In ART

1 week ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall |In ART

You may believe that you’ve had a close enough view of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. You may have gone to The Hague and seen the painting in person at the Mauritshuis. You may have zoomed into the ten billion-pixel scan we featured here on Open Culture in 2021. But if you haven’t spent time with the new 108 billion-pixel scan, can you really claim to have seen Girl with a Pearl Earring at all?

2 weeks ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall |In ART

If you happen to go to the Louvre to have a look at Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, you’ll find that you can’t get especially close to it. That owes in part to the ever-present crowd of cellphone photographers, and more so to the painting’s having been installed behind a wooden barrier and encased in a sturdy-looking glass box. These are suitable precautions, you might imagine, for the single most famous work of art in the world.

1 month ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall |In ART

As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century. Indeed, even many specialists in the field would hesitate to take on the challenge of such a manuscript in full.

1 month ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall |In ART

Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece of grotesquerie, The Garden of Earthly Delights, contains a young God, Adam and Eve, oversized fruits and musical instruments, owls, tortured sinners, something called a “tree man” whose body contains an entire tavern, a defecating avian devil eating a human being, and “frolicking, oblivious figures engaged in all sorts of carnal pleasures,” as art historian Beth Harris puts it in the new Smarthistory video above.

2 months ago | openculture.com | Colin Marshall |In ART

Before his fateful entry into politics, Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist. Even to the most neutral imaginable observer, the known examples of the estimated 2,000 to 3,000 paintings and other works of art he produced in his early adulthood would hardly evidence astonishing genius. They do show a certain technical competence, especially where buildings are concerned.