I took my World Literature Students to the British Museum on Thursday, July 25. They were there for several hours, but I spent the entire day in this great museum. For the first half of the day, I re-familiarized myself with their collections, particularly the ones I asked my students to concentrate on: the ancient [...]
Tag Archives: art
On Photography
“We don’t make a photograph just with a camera; we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.” – Ansel Adams Seen on a Flickr contact’s profile.
L.A. as Hell
Thanks to Thom for sending me the link to Dante’s Inferno Illustrated by Sandow Birk. These illustrations translate Doré’s original engravings to offer “a re-translation of Dante’s seminal work into the images and street language of today. This opens the poem to audiences both familiar with Dante and the audience that would never encounter the [...]
Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Modernism
What came out of this tradition during the Renaissance may be illuminated by the great “renaissance men” of the time like Leonardo, who, in his Notebooks, suggests a new art based on the pragmatic and verifiable, i.e., “true science” away from the religion and superstition of the Christian middle ages to observable, empirical truth and a trust in the capacities of humanity.
