Art · Museums · Pop Culture · Humour

Hastings plans a contemporary art gallery that can be viewed on skis

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, whose fortune is estimated at $4.7 billion, is to open an art gallery right on a ski slope, at the 3,433-hectare Powder Mountain resort in Eden, Utah, which he recently acquired. It is planned that the pictures may be viewed without taking

Painting in blue tones: Kremlin walls, towers and a bell tower with golden domes reflected in the dark water of a river.

Art · Moscow

The Moscow Kremlin in a 1920 painting by Leonid Brailovsky

Blue Moscow. Leonid Brailovsky, 1920

NB! · Art · Science

A Speck Spotted in the Eye of the Girl with a Pearl Earring

Sepia drawing of a priest in a cap sitting at a table with a book in a room with a bed and shelves of vessels.

Faith · Art · London · Museums · Observations

Lorenzo Lotto's drawing of a priest in his chambers, held by the British Museum

A priest in his chambers. The room is very much like mine: five hundred years have passed, yet the furnishings and the mood have survived. Lorenzo Lotto, 1491-1556. British Museum

The East · Art · Museums

Knife with a blue glass handle and an ivory sheath inlaid with precious stones

Ottoman Empire, 18th–19th centuries.

Art · Museums

Study of a Dog (1861–1862 or 1875), Gustave Courbet

Langmatt Museum, Baden

NB! · Archive · Art · Paris · People

The Letters of Édouard Manet, 1879–1880, Embellished by the Artist

NB! · Faith · Art · Observations

Have You Ever Heard of Mexican Baroque?

Have you ever heard of Mexican Baroque? Before you are two paintings on the theme of the Annunciation by Cristóbal de Villalpando of Mexico City, the most brilliant representative of Mexican Baroque art.

Painting in a gilded frame showing the interior of the Pantheon, with a coffered dome, a round oculus and figures of visitors.

Architecture · Art · Museums · Rome

Painting of the Pantheon interior at the National Gallery of Art in Washington

Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of the Pantheon. Washington, National Gallery of Art

NB! · Faith · Art · Madrid · Museums

Detail of the Annunciation (the Madrid version, the best known), painted by Fra Beato Angelico in 1435

Detail of the Annunciation (the Madrid version, the best known), painted by Fra Beato Angelico in 1435. Look at the wing of the Archangel Gabriel and imagine the level of mastery of a Dominican friar of the early fifteenth century

NB! · Art

Nicolas de Staël, View of Le Havre from the Honfleur Coast, 1952

Art · Mores · Ethnography

Polish Dress in Dutch Portraits of Children of the 17th Century, from Bol to Netscher

Here we have a most interesting instance of foreigners borrowing national dress: Dutch merchants in Poland dressed their children in costumes stylised after the clothing of the Polish nobility. The first portrait, of 1656, by the Dutch painter Ferdinand Bol, a pupil of Rembrandt, shows the son of a Dutch