Italian Art for Travelers
Your passport to culture, history, and art

Suffering Madonna overload in museums and churches? Are paintings of Annunciations starting to look the same? Now for something...

It was a gruesome site: a woman’s partially decomposed head eerily lit behind a metal screen. Her name is Caterina Benincasa, better...

Nothing brings on analysis paralysis like trying to decide on a paint color. Which shade of blue should I paint the bathroom? The sheer...

How Vincent van Gogh and a Roman Missal led me to study art history. From the graceful ornate elegance of the 1400s, to the classic figural

Venice slowly grew on me. At first the tourist mono culture was a turn off, a distraction obscuring the treasures to be discovered. My...

Would you gulp a fine wine or savor it slowly? Try enjoying art in the same way as you would a fine wine especially on April 14 for...

As I left the exhibit at the Met, a little overwhelmed, and took a taxi back to the hotel, my thoughts turned to three questions...

Michelangelo was active as an artist for some seventy years and the exhibit brought together works from his earliest teenage years to drawin

Art is a business The making and selling of art may not be the world’s oldest profession, but it has been a commercial endeavor for...

2017 made art news with the attributed Leonardo da Vinci painting selling for an unheard-of price. This raises some interesting questions...

Is Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi real or a copy? Experts disagree.

Four Renaissance masters. Individually they were artistic geniuses. Collectively their bodies of work are considered the epitome of the...

The Italian language is expressive and the terms used to describe art are evocative and just fun to say out loud. Terms like chiaroscuro...

Lorenzo Ghiberti sculpted sixty-ton bronze doors for Florence’s Baptistery. Ghiberti’s masterpiece is the equal to Michelangelo in techniqu

Big Data 1400s Style A Florentine Snapshot It’s 1424 in Florence, the wealthy commercial urban center of Tuscany. Giovanni Bianco (a...

Don’t like big museums? Overwhelmed by tourists in Florence? Here are four delightful small towns in Tuscany, perfect for those who don’t li

Three sites tell the story of St. Francis of Assisi as he began a radical new way of preaching and serving people and in the process challen

Was Michelangelo gay? Did he work alone and earn a fortune? Historical evidence tells us more about how he worked and what mattered to him t

The plague had a profound psychological, economic, artistic, and spiritual impact. There were many bouts of plague, usually peaking in the h

There were a few artists that stretched the limits of tradition and broke boundaries. Their innovations were not immediately taken up by oth

St. Sebastian holds an important place in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as he was the patron saint of the plague, which devastated the pop

The Dark Ages repressed intellectualism and artists didn’t know how to paint perspective until they saw the light of the Renaissance! If only it was that simple.

The Renaissance is a historical period with rough dates of about 1350-1600. It is not just an artistic style. As the name implies, it was a re-birth of art, literature, and architecture.