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An oil-on-canvas work depicting a deceased bullfighter lying on the ground.

Currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was Manet's first major success in the 1861 Salon, featuring a Spanish musician posing in a studio with realistic detail and vibrant color

The sitter is controlled, cultivated, and inward. The crossed arms create reserve; the sidelong gaze avoids direct intimacy; the gilt-framed paintings behind him connect him to art, taste, and bourgeois refinement. The dark suit absorbs the body into shadow, making the illuminated face and hand the psychological center of the portrait. Its effect is not warmth or charm so much as self-possession and guarded intelligence.

Virgil

Caravaggio

painted by Ilya Repin in 1884

Cows

A poignant 19th-century oil-on-canvas painting depicting a three-generation Jewish family in Poland observing Shabbat amidst poverty

Sanuel Hirszenberg, 1907

Ilya Repin
Original Title: На дерновой скамье. Красное село.
Date: 1876
Style: Realism
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 36 x 56 cm

Roberto Rossellini

Emma Hart as Circe
c.1782, George Romney

George is good.

George Romney (1734-1802) - Serena Reading

true kingship is not self-enclosed power, but a soul ordered toward God

rule, poetry, and divine dependence.

The Messiah (1975 film)

The audio is not working. You only get the image.

Saint John the Baptist

Raphael’s Transfiguration is built on a severe contrast: the upper half is revelation, the lower half is crisis. Above, Christ is suspended in light between Moses and Elijah, while three disciples collapse or shield themselves below him on the mountain. Beneath that, Raphael joins a second Gospel episode: the crowd surrounding the possessed boy whom the apostles cannot heal until Christ returns. The Vatican describes the painting precisely in those terms, and that combination of two successive biblical scenes into one altarpiece is one of the work’s governing decisions. It was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, begun in the late 1510s, and left unfinished at Raphael’s death in 1520

What makes the painting genuinely great, then, is not just technical brilliance or religious subject matter. It is the fact that Raphael refuses a simple sacred image. He does not present glory as self-enclosed. He places it over failure, illness, agitation, and interpretive confusion. The result is that the Transfiguration becomes inseparable from the world that cannot yet receive it properly. The painting says, in effect, that revelation is real, but man is still disordered; light exists, but below it there is still noise, argument, incapacity, and pain. That tension is why the work remains powerful. It is not a placid vision. It is a painting about the distance between divine truth and human ability to bear it.

The central achievement is that the painting is not just an illustration of the Last Supper. It turns the scene into a moment of shock. Leonardo chooses the instant after Christ says that one of the disciples will betray him. That choice matters. Instead of a static sacred tableau, he gives a chain reaction of responses: disbelief, agitation, suspicion, self-questioning, anger, recoil. The apostles do not all grieve in the same way. Each becomes a different mode of human response to crisis.

We can use Leonardo’s Last Supper to understand Holy Thursday more deeply because the painting shows that the night is not simply a peaceful meal. It is a meal held under the pressure of betrayal, weakness, love, and impending sacrifice.

The first important point is that Holy Thursday is easy to sentimentalize. People can think of it as only fellowship, only intimacy, only the institution of the Eucharist. Leonardo corrects that. He chooses the moment when Christ says that one of the disciples will betray him. That means the sacramental meal happens in the midst of human instability, not after it has been overcome. This matters a great deal. Holy Thursday is not the celebration of a morally perfect community. It is Christ giving himself to a community that is already fractured.

That makes Christ’s composure in the center of the painting especially important. The apostles are disturbed, reactive, divided into clusters of argument and confusion, but Christ remains still. So the painting helps us see a core meaning of Holy Thursday: divine gift does not wait for human worthiness. Christ gives himself before the disciples understand him, before they remain faithful, before Peter’s denial and Judas’s betrayal have fully unfolded. In that sense, the painting shows grace as prior to human adequacy.

Cimabue, one of the major late 13th-century Italian painters.

What matters most in it is the way Christ is shown. This is not the triumphant, upright Christ of earlier medieval art. His body sags, the head falls to one side, the torso bends, and the legs cross with a sense of weight and strain. The painting is trying to make the viewer confront suffering, not just doctrine.

Cimabue is often seen as belonging to the moment when Italian painting begins to move away from a more static sacred form toward a more emotionally and bodily persuasive art. This crucifix is one of those works where you can feel that change happening. It still belongs to medieval devotion, but it is already pushing toward a deeper representation of inner and physical reality.

A great soul:

Vincent Gallo

It is a form of self-fashioning. He presents himself as cultivated, serious, inward, almost aristocratic in bearing. The portrait quietly claims that the painter belongs among the intellectually and socially elevated. That claim is embedded in the image’s dignity.

He looks young, but not immature. The expression is neither proud nor vulnerable in any obvious way. It stays suspended between self-possession and reserve. That ambiguity gives the portrait depth. If he looked more emotional, it would become easier and smaller. Instead, the face remains inward enough that we keep returning to it.

Something pleasant to watch before bed

A lucid spiritual suffering: Christ knows what is coming, accepts it, and endures that knowledge almost alone. The scene shows Christ in Gethsemane praying before his arrest, while Peter, James, and John sleep below him and Judas approaches with soldiers from Jerusalem. Mantegna also includes cherubs presenting the instruments of Christ’s coming torture and death, so the future Passion is already present in the moment of prayer.

What gives the painting its force is the contrast between watchfulness and sleep. Christ is spiritually awake; the disciples are physically and spiritually unready. Their sleep is not just narrative detail from the Gospel. It stands for ordinary human weakness: people fail precisely at the moment when fidelity is most demanded. Meanwhile the soldiers are already advancing, which removes suspense. The point is not “Will Christ escape?” but that he knowingly submits to what must come.

Mantegna's brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini is considered to have been inspired by this painting for his own depiction of the subject, painted between 1460 and 1465 and also in the National Gallery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgonyintheGarden%28Mantegna,_London%29

Hotel Lobby is a 1943 oil painting on canvas by American realist painter Edward Hopper;

This is a World War I-era propaganda poster from the United States Food Administration advocating for the voluntary rationing of sugar. The poster asks Americans to restrict their sugar consumption to 2 pounds per person per month to ensure supply for Allied nations.

Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina (also called Pluto and Proserpina, 1621–22) is doing several things at once: it stages a myth, but it also stages power—as force applied to a resisting body—and then asks the viewer to find beauty in what is, in narrative terms, an abduction.

The composition is Baroque “frozen motion”, designed for dramatic, largely frontal viewing in its original setting, and it also functioned socially as an elite display of classical culture under Borghese patronage (reinforced by a moralizing inscription once on the base)

https://www.collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/rape-of-proserpine

Human suffering

Self Portrait Tito Conti 1842-1924 Italian

Pitti Palace

More Cinema in Miscellaneous.

Ciao!

Portrait of a Young Woman c. 1485 Tempera on panel, 61 x 40 cm
Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence

By Sandro Botticelli

English

https://publicchoice.gmu.edu/tylercowen

Correggio’s Assumption of the Virgin is a monumental dome fresco in Parma Cathedral (c. 1524–1530) that treats the dome as an opening sky rather than a decorated surface. Apostles gather at the base while angels and saints spiral upward in a vortex of clouds and foreshortened bodies, pulling the viewer into the sensation of ascent. Instead of High Renaissance calm and clarity, Correggio uses crowded motion, soft atmospheric light, and extreme di sotto in sù perspective to make transcendence feel physically real. The fresco became a key precedent for later Baroque ceiling illusionism by turning theology—Mary’s bodily assumption—into an immersive spatial experience.

This style is governed by Quadratura — the Baroque technique of painting illusionistic architecture—columns, cornices, vault ribs, coffers, balconies—so that a real ceiling or wall seems to continue into a fictive architectural space.

Daily prayers

I've become a better person because of this book.

I own volume two. Let me know if you would like to borrow it. You must check out volume one at the library.

Raphael’s School of Athens is a “masterpiece” not just because it’s beautiful, but because it solves several hard problems at once—intellectual, compositional, and technical—without looking strained.

The architecture and single-point perspective organize a huge crowd into a coherent “space of reason,” guiding the eye while still letting every figure feel distinct. Plato and Aristotle at the center function as a thesis: two orientations of thought—toward first principles and toward the human world—expressed through simple, readable gesture. Around them, Raphael builds believable micro-scenes of debate, teaching, calculation, skepticism, and solitary reflection, so the fresco becomes an image of intellectual life rather than a mere lineup of famous names. Technically, it’s calibrated to be read across a wall and from below—clear silhouettes, balanced rhythm, and luminous unity—so virtuosity never overwhelms meaning. The result is a rare synthesis: idealized beauty, psychological life, and an argument about inquiry as a public, shared pursuit.

Design by John Pawson

The vertical partitions are designed to appear subtle and light and are separated by a gap from both the floor and the ceiling.

United Kindom
https://johnpawson.com/journal

Apple
YZY
USA

A cloister is most commonly an architectural feature consisting of a covered, arched walkway surrounding an open courtyard. Historically, these were central parts of monasteries, cathedrals, or colleges, providing a space for meditation, prayer, and exercise

The present convent stands on a site occupied since the 12th century by a Vallombrosan monastery which later passed to the Silvestrines; they were driven out of San Marco in 1418, and in 1438 the convent was given to the Dominican Observants. In 1437 Cosimo il Vecchio de’ Medici decided to rebuild the entire complex, at the suggestion of Antonino Pierozzi the Vicar-General. The work was entrusted to Michelozzo, and the decoration of the walls was carried out between 1439 and 1444 by Giovanni of Fiesole, known as Fra Angelico, and his assistants, who included Benozzo Gozzoli.

Museums
Architecture
History

An important book.

Self-educated man.

Yves Saint Laurent

These photographs appear in the "Boys Don’t Cry" magazine.

Photographed by: Nabil Elderkin

American Culture
McDonalds
Kanye West

Stop The War Now!

by Vincent Gallo

Photographed by Terry Richardson

Silent films
Power
Science

St. Francis Renounces all Worldly Goods
1297 - 1299
fresco

Gothic
Religon
Peace

Francesco Hayez
1859
oil on canvas

This was the most popular painting at Pinacoteca di Brera. Rightfully so.

Narcissus by Caravaggio
c. 1597 – c. 1599
oil on canvas

In Metamorphoses, Narcissus is destroyed because he mistakes an image for a being: he falls in love with his reflection, believing it to be another person who reciprocates his desire. His error is not simple vanity but a failure of recognition—he cannot distinguish appearance from reality. Because he is closed to others in life, he becomes trapped in a closed circuit of desire, loving something that has no substance. The mirror thus symbolizes a world where seeming replaces being, and love collapses into self-enclosed illusion..

Italy
Art
Ovid

St Augustine 

Africa
Education
Catholicism

Jannik Sinner and Jasmine Paolini

A great photograph of Paul.

Rock n Roll
Blackbird
Beatles

Pope Leo XIV, thank you for recognizing Cinema.

Pope Leo XIV wrote beautiful words that resonate with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTUT1mJMFCU&t=1s

Peace
Cinema.
Future.

The Creation of Eve

Italian Renaissance

The Physics

Virgil said to carefully read the Physics

Greek Philosophy

Hamlet is my favorite play.

Shakespeare played The Ghost. It was the toughest role to play and that is why he played it. He must've been a great actor.

Homage to Hamlet.

Hamlet is my favorite play.

Natural order.

If it wasn't for this film, Including all the earlier great 60s films that Jean-Luc made at that time, I would have been an illiterate, averge, dull person.

Thank you for the Cinema.

Cinema saved my life!

The small book that she holds states: "The virgin Sofonisba Anguissola made this herself in 1554."

I owe everything to this movie.

George, God bless you sir.

One of the great American Movies by Wiliam Wyler

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

MADE IN THE USA

Tyler Cowen is a person who's had a strong influence on my thinking. He's a great thinker and humanist.

Thank you sir.

Made in the USA.

No image shall be set up that suggest false doctrine or that may furnish the uneducated with an occasion for dangerous error.