Arts

Visual Arts

Painted Sermons

The dazzling works of Fra Angelico both testify to the immense wealth and power of fourteenth-century Florentine society and attempt to heal its pride, greed, and brutal inequality.

February 26, 2026 issue

Beatrice Radden Keefe

The Undefined Gothic

At the turn of the twentieth century, a Gothic fever swept Europe as artists searched for meaning in a lost age.

February 12, 2026 issue

Jed Perl

Impassioned Ferocity

A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.

November 6, 2025 issue

Walker Mimms

Dead Ringers

The sculptor Tatiana Trouvé makes dispassionate, ironic anti-monuments using profoundly inconvenient methods of a distant past.

January 14, 2026

Colin B. Bailey

Watteau’s Theater

In Pierrot, Jean-Antoine Watteau depicted the all-embracing humanity of commedia dell’arte.

November 20, 2025 issue

Nicole Rudick

Becoming Acquainted with America

From the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, Ben Shahn sent a clear message in his art about individual people and the conditions that oppressed them.

October 23, 2025 issue

Adam Thirlwell

When and Where Is Home?

The South Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s replicas of places he has lived are extraordinary feats of magical engineering.

October 9, 2025 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

Poisonous Objects

Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States.

March 12, 2026 issue

Be My Florentine

Andrew Butterfield

The Magic of Donatello

“Since the end of classical antiquity nearly a thousand years before, no Italian sculptor had tried anything so bold in the carving of marble sculpture.”

April 23, 2015 issue

Julian Bell

The Mystery of the Great Piero

“What do we see in Piero della Francesca’s work? An extraordinarily fine mind contemplating an ordinary settledness.”

June 19, 2014 issue

H.W. Janson

Della Robbia Disputes

“The justly famous ten reliefs of the Cantoria display a distinctive style heavily dependent on Graeco-Roman sources that has no direct antecedents on Florentine soil. How did Luca della Robbia develop it?”

April 17, 1980 issue

Garry Wills

The Loveliest Doors

All other great works of art in Florence’s Baptistery of San Giovanni were considered mere preludes or accompaniments to the supreme masterpiece of its doors.

November 8, 2007 issue

Essays by Ingrid D. Rowland

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

May 12, 2022 issue

Olafur Eliasson: The weather project, 2003

Ingrid D. Rowland

Filling Our Eyes with Sunshine

No one who saw Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project has ever forgotten it.

September 26, 2019 issue

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi holding Silvio Berlusconi's hand as he speaks next to a Roman statue of the goddess Venus, Benghazi, Libya, August 30, 2008

Ingrid D. Rowland

Berlusconi: Will Someone Please Pull the Plug?

The scandals that buzz ever more insistently around Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are hardly the first that old Rome has ever seen.

November 10, 2010

Funerary stela of Lady Taperet, Third Intermediate Period, circa 850–690 BCE. Lady Taperet is praying to Atum, god of the setting sun, in the hope of eternally accompanying him on his daily journey. The hieroglyphs above her exhort the god to grant her everything she will need in the afterlife. The sky is represented by the blue body of the goddess Nut, who swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it every morning.

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Charms of Ancient Egypt

“The Egyptians, far from being obsessed with death, were captivated by life in all its forms: animal, vegetable, human, and cosmic.”

July 2, 2009 issue

Bridget Alsdorf

‘Tell Me Your Worst’

Helene Schjerfbeck captured the difficulty—even the terror—of confronting the self.

March 29, 2026

Lauren Kane

Indecorous Decorations

Medieval ideas about sex and love, both rowdy and reverent, are recorded on objects meant for everyday use.

March 28, 2026

Jenny Uglow

Rivals of the Landscape

The more we learn about J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, the more extraordinary it seems that two such breathtakingly original painters could emerge and flourish at the same time in the British art world.

April 9, 2026 issue

James Romm

The Marbles & the Muses

A. E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.

April 9, 2026 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Artistic License

When an angel in a recently restored Roman chapel was seen to resemble Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, it touched off a very Italian scandal.

March 26, 2026 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Rembrandt’s DNA

The Leiden Collection—one of the largest private collections of Dutch art in the world—was conceived as a “lending library for Old Masters,” animated by the humanist spirit found in Rembrandt’s paintings.

March 26, 2026 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

Pieces of Gaza

An exhibition in Paris of archaeological treasures from Gaza served as a reminder of how much of the Strip’s history has been destroyed.

February 12, 2026

Anika Banister

Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams

For six decades, Yoko Ono’s art has considered how we should live with ourselves and one another in an unknowable, painful world.

January 25, 2026

Susan Tallman

The Empire Gives Back

What does a fair policy of museum repatriation look like? A new book considers the issue in terms of human rights, cultural sovereignty, and stewardship.

January 15, 2026 issue