Category: Art

Core Tuesday Cultural Report

Hi fellow scholars! Here’s the Core Office bringing you once again the wonders of modern day interpretations of our beloved classics. We wanted to share with you a couple of clips referenced today in Prof. Hamill’s lecture on“Witnessing Tragedy in Euripides’ Hecuba”. Enjoy! Queens of Syria tells the story of fifty women from Syria, all […]

Texts and video from our Spring community reading

On the evening of April 14, 2021, an audience of classmates, alumni, lecturers, and friends of the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum came together to hear faculty and staff share favorite texts which speak somehow to our present moment of isolation, separation and anxiety, as Auden did in his poem “Age of Anxiety.” Here is […]

A New Scene in Bosch’s Earthly Delight

Scientists are alarmed about an trend among endangered Hawaiian Monk Seals where the juvenile seals have taken to getting entire eels stuck in their noses. As strange as this may be,researchers have nothing to worry about. After all, Hieronymus Bosch understood the oddities of the natural world completely. Why else would he fill his 1510 […]

Here Comes My Ride (It’s Aristotle)

If you have perused sculpture, paintings, and other forms of art from the Northern Renaissance, you may have stumbled upon imagery of a woman riding sidesaddle on the back of none other than the philosopher Aristotle. Bedecked in fine garments (most of the time, anyway), she is Phyllis, said to be the mistress or wife […]

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Engineers Need the Liberal Arts, Too

STEM has its roots in the humanities. If our intellectual foundations are uprooted, then, naturally, the natural sciences and their applications are in danger of withering away. This is a strong reason for the protests that followedPresident Trump’s beginning attempts to deforest our education, which might have had in mindthe prospect of recreating America in […]

A Home in Ruin: The Work of Mohamad Hafez at the Lanoue Gallery

Last Sunday, April 2nd, a solo show opened at the Lanoue Gallery, located not far from us on Harrison Ave. Featuring artwork by Syrian artist Mohamad Hafez, currently an architect in New Haven, Connecticut, the gallery is a window into a miniature world in ruin that reflects the modern-day destruction in Syria. “He wanted to […]

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Paris Exposition

At the turn of the twentieth century, author, sociologist, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois traveled to Europe for the Paris Exposition alongside collaborators Thomas J. Calloway and Daniel Murray. There, numerous photographs, patents, books, and more would make up an exhibition entitled “The Exhibit of American Negroes,” which showcased African-American life. Among these glimpses of […]

From The Weekly Standard: What We Know of Shakespeare from His (Known) Portraits

Blake Seitz at The Weekly Standard reviews Portraits of Shakespeare by Katherine Duncan-Jones, an absorbing study, we are told, by an author who flouts the rule that tells us we cannot judge a book by its cover. Or if we cannot judge Hamlet from its cover, we can at least make a judgment about its […]

TEDTalks: Elizabeth Lev, Michelangelo, and the Great Theater of Life

What is the unheard story of the Sistine Chapel? Art historian Elizabeth Lev intends to tell us, taking us on a tour through Michelangelo’s series of frescos and what she considers “the great theater of life.” Against the backdrop of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas, an age of exploration, Michelangelo took on the Sistine Chapel […]

Florence, Italy, Comes to Boston: Botticelli at the MFA

An exhibition entitled “Botticelli and the Search for the Divine: Florentine Painting between the Medici and the Bonfires of the Vanities” is set to tour the United States this year, and the MFA is one of the stops on its list. A collaboration between our own MFA Boston, the Muscarella Museum of Art in Virginia, […]