Articles

A statue tumbles and, with an almighty splash, sinks below the water. Those responsible cheer with joy. Onlookers are captured in a range of emotions: confusion, rage, wonder. What is taking place? Is this an anti-historical act of violent vandalism, or the liberating removal of a relic of the colonial era, an enduring reminder of oppression? When Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, it was

Axel Rü̈ger is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. He is a former Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam...

Leonardo da Vinci is a constant of the Western cultural tradition. We grow up with a vague sense of Leonardo’s achievements, knowing him...

The will to transparency, the scopic drive to see through, to scrutinise naked truth, encounters a significant impediment in the dead letters, the literae mortuae, of law. The puppet show of juridical interpretation, the marionettes that are pulled as heavy signifiers, gothic black-letter dogmas from the pickle jar of precedent, perform a spectacle that is always a trope and costume, a stage and screen away from the viewing subject. As the pop philosopher and ‘narcotheorist’

Count Sperello di Serego Alighieri is an astronomer descended from Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy. Antoine de Gabrielli is a prominent French businessman descended from Cante dei Gabrielli, the judge who condemned Dante to exile. Dante Alighieri lived from 1265 to 1321. During his lifetime, he was a pharmacist, a poet, and a politician. His study of medicines nourished an already scientific mind and allowed him to stock pharmacy shelves with his works. (Book

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tiziano_-_Amor_S...

Maggie Hoag is Deputy General Counsel, Americas, at the auction house Christie’s. She studied art law at Stanford, and was involved in...