Arts

Visual Arts

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

David A. Bell

‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

April 23, 2026 issue

Jed Perl

The Painter’s Shadow World

Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.

April 23, 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

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

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

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

Ingrid D. Rowland

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

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

Max Norman

Quoting the World

There may be no unifying style in Eugène Atget’s photographs—only an uncanny realism that still arrests viewers a century after his death.

April 30, 2026

Jo Livingstone

We Goofed

A new exhibition celebrates the humble poetry of errata.

April 25, 2026

Susan Tallman

Manet and Morisot: Game On

An important exhibition showcases a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of the two artists’ work and, by extension, modern art itself.

May 14, 2026 issue

Jed Perl

Art for Our Age of Chaos

The 2026 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s exhibition “New Humans: Memories of the Future” are attempts to respond to a world full of darkness, trauma, and strife.

May 14, 2026 issue

Ben Davis

Visions of Depravity

Ceija Stojka, who survived the Romani Holocaust, came to painting later in life to preserve the horrors of her childhood.

May 14, 2026 issue

Dawn Chan

Inflatable Life

Paul Chan’s eerily animated sculptures pose the question of who gets to identify humanity in others.

May 14, 2026 issue

Nicole Rudick

Seeing by Hand

“I feel my fingers have eyes,” June Leaf once said. The need to literally feel her way through her work is a primary subject of her art.

May 14, 2026 issue

Julian Bell

Drawn to the Void

Joseph Wright of Derby introduced chiaroscuro to British audiences, using everything from blazing bladders to ivory planets to illuminate his dazzled subjects.

May 14, 2026 issue

Coco Fusco

A Vital Unconscious

Wifredo Lam’s paintings spring from a unique synthesis of European modernism and Afro-Cuban consciousness.

May 14, 2026 issue

Martin Filler

The Rise and Fall of David Adjaye

Three high-profile buildings by the eminent Ghanian British architect have just been completed, but allegations of sexual misconduct have severely damaged his prospects for future commissions.

May 14, 2026 issue