DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.

the Ca’ d’Oro is not composed like a typical, or normative, Venetian palace.

Tradition is a modern idea.

But above all, the best thing is to draw men and women from the nude and thus fix in the memory by constant exercise the muscles of the...

Some Good Things that Happened to Cities after the Middle Ages There’s a substantial cadre of urbanists who think of themselves as...

one of the qualities that make Old Master drawings both beautiful and interesting is their pentimenti

The word “academic,” with respect to the arts, has a variety of meanings and connotations today, few of them positive. Academic art is...

A Postscript to “Can Machines Create?” The ancients knew that imagination depends on memory. That’s why Mnemosyne was the mother of the...

on creativity and intelligence, artificial and otherwise

On 9 April we held the virtual symposium After Raphael with historians and artists discussing Raphael's impact on the academic tradition...

I thought to myself, and then said to him, it would be fun to think of the right painting subject for that frame.

What more can be said or done about the classical orders? Maybe still something...

Much of the great art of the past was made in worse times.

The culture of classical humanism provides the firmest foundation for rebuilding a liberal architecture.

I used to think that beauty and truth were what artists largely dealt with, I now can imagine how goodness is more than what each of us does

PAINTING An architect today can decide to become a classicist, and rather quickly become competent at it. But an artist who wants to be a...

What is “Classical?” If you don’t define yourself, others will do it for you. For a while I gave up the word “classicist” for “humanist,”...

Tintoretto in Venice According to his seventeenth-century biographer Carlo Ridolfi, Jacopo (Robusti) Tintoretto was “il più arrischiato...

My first experience of Rome and Italy shaped my understanding of what it means to be “classical.” Actually, if I hadn’t studied in Rome...

Welcome to my rebuilt website (still with some rebuilding to do). In this blog section I'll be re-posting some short essays previously...