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.

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.

The Gentleman of Verona

The majesty, serenity, and opulence of Paolo Veronese’s paintings bolstered the myth of Venice’s vibrancy at a time of social, political, and religious decline.

Vitruvius & the Warlords

Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes.

Caravaggio Lost and Found

As two paintings by Caravaggio return to public view, it is possible to hope that his best-known lost work will reappear after almost half a century.

Nature’s Rival

Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.

‘A Great Glory to Wealth’

Like so many of the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi’s undertakings, the Villa Farnesina burst through all the old categories—social, architectural, and cultural—for a merchant’s house.

The Divine Guido

A new exhibition at the Prado dispels the idea that Guido Reni was an academic painter, revealing instead a tireless innovator.

Mysteries of Use and Reuse

For the artists and patrons of medieval and early modern Rome, the repurposing of ancient objects involved a tangle of complex motives.

An Exceptional Witness

The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.

The Spell of Marble

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

Caught in the Coils

In Hans von Trotha’s haunting novel, the Gestapo is rounding up the Jews of Rome, but the archaeologist Ludwig Pollak refuses sanctuary in the Vatican and wishes only to recount his memories.

Nor Gloom of Night

In Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Long Live the Post Horn!, controversy over the European Union’s Third Postal Directive reveals that the mail service is one of the most powerful bonds connecting Norwegians.

See Rome and Feel Alive

“The city itself is an artistic treasure, so there was always something to see even when museums were closed.”

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

The Virtuoso

No less than Michelangelo but much more subtly, Raphael brought on revolutions in art and architecture, and in thought itself.

He Made Stone Speak

Late in life, Michelangelo took on a series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware that he would never live to see them completed.

The Master’s Master

Andrea del Verrocchio epitomizes what the Renaissance of art in Florence was all about.

Filling Our Eyes with Sunshine

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

‘A Painter Not Human’

No one, not even Leonardo or Piero della Francesca, has ever paid such penetrating attention to the way light works as Antonello da Messina