Compared with prehistoric art, which focused on animals, Ancient Egyptian art portrayed a wealth of subjects. The Egyptians covered the corridors of tombs and the walls of temples with row…
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a couple dozen essays on the history of painting for BeyondBooks.com, a subscription service that provided online supplementary materials for high-school students. The site’s…
In the 32,000 years (more or less) since the earliest known paintings were created, untold numbers of tribes, towns, villages and cities have come and gone. Few, however, have left…
About the MFA The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, founded in 1870, opened to the public in 1876 at Copley Square. It moved to its present neoclassical home on…
In 2018, I sent 173 art-related items to my Sunday Recommendations list. For supporters, I recommended 54 more. The items in this post are my own favorites. They include 15 items…
The Art Renewal Center's annual competition for contemporary realistic art attracts some of the best artists from around the world. The paintings and sculptures are stunning for their technique and/or…
This blog post is available as a video. The illustrations below are the slides from the video. NOTE: Not all of the works in this post are in the the…
About the National Gallery Unlike the Louvre and the Prado, whose earliest holdings came from royalty, the National Gallery evolved from a collection of 38 paintings purchased by the British…
About the Uffizi The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is housed in a huge complex whose core was commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici from Giorgio Vasari. Vasari (who is today…
The Getty Museum opened Pacific Palisades in 1974. In 1982, with a bequest of $1.2 billion from Getty's will, it became the richest museum in the world. The collection of…