For students of the American Civil War, it’s hard to imagine a better classroom this summer than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two sterling exhibitions there, one entirely devoted to photography, the other chiefly to painting, illumine the years from the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, So

A new exhibit provides a glimpse into the celebration of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages

Just weeks before Pope Francis, in his inaugural homily, explicitly urged listeners to protect the environment, two art exhibitions opened in New York City, both of which explore the environmental theme through extraordinary renderings of birds. Surely Pope Francis, whose namesake is the patron sain

You’ve probably noticed that in many paintings of the Adoration of the Magi, the youngest of the three kings is a black man. You may know that this convention began in the last quarter of the 15th century, and also that “Balthazar,” as he came to be named, represented Africa, while

"Crucifixion,” a wall-sized oil painting created by Renato Guttuso (1911-87), one of Italy’s finest modern painters, is widely recognized as a 20th-century masterpiece today. But a year after the painting was unveiled in Rome in 1941, during World War II, it sparked controversy. Gut

Delighting in the revelations of “Inventing Abstraction,” now at MOMA