The 16th-century “Isenheim Altarpiece” confronts us with the reality of suffering, violence, and death in a century where violence is both omnipresent and obscured.
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Ed Simon
Ed Simon is a staff writer for The Millions and the author of Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology
How Giuseppe Arcimboldo Made the Familiar Bizarre
The artist’s perplexing paintings should be viewed not as mere visual puzzles, but instantiations of an occult philosophy.
Albrecht Dürer, a Humanist Messiah
He believed, and demonstrated, that individuals could ascend to divine realms of knowledge.
The Temptations of Pieter Bruegel the Elder
His 1559 masterpiece “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” is an argument in paint for moral and spiritual ambivalence.
How Bosch Experienced his Own Kind of Hell
Bosch was the inventor of the modern Western imagining of the demonic while transcending that tradition — all because of bad weather and moldy bread.