I quickly came to realize, comprehensively blows them all completely out of the water, both in terms of quantity and quality. No less than 9 out of the first 15 people I’ve spoken with for the podcast, or am now scheduled to speak with, have recently published with PUP. Indeed, there is such a strong link between our Exploring Art History podcast and Princeton University Press that you might well think that there is some kind of formal structural relationship between us, solidified with some financial sponsorship arrangement.

There is not. I have so often turned to PUP simply because they are doing a fantastic job: quietly, methodically, they are steadily pumping out one wonderful, captivating book after another.

And it gets even better. Because their art and architecture books are not only chock-filled with extremely stimulating words, they are often spectacularly beautiful to look at as well, vastly increasing the reader experience through detailed, carefully-positioned high-resolution images on durable, top-quality paper. They are, in short, works of art in their own right.

Their authors, unsurprisingly, have certainly noticed. Everyone I spoke with who had their book published with PUP was profoundly grateful for all the time and effort invested to produce the highest quality product, and would frequently spontaneously mention that to me (not the usual response from academics, it should be stressed).

When I first talked to Susan Dackerman about her book, Dürer’s Knots, she stressed the importance of me experiencing the physical book (i.e. more than just a PDF), as it subtly reinforced many aspects of her ideas. Sam Holzman marvelled at how a deliberate effort was made to cleverly imprint the front cover of his first book, Retrospective Columns, with a tangible representation of its subject. The list goes on and on. Such efforts not only take time, they also take money. Well, you might breezily think, Princeton has lots of money. After all, the university’s endowment is currently estimated at slightly less than a whopping $40 billion. But without getting into the relevant financial details (of which I am wholly and wilfully ignorant), that very much misses the point.

Obviously, money is a necessary prerequisite for constructing such intricately crafted products. But it is by no means sufficient, as witnessed by the fact that nobody is doing anything like what PUP is doing with their art and architecture books. Not Yale University Press (Yale’s endowment is currently valued at $44 billion) nor Harvard University Press (Harvard’s endowment is currently valued at $57 billion), nor anyone else.3

No, it’s quite clear to me that the people at Princeton University Press do what they do for one simple reason: because they’re determined to create the best works imaginable. I’ve never met Michelle Komie, the clearly exceptional editor whose commitment to excellence permeates every art and architecture book that PUP produces.

But I don’t have to. The books speak for themselves.

Howard Burton

• Ep. 1. ALBRECHT DÜRER: Islamic themes in Dürer’s prints - A conversation with Susan Dackerman, UCLA:

• Ep. 2. THE ART OF MAPS: A history of Rome in maps - A conversation with Jessica Maier

• Ep. 3 MICHELANGELO: The Making of Art - A conversation with Bill Wallace, Part 1

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In short, somehow, the vast majority of us don’t have any real comprehension of what research actually is, as witnessed by the all-pervasiveness of such contemporary tropes such as “evidence-based research” – a phrase that, through its suffocating redundancy, straightforwardly displays our collective ignorance: is it possible to indulge in non-evidence-based research? Of course not. That is simply uninformed opinion – the sort of thing we are all flooded with on a constant basis these days.

But if you look closer, the situation is actually far worse than that.

It’s not just that an alarming number of us are unable to distinguish between an act of genuine impartial investigation and transparent attempts to justify some pre-conceived agenda, it’s that we don’t grasp the fundamental, overarching spirit of the research enterprise that is directly responsible for its transformative power. Because the true breakthroughs do not occur from straightforwardly extending our models; they arise from leaps into the unknown, from sudden glimpses of inspiration, from a serendipitous concatenation of events.

We’re all familiar with this idiom, too, bombarded as we are with heroic tales of discovery from Archimedes to Einstein. But those stories are all presented backwards: a great leap in our understanding occurred, what led its inventor to somehow come up with it? Most researchers, most of the time, do not hit upon a great leap in our understanding. Or even a little leap. They spend their time confused, anxious, and often completely unsure of how to proceed. As Einstein was famously reputed to have said (but likely didn’t, given that, like so many sayings commonly ascribed to Einstein, there is no documented source):

“If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research.”

Being a true researcher, then, necessarily involves a willingness to endure long periods of intellectual discomfort. It’s not just that “the establishment” will often sneer at your final conclusions if you say something different from the status quo (although that too, often), it’s that you will inevitably be plagued with a litany of self-doubts as you haphazardly meander down your own unique road.

All of this came to my mind when I was chatting with Bill Wallace, Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, and one of the world’s most accomplished Michelangelo scholars. How difficult, I wondered, was it to become an expert on someone like Michelangelo - universally recognized as one of the greatest, most documented, and well-studied artists in human history? Surely that would have been a tremendously daunting prospect for anyone, let alone someone as obviously grounded and unpretentious as Bill.

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And so it proved to be, he told me. Yet, pivotally, he had help.

“It wasn’t until graduate school at Columbia University that I decided that I was professionally interested in really pursuing this. And yes, I ran into some very negative reactions: people thinking that there was nothing more to say about Michelangelo. Everything had been said. There was such a huge bibliography of this artist that really there was little left to contribute.

“Fortunately, that wasn’t the case for everybody advising me. The best advice I ever received was from Howard Hibbard at Columbia, who said that every generation has new questions to ask and new ways to look at great art. And every generation should study the great works of art because they have something new to say about it. That was the encouragement to keep me on this path that I pursued now for more than 40 years.”

But that was only the beginning. While pursuing his doctorate on Michelangelo’s drawings, Bill was drawn to Carrara where the marble for so many of Michelangelo’s famous statues was quarried.

He made repeated trips to the area, tried his own hand at carving marble, and spent long periods of time searching for the particular spot where Michelangelo extracted his marble.

“I spent a lot of time just walking these paths out, trying to find the quarry that Michelangelo used for San Lorenzo. And we know where it was, but it was so high up on the mountain that it had been basically abandoned in the early 20th century. But there were still paths that led up there. It was at times very scary, because the paths had been eroded and the mountain is very high. But it was utterly sublime. I can see why Michelangelo was willing to spend hours - or years, actually - in the quarries: because it just inspires you to grandeur. They are majestic beyond belief.”

Unbeknownst to Bill, he was not only literally following in Michelangelo’s footsteps, he was also slowly carving out his own brilliant academic path that would shed deeply valuable light on a long-ignored aspect of Michelangelo studies: How, exactly, did he make his art, and what were the many difficulties that he encountered along the way?

But at the time things looked very different to the young scholar.

“It was a very special experience for me, though I felt guilty at the time because I wondered if that was research. Is this research: wandering around the mountains trying to find Michelangelo’s marble paths? I finally came to realize that: yes, this is a kind of geographical or topographical research, which was very essential to how Michelangelo worked, and how he could build a building.”

Just like Michelangelo’s footpaths through the Carrara quarries, the road of research is never straightforward, and can often be, in its own way, quite precarious. But it is well worth the effort.

Howard Burton

Below you can watch an illustrated video podcast of my recent conversation with Bill Wallace: MICHELANGELO: The Making of Art - A conversation with Bill Wallace, Part 1 (on May 4th we’ll release Part 2: Michelangelo: Contemporary Artistic Impact).

• For your convenience we have embedded the podcast video below. We’ve produced carefully edited English subtitles that are the basis for all translated captions on YouTube. If you’d like to watch on your laptop, please click on “Watch on YouTube” on the cover below to activate the subtitles.

• You can also watch the conversation on our Exploring Art History Spotify channel - enjoy and thanks in advance!

My Raphaelphilic credentials, in short, have been pretty clearly demonstrated.

And then, as if any further inducement was needed to go see a blockbuster show dedicated to this unparallelled High Renaissance master, Raphael-lovers the world over had recently been cruelly shortchanged. The year 2020, the five-hundred year anniversary of his death, was supposed to be “The year of Raphael”, with a panoply of compelling exhibitions staged throughout the globe, mostly in Italy. But the coronavirus pandemic put an emphatic damper on that, with virtually all shows drastically reduced, if not simply cancelled.

Into this distressing gap, then, strode the Met with their current show Raphael: Sublime Poetry, the first major Raphael retrospective ever held in the United States, with a stunning collection of some 237 Raphael-related works, many of which had never before left Europe. With a focus on the theme of motherhood and childhood mortality – Raphael’s mother died when he was 8, while two of his siblings also died in childhood1 – a great effort has been made to explicitly demonstrate the vital social and historical context that might well have later influenced Raphael to make his stunningly moving portrayals of women and children throughout his many devotional paintings.

Curator Carmen Bambach even went to the trouble of incorporating an account book from the Urbino convent that catalogued the funeral expenses for Raphael’s mother and infant sister to provide the viewer with concrete evidence of this hugely traumatic, yet sadly all-too-common, aspect of 15th-century domestic reality.

Bambach, longtime head of the Met’s drawings and prints section, a global authority on Leonardo da Vinci, and prime creative force behind this new exhibition, has clearly gone to a great deal of effort over the past 8 years to make it a reality, vigorously hitting the road to cajole and convince an extraordinary number of leading European galleries to allow their Raphael masterpieces to make the trip to New York.2

But I will not.

And neither, I believe, should you, if you don’t live in the United States.

For what can possibly be the value of “appreciating the historical context” of infant mortality and women dying in childbirth if we blithely head across the ocean to visit, and thereby implicitly support, a country that is, among other things: wantonly murdering its own mothers in plain sight,3 aggressively separating children from their parents,4 and leading the industrialized world’s maternal mortality rate by a considerable margin5 – a number it’s perversely determined to drive yet higher still through the efforts of a stridently anti-vax, conspiracy theorist-peddling “Secretary of Health and Human Services”.6

I know what you’re thinking:

All of this, surely, is “politics”. What on earth does it have to do with the likes of Raphael? Why, on earth, are you writing about this in a place devoted to “Exploring Art History”?

Well, in the first place, I think we’ve left “politics” a long time ago now. Politics is about whether or not we should raise taxes to provide more government-run services or lower them to provide more incentives for economic growth. It’s about debating which programs and policies will be the most efficacious in advancing the collective interests of our society; and what, specifically, we mean by such an “advancement”, anyway. It’s not about mindlessly demonizing anyone who disagrees with you in order to advance your own weaponized personality cult. That’s something else entirely, a phenomenon that the historically aware have seen many times before. And it never ends well.

That’s the thing about historical context: it cuts both ways. There is something hideously duplicitous about feigning sympathy for the miserable plight of people 500 years ago while by our very presence we are tacitly supporting a regime that is now deliberately inflicting many of those very same miseries on our contemporary fellow humans.

Either we care about these things, or we don’t.

So if you are American, or live in America, by all means make a beeline to see the Met’s new Sublime Poetry exhibition; learn about the particulars of Raphael’s Renaissance world and become inspired by the breathtakingly magnificent works that one profoundly talented and exceptionally hardworking individual was able to create in his all-too-brief lifetime. God knows you need it.

But if you live somewhere else, stay home. Access to beauty should never require gratuitously kowtowing to incendiary ugliness.

Meanwhile, for those whose attention has now been at least momentarily directed to the near-incomprehensible cascade of achievements of this wonderful artist, here’s a short excerpt from our 2024 film, Raphael: A Portrait, that describes his interest in architecture and archaeology, two aspects of his exceptionally intense life that are not significantly dealt with in Sublime Poetry.

Howard Burton

Raphael: A Portrait is a comprehensive film based on rigorous research providing a detailed, unprecedented exploration of the extraordinary life, achievements and legacy of Raphael (1483-1520), one of the most prolific and influential artists of the Italian Renaissance. Runtime: 148 minutes

“An impressive achievement. This film offers an illuminating, copiously detailed study of the artist’s life and times.“ - The Guardian

“Raphael: A Portrait takes us on a captivating journey filled with stunning visuals and rich historical context.” - Ross King, Author of Brunelleschi’s Dome

“An impressive achievement and covers a wide range. Highly recommended.” Paul Joannides, University of Cambridge

Visit the film page