history

4 posts

Inherited Frames: How Canaletto, Friedrich and De Chirico Still Compose the Photographs We Take in Europe

Almost no view worth photographing in Europe is unframed. Someone standardised it, usually a painter, usually for money, and usually long enough ago that the composition now feels like a discovery rather than an inheritance. Work through a season of pictures and the pattern…

roundup

Museum Rooms and Marble Faces: A Roundup of Recent Roman Posts

A running list of recent pieces, most of them built around a single object standing in a single museum room — the method that keeps abstract Roman…

history

Salt, Tax, and the State

Salt was the first commodity governments taxed reliably and the last one they gave up. The logic was simple: everyone needed it, it was cheap to…

culture

Small Languages and the Limits of Preservation

Of the roughly seven thousand languages currently spoken, half will likely fall silent within the century. The mechanisms are well understood…