During the George Floyd affair of 2020, protesters defaced, removed, and even decapitated statues of the “colonialists” George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Christopher Columbus. Climate activists likewise attack artworks by Monet, Van Gogh, Vermeer, K...

I have spent my academic career arguing that the arts and aesthetic thinking signify an important way of understanding our lives and experiences. I maintain that together they are a method or “way of knowing” the world that must be engaged and appreciated ...

Last year, the Vatican Museums planned—and later postponed—a collaboration with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh exploring the spiritual aspects of Andy Warhol. To which many responded: The spiritual aspects of Andy Warhol? Many today are still shocked...

The art historian Leo Steinberg once called Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” “the most thought-out picture in the history of art.” Commissioned by Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, in 1495 for an end wall in the refectory of the Dominican Church o...

Comparing Kim Ki-chang to Caravaggio may seem paradoxical: the one bold and aggressive figures, the other delicate and restrained watercolors. But then, seeing painting across cultures requires empathy, intuition, and perhaps a taste for paradox. I first encou...

Given the depth of thought that Leonardo placed into all his work, we can be sure of one thing: everything we see was done on purpose. Five hundred years after the artist’s death, Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has continued to inspire both believers and ...