Stand in one of the upper galleries and the room does all the work for you. Tall lancet windows throw cold daylight down a rough plaster wall. The roof is open timber. The floor is brick, worn to a warm red. A carved retable sits on a bracket at exactly the height an altarpiece …
Stand on the San Marco side of the Grand Canal, put the Rialto Bridge in the middle distance, let the palace fronts run away on both sides, and you …
Draw the Louvre from memory. You will draw a triangle. Not the Cour Carrée, not the Grande Galerie, not the Renaissance wings that took four centuries …
The Cortile Nuovo at Palazzo Bo is a hard courtyard to photograph and an easy one to walk straight past. Most visitors to the University of Padua …
There is no good place to stand in front of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. The parvis is shallow, the hill falls away behind you, and the façade is …
The big blue canvas reads as a burst of energy. Five figures, a green mound, a flat blue sky, almost no detail, the whole thing apparently thrown down …
Seen from beneath the iron footbridge that crosses the Saône at the foot of Fourvière hill, the church of Saint-Georges reads as the oldest thing in …
The wall label gives the date with unusual precision: Paris, June to July 1914. Francis Picabia was working on a canvas over eight feet tall, filling …
The proverb says lemonade. The proverb has clearly never been to the coast of France. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about lemons: on …
There is a moment just before a bird moves when it becomes completely legible. Every feather settles. The eye fixes on something. The body gathers …
