Art

Under Art we cover the visual and musical inheritance of the European traditions — painting and sculpture from Roman portraiture through the Renaissance, the Baroque, and into the modern movements; the illumination, manuscript, and metalwork traditions of the medieval North; the long sweep of European music from plainchant through polyphony, the operatic and symphonic tradition, and the folk traditions that fed and survived alongside them.

We write about art as material practice as much as aesthetic object. The pigments a painter chose, the source of the vellum, the size of the choir an organum was written for, the loom a tapestry came off — these specifics ground the work in time and place. We’re less interested in art as a sequence of named geniuses than in art as the surviving evidence of how people lived, worked, and believed.