The painting tells a story through its colors. The Boy recumbent atop the ultramarine and incarnadine robes of the Madonna. His gaunt frame is accentuated by loose fitting cloths to which the eye is drawn by a splash of wan orange. The boy’s heavy outer garments have been cast aside…

Or how Futurists stole my patrimony and made me into the Rubenesque creature I am today In a massive, ecstatic painting of fire-hunting wood pigeons, there are all of two immediately recognizable avian forms. Around the peasants dart and squirm and spin ligatures of brown, grey, black, and flying brushstrokes…

I’ve noticed that museums often don’t know what to do with Moreau — too ahead of his time for rank among his coevals, but not famous enough to merit fanfare like other iconoclast classicists. In the Museum Thyssen, this disregarded masterpiece hangs at the portal between a hurried-along staircase and…

Oh Picasso. What even to say? What can I add to criticism and art writing that hasn’t already been said? Well, I haven’t actually read any criticism or art writing. Ergo, anything I put down on the page here is an echo from virgin chasms, impressed like a wet salami…

Of all the myriad portraits of St. Jerome, from skin and bones wildman with body-length beard to scholar surrounded by veritas, lion purring at his feet, this is the St. …

Of all the epically large history paintings in the Prado, I think Francisco Padilla’s Queen Joanna the Mad is my favorite. Yes, this sort of painting has been done before countless times but this is a good and pleasing example — an exemplar of the history genre. It should be…

The soothing entanglement of body and cloth; the relaxed, pensive drying of her legs. There is no rush and so she sits. Lost in thought, she does not notice her nakedness nor her voyeur behind. The marble about her references luxury and nods to sculpture, her face and body in…

The first thing I notice when looking at Pomar’s masterpiece of motion Gadanheiro (reaper) is the peculiar perspective. As a viewer I look up at the reaper whose heft spills from the frame. I see the underside of his chin, the foreshortened handle, the strong body. Sure it is a…