The Virtuoso
National Gallery, LondonRaphael: An Allegory (The Vision of a Knight), circa 1504 Like the artist himself, the long-anticipated Raphael exhibition that opened in Rome on March 5, 2020, was struck down...
View ArticleLight in the Palazzo
Bas relief of the port of Rome, circa 200 CE In 1968 the Roman aristocrat Alessandro Torlonia, Prince of Fucino, applied for a permit to repair the roof of his family’s private museum, a...
View ArticleSee Rome and Feel Alive
In the Review’s May 13 Art Issue, we published “Light in the Palazzo,” Ingrid Rowland’s review of The Torlonia Marbles, an exhibition in Rome of ancient sculptures long hidden from view. Since 1876...
View ArticleNor Gloom of Night
Erik Norrud/Guardian/eyevine/Redux Vigdis Hjorth near Oslo, Norway, 2019 Ellinor, the protagonist of the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Long Live the Post Horn!, is a thirty-five-year-old...
View ArticleCaught in the Coils
Illustration by Alain Pilon How do we respond to barbarians at the gates? On February 25, 2022, as Russian troops invaded her country, the young Ukrainian congresswoman Kira Rudik tweeted, “I learn to...
View ArticleThe Spell of Marble
Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, circa 1614–1618 In theory, early modern Italians regarded sculpture as a lower form of art, harsh physical labor unsuited to a gentleman. In fact,...
View ArticleAn Exceptional Witness
Maira Kalman Stella Levi (front row center) with members of her family and friends outside the Juderia, Rhodes, late 1920s; illustration by Maira Kalman One evening in 2015, the writer Michael Frank...
View ArticleMysteries of Use and Reuse
The single exposed corner of my house in Rome is shielded by the battered stub of an ancient column. The marble cylinder, with its worn fluting, must have been sunk into the sandy soil of Trastevere,...
View ArticleThe Divine Guido
The Roman church of Santa Maria della Concezione sits atop a precipitous cliff of volcanic stone that frames the modern Via Veneto. Most visitors climb a flight of outdoor stairs to see the crypt,...
View Article‘A Great Glory to Wealth’
Few of Rome’s marvels are more marvelous than the Villa Farnesina, the riverside villa built in the early sixteenth century for the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi, who commissioned this enigmatic retreat...
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