Ogmin/art history

The Significance of
Mount Shasta
as a Visual Resource
in 19th and Early 20th Century California Art

Mamallapuram
7th c. ce

Northern Song Dynasty Landscape Painting Detail

The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the 12th-18th centuries.

This is an incredibly good site; one of the best on the web. Lately I have been studying the medieval period, primarily through books but supplementing with material from the web. Take one of their tours and witness how little you know about the explosion of artistic creativity which is called The Renaissance.

Contemporary Tibetan Painting

Tibet is in a state of flux and change that impacts all of its inhabitants and cannot help but catch the notice of the many visitors and tourists that come in increasing numbers to the high plains of this magical land. Tibet's artists are at the cutting edge of this evolution: it is they who are constantly dealing with the contradictions and rapid change of their treasured home.

RETURN OF THE BUDDHA -- The Qingzhou Discoveries: A beautiful exhibition (in Java, so i couldn't photoblog anything) at the Sackler Gallery

"In the early twenty-first century, many of us may have lost touch with the experience of majesty, of the numinous presence of superior beings that ask for our concentrated attention and respect. At least in the re-experience of the numinous in the world, the devotional imagery presented by divine images in the round or in focalized reliefs allows the modern spectator to encounter the forces implicated in these tendentious artworks. They exist as powers, not limited by the time or place of making but naturally inciting patterns of response, embedded in the human psyche. In their sight, we are forced to acknowledge the loss for many of us of the presence of the spiritual in the world, and, yet, the very awareness of that loss heightens self-knowledge, itself a principle of Buddhist beliefs."

- Sacred Sculpture: A View by Richard Brilliant (from the site)

Three Centuries of Italian Art is an overview of 300 years of Italian art from 1500 to 1800 including masterworks from the Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo eras. More than one hundred works from public and private collections in cities such as Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Naples are displayed chronologically.

Leonardo da Vinci
Study for the head of Christ for The Last Supper
[Testa di Cristo] c.1495 drawing on paper

Nice tour. Well done intro to this period, and it loads easily. I tend to look at these paintings as primer in how to SEE.