Part 2 of an analysis of Campin's Portrait of a Woman. For Part 1, see this post. Note: The reproduction above - the best I could find on the Net -…
Back in 1996 I started writing on how to look at paintings if you want to go beyond an initial emotional reaction. This is the opening of an unpublished paper…
My favorite short story by Dorothy Canfield Fisher is "The Washed Window," which centers on Booker T. Washington. Fisher's story was published in 1955, forty years after Washington's death. I…
Thomas Ball, Daniel Webster, dedicated 1876. Central Park near the West 72nd Street entrance. Photo copyright © 2017 Dianne L. Durante Fame ... The national reputation of “the god-like Daniel”…
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…