Latest news with #medievalArt
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Giotto's ‘The Legend of St. Francis': Assisi's Devotional Frescoes
When I first saw Giotto's fresco cycle 'The Legend of St. Francis' in the upper church of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi—a small Italian town two hours from Rome by train—I thought: Is this really what I traveled halfway around the world to see? The colors have faded into ghosts of what they once were. The figures are as boxy as the houses that surround them. Their stiff faces look like those of cadavers that have been stretched into place. But spending more time with these huddled masses of earnest zealots slowly reveals the complex inner lives behind their static masks. If we set aside our modern biases and 800 years of artistic advancement, we can start to understand why medieval viewers thought these images were the most lifelike they had ever seen—and why the founding father of art history, Giorgio Vasari, stated in his 'Lives of the Artists' that Giotto alone rescued painting from 'an evil state and brought it back to such a form that it could be called good.'
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Science
- Telegraph
The Big Picture
10 of 11 A row has broken out between scholars after an expert claimed to have discovered an extra penis on the Bayeux Tapestry. Dr Christopher Monk, a medieval scholar and expert on Anglo- Saxon nudity, believes the genitalia of the figure on the right was restitched with black
