Baptism of Christ

On March 15, 1523 the Venetian humanist Girolamo Negri wrote to his friend, the art collector and writer Marcantonio Michiel, about the visit of the new Pope Adrian VI to the Belvedere gardens in Rome....

More than just windows to the soul, the eyes are part of it. What we know—or think we know or want to think—about them affects how people look to us...

Whereas Tintoretto worked on enormous canvases aided in the execution by his techniques for speed and his large workshop, Barocci worked laboriously on his altar-pieces through multiple stages of preparation, carefully calculating especially his affective color. If Tintoretto’s ambition was to engulf his viewers, Barocci’s was to enthrall them.

WE DO not explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures — or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered then under some verbal description or specification. For instance, if I think or say about Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (fig. 1) something quite primitive like ‘The firm design of this picture is partly due to Piero della Francesca’s recent training in Florence’, I am first proposing ‘firm design’ as a description of one aspect of the …