Coming Up · Architecture · Art · Moscow · Museums

Francisco Infante's Red Square lighting project at the Garage Museum exhibition

Francisco Infante's plan for the illumination of Red Square. Among much else, it contains a most intriguing proposal: a dynamic lighting scheme for the Kremlin wall, in which a white light would "march" along the wall itself in step with the honour guard. Regrettably, the idea

Detail of an old painting: a creature with blue wings and thin legs sits on the wall of a dark ruin, with a landscape visible on the left.

NB! · Art · Observations · Humour

Winged creature in a detail of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch

A winged creature waits for you to open the window with no mosquito net. Hieronymus Bosch

Faith · Art · Monarchies · Observations · People

Portrait of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna by François Flameng, 1894

Did you recognise her? I could not, without a prompt. The sublimely melancholy young woman in François Flameng's portrait of 1894 is a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, aged thirty, the elder sister of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and the wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich: Grand Duchess Elizabeth

Archaeology · Art · Observations · Science

The Palaeoart Centre of the Institute of Archaeology and a programme with Elena Levanova

I am often asked about the origins of art in the earliest epochs of humanity, but this is not quite my field, despite several articles on the subject and a few interesting thoughts. Our Academy of Sciences has a team that deals with the questions of ancient pictorial practices with

Art · Society · Reportage

A very cool art object on one of the squares of Nizhny Novgorod: the "Bitter Experience" kiosk, alluding to Gorky, the city's former name and one of Nizhny's most famous natives

The display boards of the kiosk, on which a sign reading "back in 5 minutes" has hung for four years, carry works by contemporary artists from Nizhny, among them Artem Filatov, Ivan Sery and Kurs Studio. Among them is, for example, an advertisement for SLON Travel promising an

NB! · Faith · Art · Moscow · Observations · Humour

Tell me, why does even Van Dyck's Preparation for the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian remind me of the unbearable Moscow heat?

Portrait of a dark-haired man with a moustache, wearing a dark coat, a burgundy waistcoat and a white cravat.

Aristocracy · Art · Science · People

Portrait of a man by the painter Philip de László

Portrait of the French Aristocrat, Industrialist and Scientist Armand de Gramont, Duc de Guiche (1879-1962) Artist: Philip de László

Art · Observations · Mores · Humour

Wallpapering shown in an engraving and a repair method unchanged for centuries

As an experienced foreman and connoisseur of renovation matters, I cannot help wondering: do these gentlemen hang their wallpaper from the corner or towards it? The engraving does not settle the matter at once: whether the new chequered paper is going up in place of the old-fashioned kind with

Fresco of the nude Adam and Eve among trees, with a haloed bearded man in a red robe raising his hand.

Faith · Art · Paris · Humour

Hippolyte Flandrin's fresco in the Paris church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés

The Lord Asks Adam and Eve to Observe Social Distancing. A fresco by the celebrated French painter Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris

A vast torch-lit palace beside a river of fiery lava under a stormy sky, with a warrior holding a shield on a rock in the foreground.

Art · Moscow · Observations · Humour

John Martin’s 1841 painting “Pandemonium”, after Milton’s poem

When you learn that from tomorrow Moscow is once again at +30 and above. Well, here is a painting by John Martin, not the science-fiction writer, mind you, but the Romantic painter, dated 1841. It is called Pandemonium. Yes, yes, that very capital of hell in Milton's

Art · Society · Paris · People

Rodin kept his Balzac monument after the Society of Men of Letters rejected it

Ugliness, a shapeless mass, a monster: this is how the patrons described Auguste Rodin's monument to Balzac. The statue at the intersection of the boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse still provokes controversy today. After a scandal that all France followed, Rodin kept the sculpture for himself and returned the

A young man in a dark velvet jacket sits at a polished table holding a gold chain attached to a squirrel, against a red drape.

NB! · Art · Mores · Nature

Portrait of Henry Pelham with a pet flying squirrel by John Singleton Copley, 1765

A pet squirrel will surprise no one, but a domestic flying squirrel on a golden lead is a great rarity, even by the standards of the eighteenth century. 1765, John Singleton Copley, portrait of his half-brother Henry Pelham