The vandal who beheaded Esther Strauss’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary in labor disregarded centuries-old depictions of the mother of God as just a mother.
Ed Simon
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for LitHub, and the author of Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (2024).
Posted inArt
Hildegard von Bingen’s Eternal Garden
The 12th-century mystic continues to attract devotees among both Catholic clergy and New Age gurus, Christian traditionalists and radical feminists.
Posted inArt
Caravaggio Made Darkness Visible
In his violent, carnal visions, sparks of divinity may glow even from within the blackest confines of our fallen reality.
Posted inArt
Matthias Grünewald’s Gruesome Good Friday
The 16th-century “Isenheim Altarpiece” confronts us with the reality of suffering, violence, and death in a century where violence is both omnipresent and obscured.
Posted inArt
How Giuseppe Arcimboldo Made the Familiar Bizarre
The artist’s perplexing paintings should be viewed not as mere visual puzzles, but instantiations of an occult philosophy.
Posted inArt
Albrecht Dürer, a Humanist Messiah
He believed, and demonstrated, that individuals could ascend to divine realms of knowledge.
Posted inArt
The Temptations of Pieter Bruegel the Elder
His 1559 masterpiece “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” is an argument in paint for moral and spiritual ambivalence.
Posted inOpinion
How Bosch Experienced his Own Kind of Hell
Bosch was the inventor of the modern Western imagining of the demonic while transcending that tradition — all because of bad weather and moldy bread.