We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more, please click this link.
The Transfiguration” ranks among the Scottish poet Edwin Muir’s better known poems. As its title suggests, the poem relates to Christ’s Transfiguration as narrated in the Gospels. Mark for one, writes that Jesus took Peter, James and…
Ash Wednesday arrived one day after the storm. The skies had cleared but still bore traces of the turbulence of the previous days, which, while without gale-force winds, unleashed an endless pour of rain, causing floods and…
Did the classical painters shun the subject of leprosy? As far as I know, not one of the famous artists, including those who favored biblical themes, had a go at it, notwithstanding that, among Jesus’ miracles, the…
The 19th-century French painter James Tissot was a contemporary of Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet. But, instead of adopting their impressionism, he stuck to his realistic method. He painted fashionable women, as well as people and scenes…
John Ruskin considered Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna “one of the most perfect pictures of the world.” Raphael was in his early twenties when he did the painting, which Niccolò Ansidei had commissioned for a family chapel in honor…
In March 1481, the Augustinian monks of San Donato a Scopelo in Florence commissioned Leonardo da Vinci, then 29 years old, to make a painting for their altar. Leonardo began working on the “Adoration of the Magi”,…
Another year, and so it starts again, This back and forth of customary time. Even the rains (must be a storm again, But still too far to make landfall again). How do we mark beginnings with all…
In 1595, while imprisoned in the Tower of London to await his execution, the Jesuit priest and poet Robert Southwell, a cousin of William Shakespeare, wrote a Christmas poem, entitled, “The Burning Babe.” Ben Jonson envied Southwell…
Quite serendipitously, I came across a poem by Thomas Merton about John the Baptist. I surmised that such a poem could only be written by someone like Merton, a Trappist monk, who lived a life of silence,…
About waiting, I ask myself what my most memorable experience of it would be. At my age, I should be able to recall not just one but many. There were joyful waitings, of course, the most recent…
The bleating woke me up. We had spent the night at Cabo San Miguel, a beach resort in Owak, Asturias, Cebu, and in the morning I heard a goat cry. I got up and opened the door…
I have always looked on William Blake as a poet. In fact, he was more than that — he was likewise an artist, one that art critic Jonathan Jones considered “far and away the greatest artist Britain…
We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more, please click this link.