Deianeira and the Centaur Nessus

~WHY IS IT that certain American places have the emotional intensity of old master paintings? The American places I have in mind do not literally look like paintings by Rembrandt, but they sometimes have the gravity and pathos, the infinite depth and unaccountable lightness, of...

Earlier in the sixteenth century, Sebastiano del Piombo, the Venetian artist working in Rome, painted a particularly novel picture of Venus mourning the death of Adonis (fig. 83). Sebastiano’s painting stands apart from the various pictures of Venus and Adonis that I have considered here thus far...