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I'll take Mozart or Rossini over Puccini most days of the year, but (OK, husband and daughter, I admit it) I do enjoy Tosca. Alphonse Mucha, who created a poster for…
While writing last week's post on rhetoric, I ran across Ovid's description of Medea pondering whether to betray her family for the sake of Jason, with whom she's fallen in…
The purpose of the liberal arts: clarification In my post on Grammar, I stated that the liberal arts were originally intended to provide the knowledge that a person needed to…
Someone loved this boy a lot and had the money to show it: full-size bronze portraits were not cheap in the first century B.C./A.D. In fact, in all of Roman…
In late May, I posted on the sculpture of Clarence Darrow that was being designed to stand in front of the courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trial was…
Three major bridge replacements have been in progress in the Tristate area during the past few years. The Goethals Bridge, dating to the 1920s, connects Elizabeth, New Jersey, with the…
When I started reading about Laurent de La Hyre's Allegory of Grammar (more on that painting below), I was shocked to discover that I had earned a Bachelor of Arts degree without…
The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) is part of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Dresden State Art Collections). It was founded in the early 18th century by Augustus the…
On June 24, 1826, eighty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson responded to Thomas Weightman's invitation to attend the celebration in Washington, D.C., of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This is…
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