Dutch art from the seventeenth century is an illustration of life and culture and, taken as a distinct period, it is characterised by acute attention to detail of the physical world. Pictures record the world but they are inexorably bound up with the perception of the world by the artist. The emergence of the Dutch […]
It is fitting to start this account with this image, as in many ways, it shows the start of the Christmas story. It was painted by Fra Angelico (c.1390-1455) a Dominican friar, probably for the Dominican house of San Domenico in Fiesole, near Florence. It was bought in 1612 for the Duke of Lerma’s chapel […]
Nobody really knows what the Neolithic Majorero people were up to when they scratched their enigmatic signs into the sacred mountain, but the impulse stirring at the back of their minds may well have to do with what we now understand as art. A few thousand years go by and the scene is still Fuerteventura, […]
Joan Bakewell wrote of Richard Holloway, the former Anglican Archbishop of Edinburgh, in the New Statesman, that “[he] has always been a radical living in the real world, ready to come to terms with its hectic demands and constraints”. The Anglican Archbishop of South East Asia, Moses Tay, described his 1999 book Godless Morality as […]
In August of 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed that a secret army, called Gladio, had existed in Italy throughout the Cold War period. His revelations were shocking, not simply because they admitted to something that had long been denied (including by Andreotti himself when speaking to a judicial enquiry in 1974 in his […]
Dr. Samantha Riches talks to TMO about the cult of St. George and the Dragon, and why there’s a significant collection of art works where the legendary dragon is depicted, very clearly, as female.
"Well, it is worth pointing out that joining the EU is a long term process," comments Chris Morris, author of The New Turkey – The quiet revolution on the edge of Europe. Much of Morris’ tenure as BBC correspondent in Turkey [1997-2001] was spent, necessarily, examining the complexities and contradictions that surround Turkey’s proposed membership […]
The machine is the single most defining entity of the twentieth century. Its role at the turn of the century was a central one: it was the dawn of the modern age facilitated by the energy and productivity of the machine. The focus of life shifted from the rural to the urban, from day to […]
On the 2nd of August this year (2005), football fans from the Sicilian city of Messina blockaded the strategic ferry route between the city and the Italian peninsula, protesting against their club’s relegation to Serie B. Another small episode in a long history of impassioned football support, and political intrigue (the Sicilian club were re-admitted […]
Harry Clarke was recognised for his artistic genius and achieved great success during his own lifetime, yet he often gets pigeonholed into various modes of artistic expression. Clarke however, was not merely a symbolist, a revivalist, an illustrator, or a stained glass artist; he was all of these but also much more complex and interesting […]
