Ingrid D. Rowland

Nature’s Rival

Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.

‘A Great Glory to Wealth’

Like so many of the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi’s undertakings, the Villa Farnesina burst through all the old categories—social, architectural, and cultural—for a merchant’s house.

The Divine Guido

A new exhibition at the Prado dispels the idea that Guido Reni was an academic painter, revealing instead a tireless innovator.

Mysteries of Use and Reuse

For the artists and patrons of medieval and early modern Rome, the repurposing of ancient objects involved a tangle of complex motives.

An Exceptional Witness

The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

Caught in the Coils

In Hans von Trotha’s haunting novel, the Gestapo is rounding up the Jews of Rome, but the archaeologist Ludwig Pollak refuses sanctuary in the Vatican and wishes only to recount his memories.

Nor Gloom of Night

In Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Long Live the Post Horn!, controversy over the European Union’s Third Postal Directive reveals that the mail service is one of the most powerful bonds connecting Norwegians.

See Rome and Feel Alive

“The city itself is an artistic treasure, so there was always something to see even when museums were closed.”

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

The Virtuoso

No less than Michelangelo but much more subtly, Raphael brought on revolutions in art and architecture, and in thought itself.

He Made Stone Speak

Late in life, Michelangelo took on a series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware that he would never live to see them completed.

The Master’s Master

Andrea del Verrocchio epitomizes what the Renaissance of art in Florence was all about.

Filling Our Eyes with Sunshine

No one who saw Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project has ever forgotten it.

‘A Painter Not Human’

No one, not even Leonardo or Piero della Francesca, has ever paid such penetrating attention to the way light works as Antonello da Messina

Roman Holidays

‘Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe’ by Victor Plahte Tschudi

Norwegian Woods

The thrilling complications of Edvard Munch’s art

Roman Rivalries

Bill Viola in Florence

The Florentine exhibition “Bill Viola: Electronic Renaissance,” organized around the work of the acclaimed American video artist Bill Viola, has brought the paragone—the age-old debate about the most expressive form of art—into the twenty-first century.

Martin Luther’s Burning Questions

On the vast, unpredictable forces his rebellion unleashed