the Renaissance
Surreal visions: the best of this year’s art books reviewed
Subjects include Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes, Leonora Carrington’s paintings, Albrecht Dürer’s dreams and the photographs of Lee Miller
The perils of being pope
The power of the medieval papacy resembled that of the Holy Roman Emperor – and like the first Roman emperors, popes attracted envy, scandal and violent retribution
This radical Nativity is also one of the great whodunnits of art history
Martin Gayford on a radical Nativity that is the subject of one of the great whodunnits of art history
The secrets of Dante’s marriage
Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even…
Why do men grow beards?
The ocean that Christopher Oldstone-Moore has set out to chart is as broad as it is shallow: what it has…
What did the ancient Greeks believe?
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word…
