ARTES MAGAZINE

  A  visit to New York’s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Old Masters Collection, provides the interested viewer with an opportunity to look closely at pictures painted on wooden panel, canvas, and occasionally, stone or metal. Here, we will refer to their collection and concentrate on the materials, techniques and physical history of European works from [...]

Seeing the known anew is the grace of every great exhibition. In front of The Adoration of the Magi, by Michael Damaskenos at “The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete,” at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York City, this belief strikes a particularly strong note. Painted in 1585-91, the sensation is [...]

In the 1990s, I recall watching Sister Wendy Beckett, the reluctant celebrity spokesperson for a popular PBS series on art appreciation. This sequestered nun, who for decades had lived under a vow of silence, had gained notoriety for her views on famous works of art and now stood in her nun’s habit waxing vociferously before [...]

As the movers and shakers of the handmade rug industry, the interior design trade plays a pivotal role in shaping the end consumers’ purchasing decisions. After focusing on the greenness of the handweaving process from the manufacturers’ standpoint (See “Special Green Report—Handmade Rugs—The Original Green Floor Coverings,” ARTES (Oct. 13, 2009), this article takes a [...]

As I pulled up the long drive, lined with sturdy, shag-barked Maple trees, the snow-covered fields and a distant copse of fledgling oaks and birches to my right offered a glimpse of a Boston of long ago. Suburban neighborhoods and office parks now surround this pastoral vista, a gently rolling reminder of what much of [...]

Tang Dynasty Camel and Rider is a thousand-year-old treasure within reach of many collectors This extraordinary early Tang Dynasty (618-907 c.e.) camel and rider (20” tall x 14” wide) is representative of a golden period in Chinese cultural history. After hundreds of years of regional conflict and division, central China was unified under as series [...]