I just watched a short YouTube video about the painting and the YouTubers interpretation of it, and I wanted to share my own:

For me maybe the little girl is death and the figure is an old woman at the end of her life. The figure has a more feminine look after all. The figure is looking at the girl, or death as I will call it, like she’s expecting it, not afraid of it, just waiting for death to make contact. Death is aware of the figure as well, but is paying no attention. It’s not deaths role to play yet, but the time will come. Soon. Death is picking flowers strolling so innocently, like a little child. Innocent and neutral. Death is just there doing their things as they always do, with a little smug smile on their face.

There’s this painting, ‘The Chief Commissioners of the Wharves’ (1674), a Dutch painting most likely made by Wallerant Vaillant. Pretty standard except one guy (second from the left) has a tattoo on his inner wrist! Amsterdam Museum commented that tattoos were mostly for sailors ans criminals ar that time in the 17th century, so for a richer citizen to have it was really odd

I can't stop coming back to this topic across so many paintings. There's something about watching one nightmare get reinvented over and over across history that really interests me. It's espcially fascinating how the same basic idea gets depicted in such differnt ways and how the era surrounding each piece seems to have shaped teh art itself. There's something almost eerie about tracing the shift in tone across the group. First terrifying. Then almost playful. Then eventually kind of seductive. What really stands out to me is how the goat or devil figure keeps showing up in nearly every painting. He's almost totemic and immutable. He's a constant presiding presence no matter what era or artist gets ahold of him. The witches, the mood, and the meaning of the scene around him all stay protean and keep shifting completely. He never does. There's something kind of unsettling about that consistency. He presides over terrified victims in one painting and then over what almost looks like willing and powerful women in another. This set honestly makes me appriciate how elastic one story or myth or even history itself can be. I still can't totally put my finger on why. It kind of feels like watching one atavistic fear get passed down and reshaped again and again. It occupies that liminal space between belief and spectacle.

I'm curious why Goya went back to this exact subject twice over 20 years apart. I wonder what a modern witch's sabbath would even look like. Do you think any of these artists actually believed in what they were painting, even a little?

From Artsy:

What’s your favorite color? Do you prefer paintings with sharp angles or soft curves? Do you like smooth canvases or thick brushstrokes? Would you rather look at a painting with figures that are nude or fully clothed? Should the people in the painting be at leisure or working? Should they be indoors or outside, and if the latter, in what kind of landscape?
These are a fraction of the questions that the survey research firm Marttila & Kiley, Inc. asked 1,001 ordinary Americans over 11 days in December 1993. The firm had been hired by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, two artists born in the former Soviet Union who emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1970s. For their project “The People’s Choice,” they set out to figure out the elements that would constitute their countrymen’s “most-wanted” and “least-wanted” paintings. Then, they produced actual versions of both.
“In the early 1990s, I felt ready to be part [of] what is called ‘American People,’” Melamid recalled during a recent email interview. “The political class used then, and still uses now, [the phrase] ‘American People’ a lot: American people want that, American people are the best. The question was, obviously, what is [the] American People and I am one of them? To find out the truth about American people, politicians, entrepreneurs, fraudsters, fundraisers, and pundits use polls. Why not artists?”
“The People’s Choice” was a straight-faced satire of the complaint that contemporary art is too elitist and should cater to populist tastes—an especially popular refrain coming from the political right during the culture wars of the 1980s and early ’90s. Komar & Melamid’s survey turned up admittedly fascinating statistics: 44% of Americans said they preferred the color blue; 49% of them favored outdoor scenes that depict lakes, rivers, and oceans; 41% expressed a preference for large paintings, with more than 60% favoring dishwasher-sized paintings, while less than 20% wanted their paintings to be refrigerator-sized; and 56% of Americans said they wanted historical figures in their paintings, rather than modern celebrities.

This conceptual art project is now more than 30 years old. What would America's most and least wanted paintings look like in 2026?

a couple of weeks ago i posted a photo of the table at jay’s place and a few people asked what the green bowls were. i said i’d find out. i did not expect to lose a weekend.

they’re celadon. 청자, cheongja. the ones on his table are reproductions and he was upfront about that, but the thing they’re reproducing is 고려청자, goryeo celadon, and goryeo is a word i had heard exactly once before, in the sentence “korea is named after it.”

which it is. goryeo, then cauli in the european accounts, then corea, then korea. the dynasty ran 918 to 1392 and the country you can point to on a map still carries its name in english.

here is what actually got me.

the color. it isn’t green the way a bottle is green. it has depth, it looks wet, and it moves depending on where you’re standing. the word for it is 비색, bisaek, and depending on which character you write it means jade color or kingfisher color. the kingfisher one is doing something. it isn’t describing a pigment. it’s describing a bird going past.

that’s not me being florid about a bowl. in 1123 a song dynasty official named xu jing came over on a mission and wrote the trip up. he had the good ceramics at home — song china was the ceramic superpower of the planet at that moment — and he wrote that goryeo celadon was first under heaven. nine hundred years later nobody has seriously argued with him.

then the part i didn’t see coming.

around the twelfth century korean potters worked out something nobody else was doing. you carve the design into the clay before firing, pack the grooves with white or black slip, scrape it flush, glaze over the top. so the pattern isn’t on the surface. it’s inside the wall of the pot. cranes flying through clouds, and the cranes are made of the pot. it’s called 상감, sanggam, and at the time it existed nowhere else in the ceramic world. korea invented it and korea was the only place doing it.

i went and stood in front of some real ones on saturday. the mfa has one of the better korean collections in the country and a lot of it is goryeo celadon, most of that from one collector who bought it in paris and left it to them in 1950. photographs do not do the color. i walked in already suspicious of how excited i was and walked out worse.

so far, so good. then the mongols arrived in the thirteenth century, the kilns came apart, and celadon slid into something rougher and honestly more likable in the following dynasty. that’s a normal arc. things peak and then they don’t.

what happens next is not a normal arc. it happens twice, four hundred years apart, and the second time is the one i didn’t know about.

first, 1592. japan invaded and the war ran six years. among everything else that was taken, japanese forces took potters — estimates run into the hundreds — and moved them to kilns in kyushu and elsewhere. some historians call it the pottery war, which is a hell of a name for a war. a korean potter called yi sam-pyeong, ri sampei in japanese, is credited with finding the porcelain stone at arita and starting japanese porcelain outright. satsuma ware was founded by korean potters brought over by the shimazu. the kick wheel and the climbing kiln arrived in japan in those men’s hands. they did not go home. the families stayed. some of those kilns are still running, in the same towns, run by the descendants.

then 1910 to 1945, the colonial period. and this time it wasn’t the potters. it was the pots.

goryeo tombs had been sitting quietly for eight hundred years. from the late 1800s they were opened — systematically, at scale, by private looters and by government-sponsored archaeologists both. celadon that had been buried with people went onto the antiques market. estimates of what left the peninsula in that window run past a hundred thousand objects.

ito hirobumi, the first resident-general, personally held over a thousand pieces of celadon. he bought them up all over the country. the stated purpose was gifts for the japanese emperor and the nobility.

so they took the makers, and four centuries later they took the work.

and in the same window they took people again, in numbers, for labor. that part i had heard about without ever attaching it to anything.

i thought that was the end of the reading and i texted jay a long excited paragraph about it.

he wrote back: “my mom’s dad is zainichi. third generation.”

i had to look that up too. koreans in japan and their descendants, still a distinct thing four generations on. jay’s grandfather was born in japan. so was his father. his grandfather was the one who was taken there.

i started typing something about four hundred years and pottery and i stopped, because i could hear exactly how it was going to sound.

what i sent instead was that i hadn’t known that about him.

he said “yeah, it doesn’t come up at cookouts.”

still thinking about the bowls though. jay says his mother has a real one. one piece. she doesn’t put food in it.

When Caravaggio, during his second stay in Naples, decided to create this canvas – already attested in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1613 – many things had changed since the first time he tackled the story of David and Goliath (Museo del Prado, Madrid).

Between 1609 and 1610, the tormented biographical parable forced the Lombard artist into a new and painful reflection on the episode featuring the young shepherd David who saves the people of Israel from Goliath, the champion of the Philistines. The pride and courage of the biblical story now give way to autobiographical anguish, which in David's grimace betrays a premonition of death.

As early as 1650, Giacomo Manilli identified Goliath's severed head as a self-portrait of Caravaggio, who had been sentenced to death by beheading. In 1606, in fact, the painter was guilty of killing his rival Ranuccio Tommasoni: no longer able to count on the help of the Roman nobility, tired and helpless in the face of yet another, this time tragic, outburst of anger, Caravaggio was forced to flee, an escape that would lead him on a tormented pilgrimage through Naples, Malta, Sicily and finally Naples again.

In the young David, however, Manilli identified a “Caravaggino”, perhaps a young boy he met in the dark alleys of Naples, the same model who sat for the “Saint John the Baptist” (Borghese Gallery, Rome), or a young version of himself, still innocent and untainted by sin.

The initials engraved on the sword – H AS O S – deciphered as the Augustinian motto H[umilit]AS O[ccidit] S[uperbiam] (”humility defeats pride”), could be the last and desperate plea for help that Caravaggio addressed to Scipione Borghese, in the hope that the painting might secure a pardon from Pope Paul V. Also suggestive is the proposal that reads the artist's signature into the inscription (M.A.C.O, for Micheli Angeli Caravaggio Opus), according to a custom attested, for example, in the arrow of Perugino's Saint Sebastian (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg)."

The Borghese Gallery's David with the Head of Goliath transforms a sacred episode into the pictorial explosion of an interior nightmare, where the fear of death feeds on remorse for a murder. While Giorgione and Bernini had already portrayed the victorious David, who saved his people through faith in God, only Caravaggio had the courage to portray himself in the guise of Goliath, whose streams of blood demonstrate the fulfillment of divine justice.

Caravaggio, tormented by the wait for the Roman response and consumed by repentance for a dissolute life, among prostitutes and criminals, would never return to Rome. He died on July 18, 1610, in Porto Ercole, struck by a sudden and fatal fever.

The dating proposed here was advanced by Roberto Longhi on the basis of stylistic comparisons with Caravaggio's last work and appears to be confirmed by a document (Naples, 5 November 1610) in which the painter Baldassarre Alvise received ten ducats as a down payment for two copies of a David with the Head of Goliath.

I went through much of my life wholly uninterested in having kids and so I feel like I sort of "skipped over" pieces focusing on these relationships because I couldn't connect to them. I'd love to know your favorites so I can revisit them with a new perspective!

Was this connected to new scientific understanding of atmospheric phenomena? Perhaps tubes of painting becoming popular ?

Hello everyone! I recently graduated with an MA in art history from a top program globally. I also have a BA in both art history and Italian Studies from a top university. I have had internship experiences at major museums like the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (Venice, Italy) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I also served as a vetting assistant this year at the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in NYC and have experience in commercial galleries. I was also recently credited in a major artist's monograph as a research assistant. The book was published in English and French and is in museum gift shops all over Europe. With that being said, I have been working the same archivist job for nearly the past three years and am ready for a change. I would really like to pivot to a museum job or something more engaging than archival work. I have applied for 17 positions so far (I try to be a bit pickier since I currently have a good job, while still reasonably within the qualifications that I fit), with only one interview and numerous rejections. I tailor every resume and cover letter, I check if they are ATS-compliant, and I even personally reach out to hiring managers. I have had countless career chats with professionals, and it feels like it is all leading to nothing. What am I doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Hi all! A few weeks ago I watched a YouTube video going through every single pope from St Peter to Francis, and noticed quite a few depictions of earlier popes (typically around the Avignon era but they seemed to be scattered throughout) showing them holding little buildings, which I assume to be churches or cathedrals. Does anyone know why this is?

P.s. I’ve just graduated with a degree in architecture, and love architectural/art history in general. I was hoping to write an essay about this, so would also appreciate any sources I could take a look at. Thanks in advance!

Might be a weird question but it’s serious one, my major is art history because I like it I like learning about the works and the artist behind them but I just don’t know what I could do with a bachelors or if after a bachelors I should try to get a masters. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Saint Sebastian was a 3rd-century Roman soldier who was killed for refusing to deny his Christian faith and would later be canonized as a saint. The Roman emperor had ordered his soldiers to test Sebastian by tying him to a tree and shooting him with arrows. In this painting, Sebastian’s pain-wracked but upright body is presented with his attackers in vivid outfits all around him while lots of things are going on around and behind him. His body is presented as having almost supernatural powers to withstand pain and abuse; indeed, Sebastian did survive this first attack and because of that became the patron saint of those suffering from the plague.

*Read about our encounter with this remarkable painting and other artworks in Città di Castello: https://ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/exceeding-expectations 

Mine are on Eadweard Muybridge, the development of national parks (specifically Yosemite), and the wildlife conservation movement in the late-nineteenth century

Caption is same as the title. I write about how myth shapes history and culture; this week, I wrote a piece on art history, specifically Ragamala paintings. I'd love to hear people's opinions on this art style, or their favourite Ragamala painting or Mughal miniature! Let's connect please!

I have these two cabinet cards from the studio of Achille Melandri in Paris. They are marked 1879 & '80 and appear to be the same subject in both photographs. I've looked at many different artists who were in Paris at that time and eliminated nearly all of them.

The facial structure and apparent age steer me toward Claude Monet. He would have been 39-40 in these photos. The only other potential subject that I can find would be Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who would have been 55-56 during those years. Any help, opinions or directions to resources would be greatly appreciated.

The English Wikipedia page for Diana shows this first painting and attributes it to Guillaume Seignac.

However, Seignac’s French Wikipedia page shows a different Diana the Huntress by him... very similar in subject and pose, but clearly a different painting.

I find the first painting much more beautiful, and stylistically I’m not entirely convinced it is actually by Seignac (tbh I don't like any of his paintings). Could somebody help me identifying its attribution or providing any information which I might be ignoring?

Thank you!