Category: Arts & Letters

Flickering Flames: The Primordial Power of the Movies

Night. Somewhere in Northern Europe. (8,000 B.C.) Picture a cave with a fire burning just outside its mouth. Prehistoric men, women, and children are seated on the cave floor, every face alit with awe and wonder, under the spell of a master storyteller. Before them, an elder, dressed in animal skins and a headdress with…


The Angelic Music of Josquin des Prez

Music calls out to us, evoking an array of feelings, and at its best, it renews a sense of aliveness and hope within us. A masterfully crafted musical composition renews our spirits and gives us access to parts of ourselves that otherwise remained dormant. Unless deeply steeped in the sounds of classical music of old,…


A Day in The Life: A Student at the Kano School of Painting

A Day In the Life Everyday, we wake up and we hurry to our jobs or to school. We become part of a routine that seems to encapsulate us. In this series, we will take a moment from our hectic, fast-paced world, step outside of our routine, and imagine what life may have been like…


A Return to Divine Beauty: Socrates and Phaedrus

The Eye of the Beholder: Reflecting on the Purpose of Beauty and Art We’ve all heard the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but what does this mean and does it hold weight? In this series, we’ll take a casual look at the philosophical debates concerning our experiences with beauty and art….


Landscapes of the Sublime

Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher. —William Wordsworth In times when “progress” charts a potentially perilous course for humanity, it’s the role of art to remind us of our connection to life, both inside and outside ourselves. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as the industrial revolution transformed the…


The Medici: Patrons of the Florentine Renaissance

Their artworks are icons of Italy and their names are among the most well-known in the art world: Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo. Eager viewers stop and snap photos of the instantly-recognizable paintings, sculptures, and buildings. Displayed in museums around the world, the immortal paintings invite a popular following. What remains obscured in the history books,…


The Moral Certainty of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’

Director and producer Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 masterpiece, “Rope,” begins deceptively, with fine lilting music and scenes of an idyllic New York City block. A woman walks her baby in a stroller, a car glides down a one-way street, and a policeman escorts two boys through the light traffic. Despite omnipresent brick, glass, and concrete, the…


Romantic Aspirations, Vision, and Viaducts

Charles Carroll of Carrollton might well have been the Elon Musk of his day. The last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence was certainly an influencer. Carroll sponsored advances in agriculture, and, encouraged by his partnership with John, George, and Andrew Ellicott, Carroll promoted the use of crop rotation and pulverized limestone on his…


Is Hope for Our Future to Be Found in Our Past?

All over the world, people have the sense that something has gone wrong. Our neighborhoods are no longer safe. Children aren’t learning the skills they need for life in school; instead they are taught to judge everyone by their race or gender. The jobs we thought we would have for decades disappear with little warning,…


An ‘Academical Village’ as a Model for a New Republic

If you had traveled with the Marquis de Lafayette to the Piedmont region of Virginia in 1824, you would have been amazed to come upon a beautifully proportioned village being built in the finest tradition of Renaissance planning. Ten pavilions, connected by colonnades extending from a great building resembling the Roman Pantheon, rose impressively above…