This is Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence (1609, some online sources date it earlier but I don’t agree with them),...

Our last two seasonal art posts have been about the Nativity, now we’re turning to St Nicholas. This is stained glass from the south...

This week I tried to choose a nativity-related piece that isn’t well known. It’s a Rembrandt called Joseph’s Dream or sometimes Dream of...

The Annunciation has to be one of the most frequently recurring subjects in European art, which made it horribly difficult to settle on...

This will be our first post about a mosaic. I had a mild falling out with mosaics in the second grade when I made a 12x12 of an erupting...

We haven’t compared pieces lately so this week we’ll contrast three sculptures that draw on the Biblical story of David’s fight with the...

If you find the gore of this piece shocking, so did the patron who commissioned it. After one look he almost didn’t make his promised...

This is Henry Fuseli’s 1781 piece called The Nightmare. Obviously I posted this because it’s a great seasonal fit with Halloween but it’s...

I’ll wager that the name Hieronymus Bosch is not on the tip of anybody’s tongue. But, then again, maybe it is. He may have painted in the...

Perseus with the Head of Medusa is a bronze sculpture completed in 1554 for the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, Italy. The sculptor...

This is Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633), the only seascape Rembrandt ever painted. The story he drew on appears in the New Testament...

We’ve never done a post on architecture. But as far as I’m concerned, this is sculpture rather than architecture. That’s because The...

Wheatfield with Crows was once thought to be Vincent van Gogh’s very last work. I’ve even heard it described as his ‘suicide note.’...

Pieter Bruegel has long been labeled ‘the peasant painter,’ and not because of his personal socioeconomic status. It’s because peasant...

Jan (& Hubert) van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece (1432) is also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. It’s a cinematic series of hinged...

I hope Michelangelo won’t be jealous at this but Gian Lorenzo Bernini deserves to be considered one of history’s best sculptors. This is...

I’ve wanted to use the word ribald in one of these art posts for a while now so here’s a moderately ribald painting about the English...

I don’t know how you feel about impressionism but Edgar Degas was one of its leading lights and he didn’t care for the term very much....

If you remember mythology from school, you may recall the name Bacchus, god of wine. He’s one of two central characters in this painting...

There aren’t too many artists more interesting than Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. He was named for Michael the Archangel but his...