The Arts

Law and Liberty , May 31, 2024 (Review of The Holdovers )   It’s a well-known fact that historians generally don’t like historical...

The New Criterion , October 2020   (On the aesthetics and history of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.)   Abraham Lincoln had...

The Wall Street Journal , June 29, 2020   (On the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.)   At the end of the Civil War, on April 11,...

The New Criterion , June 2020   Poor Raphael! This year, the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, was to have been his year of glory....

The Wall Street Journal , April 10, 2020   (On Raphael’s “Transfiguration”)   Late in 1519, the great Renaissance artist Raphael faced a...

The Spectator (World) , February 26, 2020 At the time of his death on Good Friday, 1520, Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino was the most...

The New Criterion, December 2019 One thing you have to say about Leonardo da Vinci is that he really packs them in. The last major...

The New Criterion, September 2019 This year is the five-hundredth anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, and the museum world has not...

The New Criterion, December 2017 Fame often does an artist little good. Quite apart from the moral temptations, there is the danger of...

The New Criterion, July 27, 2017 From his death in 1520 to the early nineteenth century, Raphael was widely regarded as the greatest...

The New Criterion, June 2017 In his memoir Unforgotten Years (1938), the expatriate writer and aesthete Logan Pearsall Smith relates with...