Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

Santa Maria Novella, close to the namesake station in Firenze, is a whole Art History book waiting to be perused, with works that go from the Trecento to Baroque, including masterpieces by Masaccio, Giotto, Cimabue… and, of course, the Tornabuoni Chapel by Ghirlandaio. This is but a piece.

There is growing evidence that the famous Riace Bronzes, discovered by a diver off the coast of Calabria in 1972, had been submerged near Riace by traffickers just a few months earlier in order to hide them. They had been secretly recovered from the seabed near Brucoli in Sicily in the late 1960s.

Heading to #Positano from #Capri we witnessed an amazing sunset against the backdrop of the Lattari mountains. Glad we took the last boat back. #photography #Sunset #GoldenHour #Maritime #italy #TravelPhotography #Silhouette #EastCoastKin #AmalfiCoast #travel #landscape #LandscapePhotography

This Artemisia Gentileschi Painting Is Unlike Any of Her Others. Here’s Why This recently reattributed painting is more than what it seems. by Karen Chernick for @artnet.bsky.social news.artnet.com/art-world/th...

This is the “Corrala” de Santiago, which is a scholar residence for the University of Granada (check the coat of arms in the pebbled pavement). That fact has made it one of the few surviving “corralas” in Granada. Corralas are apartment complexes with shared services (such as sanitation and water)

This is the administrative building of the Sant Pau hospital by Domenech i Muntaner; this is the part that’s actually open to the public. It’s got a certain fairytale air to it, but in fact it’s not so much Neogothic as Neo-Catalan gothic, using colors and stones that can be seen elsewhere.

Plant Insumsia https://botfrens.com/collections/69/contents/20011

In Ethiopian 🇪🇹 and Eritrean 🇪🇷 iconography, the Holy Trinity (ቅድስት፡ ሥላሴ፡) is traditionally depicted as three men with white hair and white beards blessing the observer Ethiopia, 18th c. #trinity #god #blessing #africanart

Today we took the last lessons of the semester, and this included learning a bit about the social history of art, including historians such as Svetlana Alpers. She singled out Rembrandt’s workshop as a showcase of artistic talent meets entrepreneurship, and how one can’t understand one w/o the other

The Raising of Lazarus. Relentless 1-point perspective disorients Lazarus, who has been peacefully dead for days. Also, he stinks! Maybe he would have preferred to stay dead; did anybody ask him? By Michael Pacher.

The Trump administration is pressuring EU countries not to support a reparations loan for Ukraine funded by frozen Russian assets - politico reports

If this👇 is true, the treason is even worse. Putin wants war. Trump knows it, but still try to force Ukraine to surrender. “Trump thinks Russia’s Putin wants all of Ukraine: WH staff chief Susie Wiles”

Before Italy, my go-to country was Belgium, ever since 1981, when I spent a month there in a Boy Scout Jamboree. The camp was close to Ghent, so it’s one of the first places I visited; I’ve been there dozens of times over the years. But I only visited Prinse Clementinalaan in 2018

Archduke Leopold Wilhelm checking out his favorite masterpieces with some friends, and some dogs. They were always hanging out in his gallery! By David Teniers, born OTD 1610.

I’ve started reading Atlas Mnemosyne, the life’s work of Aby Warburg, one of the greatest art historians of all time. Although at times cryptic, he makes sense in a way. The work is organized in panels that set in a grid different images with a common rough topic. Panel 7 is about victory

How do we know what’s the topic of a painting or an sculpture? That’s what’s called iconography. Through pattern books or “manuals” such as the “Golden Legend” or the apocryphal gospels, saints, archangels, prophets, get associated to “attributes”, the combination of which identifies the topic.

"Ukraine will clash with Russia on irreconcilable terms. As long as Russism exists, it will never give up its ambitions." 1995. The prophetic words of the president of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Dzhokhar Dudayev. One year later, he would be assassinated by Russia.

Today is Saint Lucy, a saint born (most probably in the figurative sense) in Syracuse, Sicily, where she’s the patron saint. Here’s the sanctuary devoted to her… and a painting by Caravaggio

499 years ago #OTD Álvaro de Bazán was born here in Granada. He’s one of the best admirals that Spain has ever had, with 28 victories (up to and including Lepanto) and retiring just short of the defeat of the Invincible Armada, that was directed by a weak and inexperienced admiral. Bad idea.

Modern Mona Lisa: The Scream, 1893, tempera and pastel on board, by Edvard Munch, Norwegian artist, born #OTD 1863; described by the artist as ‘the enormous infinite scream of nature’; he created three later versions of the work. Nasjonalmuseet Oslo

Ukraine working hard to fight corruption in wartime. Impressive. What has the Trump Admin dine in this respect lately? Any bold anti-corruption moves? Besides puting the president's son in law into a diplomatic mission he is not qualified for, hoping to enrich his own familiy, that is..

As promised, here’s one of the corner buildings of the Sant Pau hospital, by the architect Domenech i Montaner. Together with the Palau by the same it’s a world heritage site. But this is a whole campus occupying a whole block. Parts of these building are still used as a hospital.

DENMARK INTELLIGENCE REPORT: “.. The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/w...

José/Giuseppe de Ribera, “Lo Spagnoletto/El españoleto”, was a Baroque painter who spent most of his career in Naples. His style looks so much like Caravaggio, with the same chiaroscuro, that the last painting discovered by the latter, the “Ecce homo”, was originally assigned to “Españoletto school”

Talking about AI agents, I love the idea of an Internet of Agents (IoA) based on open standards, open protocols and open source: eclipse.dev/lmos/docs/in... “Eclipse LMOS incorporates well-established W3C protocols and ideas from the Internet of Things (IoT), the Semantic Web, and Social Web.”

How Local Criminals Help russia Fight a Gray Zone War in Europe - New Lines Institute newlinesinstitute.org/strategic-co...

At this point in time, the Sagrada Familia is a mesh of different styles and sculptors, and it shows, not only in the color of the stone. As you can see from the cranes, it’s still a work in progress, although it’s already been consecrated. But does the original vision hold? Well…

OTD in 2021 General Gerasimov said Russia had no plans to invade Ukraine. So you can believe that we won't re-invade after we stop what we said we wouldn't start.

You’ve probably heard about the Sagrada Familia by Gaudì, a work of genius that’s still unfinished. But there’s a building in the area that was finished: this one. It the so-called “provisional school”, designed and built by Gaudì himself to serve as a school for the children of the workers

The entrance to the Fisher Theater at the Fisher Building, Detroit.

Barcelona hosts a varied and amazing crew of street writers, in many cases using slaps or other types of interventions, like the tiles here. The juxtaposition to the vintage plaque of the electric company adds to it.

Yes, there is a Romanesque church in the middle of Barcelona, Sant Pau del Camp, Saint Paul in the Fields. No more fields in their surroundings, and the Camp Nou is quite far away, but this is in the middle of the Raval, literally the “suburb”, the neighborhood outside the city walls.

It’s been a day full of wonders, but I’ll share just one for the time being: the administration building of the Sant Pau hospital, created as a gesamtkunst, a “total work of art”, by Domenech i Muntaner, and part of the dual world heritage site that includes the Palau de la Música

Two architects Gaudi and Domenech

Back to Barcelona, so let’s go back to our “Madonna of the councillors” and its iconology. First, the five councillors, and just the five that paid for it, prostrated in front of the Virgin, but it’s not using hierarchical, but cavalier perspective: pretty much life-size everyone. Heads a bit lower.

This “Madonna of the councilors”, o “Verge dels consellers”, was painted by Luis Dalmau in the first half of the 15th century. It’s probably the masterpiece of late Spanish Gothic, and the bookstop to Spanish Medieval painting, separated by almost a century and a half of almost nothing from Baroque

Let’s go back to Denver (figuratively, I don’t see any good reason for going to the USA in the foreseeable future, to check out this, can you see where where it got its inspiration? It’s the Daniels and Fisher tower, that was built in 1911 as a simple milestone that marked a department store.

I managed to get in a retirement home that, managed by the Brotherhood of the Charity and Refuge, has inherited many works of art from the 17th century. I showed the building the other day, it’s a modernist work by Wilhelmi, a local architect. But this painting and others are something else.

Winter sunlight illuminating the tower of Southwark Cathedral this morning. Here Shakespeare buried his younger brother Edmund, an actor aged just twenty-seven in December 1607, at the cost of twenty shillings “with a forenoone knell of the great bell.”

This was… expected

We’ve talked about stations several times before, and this one, Union Station in Denver, Colorado, USA, stands on its own. Built, as recorded in the side, in 1880. It’s got a clock, t’s got high arched windows, but this is America so a bit of neon can’t hurt. It’s now become, since recently, a hotel

If the Venezuelan sailors were enemy combatants, then the 2nd strike is a war crime. If the Venezuelan sailors weren’t enemy combatants, then both strikes are criminal murder. It’s that simple.

A “memento morí” that includes a copy of a “Gisant” or effigy originally created by Arnolfo di Cambio, a Tuscan sculptor in the 13th century. The frame is Baroque, however. The “golden eggs” are the Chigi symbol, from Alexander VII, who intervened in Saint John of Letran in the 17th century

And owl mystery solved. It's simply a decoy to scare away pigeons and others www.bauhaus.es/repelentes-p... Someone placed it there to avoid them taking over the niche. Maybe there was something there before, maybe not, who knows. Thanks to Reddit user becs1932 www.reddit.com/r/askarthist...

$1.6bln: The amount of his fraud scheme 7: Years of his sentence 10,000: Victims of his fraud 1,000: Letters from victims to the court 13: Days he served 1: Pardon from Trump www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/u...

Hungary must immediately be stripped of their EU voting rights.

While on an errand, I remembered this building a bit off the way and returned to take some pictures. It’s the Carmen de los Alarifes, and it was built in 1938, during the civil War, by the architect Francisco Prieto Moreno, a rather prolific architect in the city of Granada.

Larry Wall has answered to an issue in #rakulang @gellyfish.uk opened in 2021... github.com/Raku/doc/iss...

Gloom. Despair. Agony. Illustration from America: A Prophecy in 1795 but very current sentiment as well. By William Blake, born on this day in 1757.