History Art/Architecture

In October 2016, Amitav Ghosh wrote a very long feature in the Guardian asking a very simple question: where is the fiction about climate change? In the years since, merely typing in “climate change fiction” brings up several helpful lists,…

Art knows no boundaries, it is said. But before the mass media that arrived in the late 19th century, art in the main was a very upper class affair. And art itself became highly formalised in turn. The strictures that the early surrealists…

Nowadays the Mona Lisa needs no introduction - it’s the most famous painting in the world, after all. Over six million people a year visit the Louvre in Paris to see La Gioconda - the Happy Woman. That name for the painting is actually a…

The first Olympic medal won by the Irish Free State was a silver medal in 1924, awarded Jack Butler Yeats for his 1923 painting The Liffey Swim. That may seem surprising today, however between 1912 and 1948 the arts took pride of place…

Carlo Gesualda was born in Venosa, part of the Kingdom of Naples in southern Italy in 1566. His father was the Prince of Venosa, having been granted that title in 1561 when he married Geronima Borromeo, niece of Pope Pius IV. Carlo was his…

There were few women who had the chance to make their mark on the Italian art world, but Artemisia Gentileschi was definitely one of them. During her lifetime she was the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in…

In the beginning of every year we witness the same phenomenon. Sometimes something worth talking about happens. Here’s a lowdown. “Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my…

The 9th of November is a significant date in German history for several reasons. In 1848 it was the official end of the March Revolution, which laid the groundwork for the former Holy Roman Empire to become the German Empire in 1871. It…

Those looking for an enjoyable scare for the Halloween season are unlikely to seek one out in a European medieval manuscript. Those things are stuffy and deeply religious, right? It would just be silly to look for anything creepy…

Nowadays, most people aren’t afraid of monsters. We know that our neighbours are not secretly werewolves, that the dead will not rise as vampires to steal our lives away, that witches will not cast malicious curses to blight our lives. And…