Browsing Category: renaissance

  • The Last Supper, again and again

    It was as startling as a ghost. The door was ajar and in the Church of Sant’Ambrogio; it was dark and cool. I looked around me: a medieval christ on the cross; a gothic statuette of Saint Ambrose with a barbed flail; a faint fresco of the mother of God from a c.1300. But none …

    April 2, 2024

  • Leonardo Da Vinci, Studies of the Human Skull (1489)

    He may be one of the fifteenth century’s best known scientists and empiricists, but Leonardo has become synymous with mystery and obscurantism. The smoke which blurs the features of his most famous painting, also coils around the edges of these burnt-brown anatomy drawings and the plans he made elsewhere for real world inventions. So today …

    November 11, 2011

  • Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet (2001)

    When a gallery is a deconsecrated church and the artwork is a piece of religious music, walking in is a hair’s breadth from turning up for Sunday worship. It’s humbling, even humiliating. The early choral work, Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis, is drawing people in off the street, nevertheless. This is one church that’s …

    May 11, 2011

  • Properzia de’ Rossi (1490-1530)

    Of the 35 renaissance artists to feature in this copy of Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists, there is only one woman. And it is a surprise half way through Book III to discover even one. This was Properzia de’ Rossi and the three pages dedicated to her life are among the most engaging …

    May 3, 2011