john 14 on Art

Paolo Uccello, an Italian painter and craftsman of the early Renaissance, lived in Florence during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. His obsession with perspective was so intense that he would s...

It is said that upon his (Edmund Spenser, 1552-1599) presenting some poems to the Queen (Elizabeth I) she ordered him a gratuity of one hundred pounds, but the Lord Treasurer Burleigh objecting to it,...

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always enjoyed hearing stories about the origins of certain words. One of these words is the “sincere.” While there are some questions about the history’s authenticity...

Life is short, and we can accomplish only so much. Much of what we do will remain unfinished. For now. In one of my favorite short stories of all time, “Leaf by Niggle,” author J. R. R. Tolkien provid...

There are going to be broken times when you feel as if everything is under demolition. When things feel unresolved or ruined inside of you. When the only thing you might have the strength to do is thr...

W.H. Auden is widely considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. Auden grew up in England but spent some of his adult years in the United States. When he passed away on the 29th of Septe...

In 1463, members of the City Council of Firenze (Florence) Italy decided they needed a monument to enhance their city. They commissioned a sculptor to carve a giant statue to stand in front of city ha...

Pablo Picasso lived among a group of artists in Paris in the early 20th century. One evening, the celebrated American writer Gertrude Stein was hosting a group of artists at her home, which doubled as...

At one point in his life, the famous modern artist Pablo Picasso was robbed in his French home. He told the police he would be happy to paint them a picture of the robbers. “And on the strength of tha...

I remember taking my youngest son to one of the national art galleries in Washington, DC. As we made our approach, I was so excited about what we were going to see. He was decidedly unexcited. But I j...