Exploring the cryptic techniques of the Italian master — Leonardo da Vinci painted Saint John the Baptist in about 1516. The figure appears to materialise — perhaps miraculously, certainly enigmatically — from a deep-black background. The effect is achieved through a technique that Leonardo pioneered: the deliberate softening of lines and contours so that the figure seems to blend…

A View of Naples through a Window — Storytelling in art comes in different forms. Some paintings lay out a profusion of narrative signs for you to read as if decoding a puzzle. Other artworks present their story in less prescriptive ways — offering an open invitation for the audience to supply their own imaginative reading. What I…

The debate over who invented abstraction, from Kandinsky to Af Klint — For decades, it was thought that the first artist to take the momentous step of painting entirely abstract art was Wassily Kandinsky in 1911. What the historians didn’t consider was that there was someone else entirely removed from mainstream artistic circles at the time who had beaten Kandinsky to it…

The meaning behind the Dutch masterpiece — There exist only 36 paintings known to be by the hand of Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. Thanks to their scarcity, his works are considered to be some of the most expensive objects in art. Not least this painting, titled The Concert, which has a value today estimated to be in…

Women painters who broke barriers — There are countless female artists throughout history who have had significant roles in shaping the world of art. Yet their valuable contributions have historically been undervalued. Factors such as social expectations, traditional gender roles and poor access to education and training academies, prevented women from receiving the same patronage and…

How letting go can fuel your artistic creativity — One way you can think about creativity is that it’s not about what you make, but what you choose to get rid of that matters. For writers, it’s the words, sentences and paragraphs that might be clogging up the flow of a larger piece that sometimes ought to be trimmed…

Robert & Sonia Delaunay’s vibrant vision of modern Life — The Eiffel Tower was unveiled in Paris as the focal point of the World’s Fair of 1889. It was the tallest manmade structure the world had ever…

Alternative realities and symbolism through paintings — Artists have long been fascinated by mirrors. In art, the reflection in a mirror becomes a portal into an “anti-world” — a more truthful version of our own. Hence, the symbolic use of mirrors in art has often been to expand the limits of the subject matter, to reveal something…

Intimate depictions, romantic connotations —