Art and Renaissance
Galleria Doria Pamphilj and Caravaggio
Two paintings by Caravaggio, made with the same model, brought together in the Sixteenth century room of the Galleria Doria Pamphilj.
Art and Renaissance
Vatican and Caravaggio Museums
The Deposition of Christ, Caravaggio's only work in the Vatican Pinacoteca, and the reason it was chosen for this rare company.
Art and Renaissance
Palazzo Barberini and Caravaggio
Where to see Judith and Holofernes and Narcissus, by Caravaggio, two works that have never left this collection since the 17th century.
Art and Renaissance
David with the Head of Goliath, by Caravaggio
Goliath's bloodied face is Caravaggio's self-portrait, a fugitive, sent to the cardinal who had the power to grant his pardon.
Art and Renaissance
Judith and Holofernes, by Caravaggio
The biblical scene that Caravaggio refused to paint as a clean triumph, showing heroism and horror in the same face, at the same time.
Art and Renaissance
Little Sick Bacchus, by Caravaggio
A self-portrait painted in a hospital, refusing the idealization of a god and transforming fragility into an argument about the sacred.
Art and Renaissance
What is chiaroscuro?
The technique of light and shadow that, in Caravaggio's hands, stopped being a visual resource and became a statement about where grace chooses to fall.
Art and Renaissance
Who was Caravaggio?
The painter on the run for murder who continued to be commissioned by popes and cardinals, and discovered that the sacred lives in the wound, not in perfection.
Art and Renaissance
Exploring the Galleria Borghese
A guided tour through the rooms of the Galleria Borghese, from the garden of the Villa Borghese to the face-to-face meeting with Bernini.
Art and Renaissance
Galleria Borghese and Bernini
Why the Galleria Borghese is, in practice, the most complete portrait of the young Bernini, before he became the architect of the Roman Baroque.
Art and Renaissance
Galleria Borghese, what to see
A quick guide to the works that combine, in a single museum in Rome, the three sculptural groups by Bernini and canvases by Caravaggio.
Art and Renaissance
Is it worth going to the Galleria Borghese?
Why a small museum, with a timed visit, contains more decisive works per square meter than almost any other in Rome.
Art and Renaissance
Apollo and Daphne, by Bernini, and Ovid
How Bernini sculpted the impossible instant, the exact second in which a nymph stops being human, based on Ovid's myth in the Metamorphoses.
Art and Renaissance
Bernini and the Aeneid, by Virgil
Why the Aeneid was, for Bernini, more than a source of sculpture, the epic grammar of a civilization, present even in St. Peter's Square.
Art and Renaissance
Bernini and the Metamorphoses, by Ovid
Because Ovid gave Bernini something that no Christian theme offered in the same way, permission for moral ambiguity.
Art and Renaissance
Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius, by Bernini
Three generations in a single moving body, sculpted by a twenty-year-old Bernini from Virgil's Aeneid, on what defines a true founder.
Art and Renaissance
What is Baroque?
The visual language of power that needs to impress because it can no longer simply order, born in Rome that responded to the Protestant Reformation.
Art and Renaissance
The Abduction of Proserpina, by Bernini
Pluto's fingers sinking into Proserpina's flesh, sculpted by Bernini in marble, and Ovid's question about power and freedom that the scene carries.
Art and Renaissance
Who was Bernini?
The sculptor who worked for seven consecutive popes and transformed marble into the visual language of Baroque, the art the Church used to respond to the Protestant Reformation.
Philosophy and logic
The Art of Being Right, by Schopenhauer
A short, sharp little book that goes the other way: instead of teaching you how to think well, it catalogs, with irony, the tricks to appear to be right.
Philosophy and logic
What is appeal to the majority?
"Everyone does it like that, so it's right." There was a time when all of humanity swore that the sun revolved around the Earth.
Philosophy and logic
What is hasty generalization?
"I met two and they were both like that, so they all are." The silent factory of almost all prejudices, disguised as life experience.
Philosophy and logic
Truth x validity
The sharpest distinction in informal logic: an argument can have perfect structure and false content, or the opposite. It's only solid when it has both.
Philosophy and logic
What is the strawman fallacy?
Distorting someone else's argument into a weaker version, and overthrowing that version, is beating a straw doll, not the person, who is still standing.
Philosophy and logic
What is ad hominem?
The fallacy of attacking the person instead of the argument. "You can't talk about that" never answered whether what was said is true.
Philosophy and logic
What is false dilemma?
"You're either with me or against me." The world almost never has just two doors, and whoever offers two has already chosen which one they want to push you through.
Philosophy and logic
What is a syllogism?
The structure of two premises and a conclusion that Aristotle described, and which still organizes all valid reasoning, from "Socrates is mortal" to today's debate.
Philosophy and logic
What is a premise?
The statement that supports a conclusion: why a false premise brings down the entire argument, even with perfect structure.
Philosophy and logic
Premises, conclusion and validity
The difference between truth and validity explains why an argument can seem right and be wrong, or seem wrong and be right.
Greek philosophy
How to Listen, by Plutarch
An almost two-thousand-year-old treatise on the most neglected art of human formation, listening, and the internal enemies that sabotage this listening without you realizing it.