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Quiz Saturday

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QUIZ: Art in Milan! How Well Do You Know the City’s Artistic Scene?

Alessia Caldana 14 June 2025

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Erotica

Sex, Love, and Death in Ancient Peru: Erotic Gallery—Museo Larco

Hidden underground for hundreds of years, depictions of sex, love, and erotica in Andean pre-Columbian art are now proudly displayed in the Erotic...

Bruno Guerra 13 June 2025

Plate with Arabic Inscription, ca 975-1000, painted and glazed earthenware, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Detail. Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: Plate with Arabic Inscription

Plate with Arabic Inscription is a masterpiece of 10th-century Islamic art. It combines minimalism, abstraction, and morality into a beautiful and...

James W Singer 13 June 2025

Design

The Charm of Colorful and Shiny Italian Maiolica Ceramic Wares

Maiolica ceramic wares are exquisitely decorated and vibrantly colored handmade artworks made popular during the Italian Renaissance. Their timeless...

Marga Patterson 13 June 2025

Ancient Greece

Not So Dark After All: Greek Designs from the Dark Ages

Despite lasting only a century (c. 1100-1000 BCE), the dark ages in Greece were an era of material poverty, cultural isolation, and artistic decline.

Lauren Dorsey 13 June 2025

South American Art

Art and Ritual: Culture of the Enigmatic Moche People

The Moche were an ancient, Indigenous people of Andean Peru. They are considered to be one of the most influential civilizations of the ancient...

Marga Patterson 13 June 2025

Women Artists

Anni Albers: The Artist Who Transformed Textiles

Anni Albers once referred to textile-making as “rather sissy”. Fortunately she later had a change of heart. From the Bauhaus in Germany...

Emily Snow 12 June 2025

Women Artists

Frauhaus: Gunta Stölzl and the Women of the Bauhaus

The women of the Bauhaus, attracted to the school by a lie, were marginalized by their male masters and forced into a single workshop. Under the...

Geoffrey Bunting 12 June 2025

Women Interior Designers: Dorothy Draper, The Greenbrier Hotel, 1946-1948, White Sulphur Springs, WV, USA. Architecture

5 Exceptional Women Interior Designers of the 20th Century

Meet the five women designers who changed the face of 20th-century interior design. Their work has been inspiring many designers and their interiors...

Joanna Kaszubowska 12 June 2025

Women Artists

The Practical Side of Modernism—Aino Aalto

Aino Marsio-Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer. She was also the wife of Alvar Aalto, which might be why you haven’t heard about her. The...

Joanna Kaszubowska 12 June 2025

Women Artists

Marion Mahony Griffin: No Apology in the World of Men

The name Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961) may not ring any immediate bells for you, but she was responsible for creating the unique look and feel...

Joanna Kaszubowska 12 June 2025

Nike of Samothrace, ca 200-175 BCE, Parian and Lartian marble, Paleopoli, Samothrace, Greece, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Detail. Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: Nike of Samothrace

Nike of Samothrace is the masterpiece of an unknown Hellenistic artist. While the artist’s story may be unknown, the statue’s story is as complex...

James W Singer 11 June 2025

Fashion

Jewelry in Ancient Greece: Treasures from the Hellenistic Era

When looking at historical jewelry one can ask themselves a series of questions centered on the object’s significance. Who was it made for and what...

Rachel Witte 11 June 2025

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Masterpiece Stories

The Boxer at Rest—Defeated Hellenistic Athlete

Coming face-to-face with a piece of art you’ve loved for years is a thrilling, exciting and oftentimes overwhelming experience. Such was the case...

Nadine Waldmann 11 June 2025

Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: Laocoön and His Sons

Laocoön and His Sons was one of the most influential sculptures during the Renaissance. The contorted bodies of the figures, their faces full of...

Anastasia Manioudaki 11 June 2025

Ancient Greece

There Were Really Hot Guys in Ancient Greece: The Barberini Faun

Drunk, sleeping men are rarely, if ever, beautiful and sexually appealing, but this is not the case with this really sexy faun from ancient Greece.

Marta Loza 11 June 2025

Erotica

Let’s Talk about Courbet’s Origin of the World

In the 19th century, the display of the nude body underwent a revolution – and a massive critique. Gustave Courbet, one of the main scandalous...

Zuzanna Stańska 10 June 2025

Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: Woman with a Parrot by Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet, the enfant terrible of French 19th-century art, did everything he could to save himself in the memory of the contemporary art...

Zuzanna Stańska 10 June 2025

Artist Stories

What Art Has to Do with Politics: Gustave Courbet and the Paris Commune

The painter Gustave Courbet, a central figure of Realism, is known for his paintings in which he reveals the true lives of peasants and ordinary...

Rute Ferreira 10 June 2025

Erotica

The Scandalous Nudes of Gustave Courbet

In the 19th century, French painter and rebel Gustave Courbet generated outrage with his scandalous nudes. What exactly was so scandalous about his...

Kelly Hill 10 June 2025

Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet

Who nowadays doesn’t appreciate Gustave Courbet‘s striking realism? We all do, but as happens with many geniuses, Courbet was not appreciated by...

Magda Michalska 10 June 2025

Artist Stories

Powerful or Problematic? Robert Mapplethorpe’s Photographs

Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe shocked the world with his images of bondage, gay sex, female bodybuilders and naked black men. Technically brilliant or politically problematic, what do you think?

Candy Bedworth, Guest Author 9 June 2025

male beauty in art: Michelangelo, Ignudo, c. 1512. Erotica

Are You a Connoisseur of Male Beauty? A Nude Invasion!

According to the famous poster by Guerrilla Girls, 85% of nudes in Western art history are of women. They were subject to the male gaze, presented on...

Magda Michalska 9 June 2025

Male nudes in art: Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Study, Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea, 1836, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Erotica

The Greatest Male Nudes in Art History (NSFW!)

Nudity started being an important subject in art in ancient Greece. The male body was celebrated at sports competitions or religious festivals, it...

Anuradha Sroha 9 June 2025

Masterpiece Stories

Masterpiece Story: Portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters

To a 21st-century viewer, the portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées might seem homo-erotic. However, pictured with her sister, the Duchess of Villars,...

Anna Ingram 9 June 2025