Opera is often considered a high-brow event that only the elite and die-hard fans can understand. However, Philip Glass (b. 1937) stands as a revolutionary figure in the world of opera. Some called him a visionary, others regarded him as the enfant terrible. Glass forged an alternative path in the world of opera through a potent combination of minimalist techniques, collaborations with sought-after names and visionaries, and a commitment to accessibility. We will glance at the history of opera before Philip Glass and discover some of his operas that changed the face of the genre forever.

A Brief History of Opera Before Philip Glass

The history of opera stretches back about 400 years and has taken many meanderings. Opera’s journey began in Italy in the Renaissance and has continued to blossom and grow. The earliest operas feature myths, gods, monsters, and heroes, harking back to an idealized idea of what ancient Greek dramas may have sounded like. Greek and Roman mythology played a large part in these stories.

Renaissance (ca. 1450 to 1650)

Dafne, Jacopo Peri, 1597

The first recorded work that is considered a true opera is Jacopo Peri’s 1597 composition Dafne. Claudio Monteverdi is regarded as the first true genius of opera in the Western world. His opera, Orfeo, tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and was performed in front of an exclusive audience at the Duke of Mantua’s court. However, it was not a sung opera yet. It was delivered in a style known as recitar cantando, or recitative (“speech in song”).

Baroque (ca. 1650 to 1700)

Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt) HWV 17, G.F. Handel, 1724

Opera took Europe by storm, and everyone wanted a piece of the action. It became an expensive affair filled with florid arias and ornate set designs with moving parts. Grandeur and noble simplicity became the catchphrases. Dances, choruses, and a more natural and fluid combination of words skyrocketed opera into the mainstream.

Castrati, male singers who were castrated before puberty to preserve their soprano voices, became the superstars of the day. They had a man’s power and control while displaying a woman’s soprano range. Today, countertenors have taken their place.

Classical Era (ca. 1700 to 1820)

Le Nozze die Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) Opera, W.A. Mozart, 1791

With the Enlightenment sweeping across Europe, gods and monsters took a back seat and opera became more realistic, focusing on people. The music became more streamlined and less ornate. A prime example is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). The opera is based on Beaumarchais’s work on Figaro — a comedic opera with a serious heart: Figaro tries to gain the upper hand over his master and points out inequalities in France. It is said that the play promoted revolutionary ideas that helped to lead towards the French Revolution.

Romantic Era (ca. 1820 to 1900)

Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Richard Wagner, 19th century

Despite the name, the Romantic Era was not about romance… It was about emotions and the pre-Romantic period, Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) sought to be “tumultuous and [filled with] intense emotions, a refusal to conform to societal norms, and a need to transgress” (Silva, 2022). The ideals of the Sturm and Drang period, especially in Germany, flowed across Europe. Artists across all genres sought to expand their world and give a voice to their feelings. Composers, like Ludwig van Beethoven, broke away from the rigid forms laid down by their predecessors and forged a new path in music.

In Germany, Richard Wagner singlehandedly changed the course of opera. Unfortunately, he was also appropriated by the Nazi Party for their nefarious reasons. He introduced new directions in harmony and expanded the use of the orchestra to convey a range of feelings, and leitmotifs to symbolize people, ideas, and places. The whole opera is based on Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art.” His epic opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, WWV 86, spans four operas and is loosely based on characters from Norse mythology and the Nibelungenlied.

Composers like Puccini and Verdi emphasized emotion and lived experience in their works, like La Bohéme, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot (Puccini), and La Traviata and Rigoletto (by Verdi).

20th Century and Beyond (ca. 1900 Until Today)

Opera has come a long way from its roots in classical Greek dramas having become all-encompassing and grand. The 20th century became loaded with politics and these two soon clashed. The Nazis appropriated Viking legends for their propaganda machine and Hitler adored the works of Wagner.

Joseph Stalin’s communist policies (known as Socialist Realism) included prescribing what all artists could and could not produce. A prime example is Dmitry Shostakovich’s 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which landed him on Stalin’s denounced artists list and in an article in Pravda newspaper. Luckily, Shostakovich survived the attack, and his Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 was offered as an apology.

Germany, under the Nazis, also placed restrictions on all forms of art, music, and film — music had to be tonal and free from jazz influences. All forms of art had to exalt the German Motherland and portray racial purity, and obedience. Anything else was considered “degenerate art.”

Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, turns the eye and ear toward the consequences of mob mentality and small-town life. Opera and politics would also turn their attention to momentous events of the 20th century in John Adam’s 1987 opera Nixon in China. As the title suggests, it refers to Nixon’s historic visit to Chairman Mao in China in 1972. Contemporary issues are also highlighted in opera, for example, the American Opera Project and the NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Stonewall Operas which were commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The riots sparked the LQBTQ+ rights movement and ignited the Pride movement.

If there is a story to be told, opera makes sure that audiences can enjoy a multisensory experience. The operas of Philip Glass are no different, but he also forged a new path in the opera world.

How Did Philip Glass Revolutionize Opera?

Philip Glass is one of the most influential musicians and composers of the 21st century. He is best known for his minimalist compositions, but his operas are epic masterpieces worthy of any music lover’s attention.

Let us discover how Philip Glass revolutionized opera through his unique minimalist approach and lens.

Einstein on the Beach

Knee Play 1 from Einstein on the Beach, Philip Glass, 1976

Glass composed his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, in 1976. While Glass composed the music, he collaborated with artist Robert Wilson on the libretto. Wilson handled the stage design and directed the production. Instead of following established conventions of plot or narrative arc, Glass’s opera is non-narrative and uses a formalist format.

He threw all the established rules out of the window. Instead of the traditional orchestra, the work is composed for synthesizers, woodwinds, and voices. Audience performances last over five hours without the traditional intermissions — audience members are welcome (and encouraged) to wander in and out of the performance at will.

Further, a series of recurring images are used in juxtaposition to abstract dances to tell the story. Knee Plays, or brief interludes, connect each of the four “scenes.” The fragmented nature of the opera is used to portray the complexities of Einstein’s theories of space and time.

The opera is a culmination of Glass’s minimalist techniques. Repeating musical figures that subtly change as they unfold during a scene creates a hypnotic and meditative atmosphere. Glass uses music to draw the audience into the emotional world of the characters. Combining the aforementioned with rhythm can create a sense of calm or urgency, depending on its use.

Einstein is part art installation, part modern dance, part opera, and a whole avant-garde masterpiece that changed opera and set a new standard for operas in America and the world.

Satyagraha

This 1979 opera and libretto is loosely based on an ancient Sanskrit text taken from the Bhagavad Gita. This was his first traditional opera, using an orchestral lineup with a cast of soloists. It is through-composed, meaning the music avoids repetition, but constantly introduces new melodies, rhythms, and harmonies. It also emphasizes the development of new musical ideas to adapt to the story. Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Richard Strauss’ Salome are examples of this from the early 19th. But that is where the Western tradition ends.

The Kuru Fields of Justice from Stayagrah, by Philip Glass, 1979

Scholars have dubbed the opera a “para-opera” because it opposes the musical and dramatic ideas found in Western music. Rhythms are used to underscore the dramatic events unfolding in the opera. In Glass’s typical minimalist style, short, repeated phrases and rhythms expand and contract — the additive and subtractive processes he learned from Ravi Shankar while transcribing Indian music in Paris during the 1960s. This technique creates the idea of a moment suspended in time.

The imagery used in the opera also adds another layer to this multi-sensory experience. This technique is well-suited to the anachronistic plot which weaves into and out of Mahatma Gandhi’s present life and his past in South Africa, where he stood up against the social injustices of the British.

Akhnaten

While the premise of minimalism is to strip down art to its most basic form, Glass’s approach is anything but emotionally void. The titular role in Akhnaten (1983) is written for a countertenor — something that is almost unheard of in operatic circles.

Today, there are some contemporary works for countertenors, including “Boy” in George Benjamin’s Written on Skin (2012), Trinculo in Thomas Adès The Tempest (2004), and the Refugee in Jonathan’ Dove’s Flight, (1998) to highlight a few. Nowadays, countertenors (or women) are used in period productions instead of castrati.

In Akhnaten the text is derived from ancient writings in Akkadian, Egyptian, and Hebrew. However, instead of a traditional narrative arc, the story is told through a series of tableaux. It is the visual impact that elevates the opera to a multi-sensory experience. Furthermore, the Pharaoh’s Hymn to the Sun is an emotional and moving experience.

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Philip Glass, 1987

“Poe’s famous horror story has fascinated poets, dramatists and composers for over a century. Poe hints at much, but states hardly anything at all. Is the story real, or is it a hallucination? What are [sic] the relationship between the narrator (William), his friend Roderick Usher, and Roderick’s dying sister, Madeline? Has she been buried alive, or is it a demon from hell who takes such a spectacular revenge at the end? And is the vast house in which they live a living malignant entity? Incest, homosexuality, murder, and the supernatural hang in the air, but then again, such things may exist only in the imagination of the audience” (Philip Glass, 2019).

The opera, composed in 1987, is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic masterpiece and short story, The Fall of the House of Usher, published in 1839. Although the opera is based on Poe’s story, Glass regards it as a “score of eighty-five minutes of musical atmosphere with a simple tale at the bottom of it” and the main aim was not to relay a story but to provide a “scope for an emotional examination of Poe’s world.”

Like Einstein, this opera also uses a fragmentary narrative to drive the storyline forward, but it also gives us a glimpse into the psychological world of Roderick Usher. Again, minimalism features strongly in the opera with gradual harmonic and rhythmic shifts. Other times the slow shifts are replaced by quickly changing time signatures combined with the same harmonies in succession.

Another standout feature is Madeline’s near-constant wordless vocalese on the stage — instead of the traditional aria(s) she is ever present on and off the stage. This helps to heighten the psychological underpinnings of the opera.

Final Thoughts

Glass’s unique approach to adapting texts and tales in his storytelling and music inspired new generations of composers to explore the boundaries of opera and open it to a wider audience. His collaborations with legendary names such as Robert Wilson and others throughout his career have driven his operas forward.

Glass specifically writes his operas in a way that allows for clear text declamation, making the words accessible to the audience. The combination of minimalism and a focus on textual clarity continues to push the boundaries of opera. While the music might be minimalist, it gives the visual impact a solid foundation to build upon and express a wide range of emotions.

Although the trilogy of biographical operas (Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten) are epic, long-form works, they still embrace Glass’s minimalist ethos of focusing on rhythm and harmony to drive the storyline forward. The Fall of the House of Usher is one of his shorter works that allows audiences to experience opera without sitting through a lengthy production. His shorter operas make opera accessible to a wider audience and Glass helped to shape the future of the ever-evolving world of opera.

Select Bibliography and Further Reading

Author Events. (2019, July 1). Philip Glass | Words Without Music [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRFqJSCgLk

Bryan, J. H. (2024). German town; Degenerate Art exhibit in Munich. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000681 Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Library of Congress.

Giannini, F., & Baratta, I. (2017, July 19). Entartete Kunst: The Nazi exhibition condemning degenerate art. Finestre sull’Arte. https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/works-and-artists/entartete-kunst-the-nazi-exhibition-condemning-degenerate-art

Glass, P. (2015). Music without words: A memoir. Faber & Faber.

Page, T. (1989). Philip Glass (1989). In Writings on Glass: Essays, interviews, criticism (pp. 3–11). University of California Press.

As an artistic genre, animal painting was never considered to be particularly high and revered, but it was almost universally admired. Yet, one female artist named Rosa Bonheur managed to make a groundbreaking career, becoming the wealthiest artist of her era. Her paintings of cows, horses, rabbits, and lions were filled with tender feelings and confident professionalism. Read on to become familiarized with five important works by Rosa Bonheur.

1. Rosa Bonheur’s Lesser Known Bronzes: A Sheep Resting

Rosa Bonheur was the most famous painter of her time, and perhaps the most successful painter of animals of all time. Her father was an artist too, who encouraged equal and mixed-gender education for all people regardless of their class and age. For that reason, he eagerly trained his four children and arranged opportunities for practice and study.

Rosa Bonheur showed an early inclination towards painting animals. Even in her pre-school years, she learned letters by drawing small images of animals next to the letters that their names corresponded to. Over the years, she developed her passion into a successful career. In her later years, she even arranged for a menagerie of lions and gazelles to be placed in her chateau for her to care for, study, and paint.

Despite being famous for painting, Rosa Bonheur enjoyed working with animal sculpture as well, although he initially resorted to it out of necessity. As a young artist in training, she attended farms and slaughterhouses, studying the anatomy, bones, and muscles of dead animals. Not content enough with the amount of knowledge she received, Bonheur decided to try her hand at dissecting animals. This was a popular practice among not only medical students but also artists of the time, with some even attending human dissections in anatomical theaters. Still, Rosa Bonheur never felt comfortable enough with blood and blades. Seeking an alternative, she resorted to sculpture as a way to study the three-dimensional movement of animals, their body parts, and their range of motion without having to dissect bodies.

2. The Most Famous Work of Rosa Bonheur: The Horse Fair, 1852-55

The Horse Fair was and remains the signature work of Rosa Bonheur, and the one that brought her almost instant fame and recognition. Ambitious about her subject, she approached several patrons, offering them the finished work in exchange for funding, but none of them were ready to put significant funds into a large-scale project of a horse market. While working on the painting, Bonheur attended the market regularly, disguised as a man to avoid unwanted attention. Her finished work was a two-hundred-inch-long scene of emotional intensity and strong character, expressed by both men and horses. Bonheur compared The Horse Fair to the famous Parthenon Frieze, the Ancient Greek relief of equestrian warriors, that is now on display in the British Museum, to the great disdain of the Greek side.

The painting became an immediate sensation. Queen Victoria herself requested a private viewing of it during the artist’s visit to England. Commissions flooded the artist, soon making her the most famous and wealthiest painter of her time—not just the most famous woman painter. Soon, she painted four smaller replicas and several watercolor copies of the work at the request of her clients.

Bonheur’s younger brother, also an artist, made a bronze relief based on the painting to be placed on Bonheur’s monument. Unfortunately, it was destroyed during World War II. All four of the Bonheur siblings became painters and sculptors, focusing primarily on animals. Some regard this as the influence of their father, a painter and educator, and others as an example of the hereditary genius—the genetically predisposed talent.

Bonheur’s success brought her not only a string of commissions and a large circle of patrons, but social obligations as well. Visitors filled her studio, and invitations to social occasions and exhibitions became overwhelming. Apart from growing connections and securing a steady income, Bonheur also became preoccupied with the new form of responsibility. The public was favorable but demanding, eagerly waiting for new paintings, new shows, and new achievements. In order to maintain her creativity in a healthy and productive way, the artist decided to act. In the late 1850s, Bonheur retired from social life and settled in a newly purchased chateau in Fontainebleau. She still painted on commission but maintained most communication through her agent, London art dealer Ernest Gambart.

Despite being born and living in France, Bonheur’s work received much more critical acclaim in Great Britain, sometimes attracting bitter criticism from the French. She was not too eager to accept belated praise, however. On several instances, after the officials offered her money for the previously rejected commissions, she refused, preferring to find another customer. For that reason, The Horse Fair, initially underestimated by the French authorities, ended up at the Metropolitan Museum rather than a Parisian institution.

3. The Gender-Based Criticism of the Artist’s Time: Weaning the Calves, 1879

Many art critics noticed the supposed masculinity of Rosa Bonheur’s work. In the nineteenth century, women artists were believed to possess specific qualities and inherent aesthetic perceptions that made their works immediately distinguishable from those of their male colleagues. Bonheur’s work, however, had no such distinction, with the bold stroke of brush, strong understanding of composition, and theoretical basis. And still, Bonheur’s paintings of animals often mix deep psychologism with tenderness and gentle admiration, like in her images of calves.

The notorious art critic John Ruskin has seen Bonheur’s work but remained staunchly convinced that no woman could paint. Ruskin had a personal animosity towards French art in any shape or form and insisted that France did not have a distinctive painting tradition at all, unlike Britain. For his nationalistic commentary, he was mocked by artists of both countries, but nonetheless, Ruskin remained influential for decades, partially due to his endorsement of the Pre-Raphaelites. Still, Rosa Bonheur was not too charmed by him, stating Ruskin had the eye of a bird for art—and not in the sense of its sharpness, but as if seeing it through a tiny pin-sized hole.

4. Rosa Bonheur’s Favorite Animals: Two Horses, 1889

Horses were perhaps the favorite animals, frequently painted by Bonheur. She was a skilled horserider, and always rode astride rather than side saddle, in a manner that was considered exclusively male and indecent for women. While working on The Horse Fair, Bonheur studied the behaviors and characters of horses well enough to develop a deep connection to them. In her diary, she left a note: “The horse is, like man, the most beautiful and most miserable of creatures, only, in the case of man, it is vice or property that makes him ugly. He is responsible for his own decadence, while the horse is only a slave.”

Perhaps, our present-day dismissal of Rosa Bonheur’s art rests on the fact that her works were rather conservative and conventional, representing a commonly shared good taste. Their great quality is diminished by the lack of a hint of a scandal, provocation, or challenge. She was not interested in defying artistic conventions, instead choosing to celebrate nature in its beauty with great attention to the tiniest of details. She was a Realist painter, but not the Courbet-type provocative Realist with raw imagery. Her realism is soft and pleasant, evoking tenderness and childhood memories.

Even her unconventional lifestyle was never performative. She was known to prefer men’s attire to dresses and even received a special municipal permit for cross-dressing, which was then illegal in Paris. Still, she highlighted that it was a choice of convenience rather than a political statement since working in slaughterhouses and stables in dresses was rather uncomfortable. Even her personal life, although raising rumors, was quiet and closed off from the rest of the world. Bonheur spent almost half a century living with a fellow painter Nathalie Micas, stating that they would gladly marry and raise children if one of them was a man.

5. Finishing Other Artist’s Work: Rosa Bonheur With a Bull

Although there are no known self-portraits painted by Bonheur, she was depicted by other artists. Most of her portraits were painted by her partner and biographer, Anna Klumpke. Klumpke spent four years with Bonheur after the death of the artist’s previous partner, Nathalie Micas. After Bonheur passed away, Klumpke was announced as the sole benefactor in the painter’s will, with all archives, paintings, and property passing to her. Klumpke made sure to protect Bonheur’s heritage and even published a memoir on their life together.

One particular portrait, however, stands out from the collection of Bonheur’s faces. Painted in 1857 by the French society painter Edouard Dubufe, the artist was shown with her arm gently placed on the neck of a bull and a paintbrush in her hand. The bull’s gentle ears and textured nose seem almost intruding in the rest of the picture as if it was never intended to be there. Well, it was, but the feeling that something is off can be easily explained. Dubufe, who specialized in official and pompous portraits of his commissioners in lavish dresses and expensive jewelry, painted only Bonheur’s figure. The bull was a later addition made by Rosa Bonheur herself, as a marker of her own love for animals and artistic specialization.

Every year, sites like the Colosseum, Pompeii, the pyramids of Giza, or Machu Picchu receive millions of visitors, intrigued by the aura of mystery and past glory surrounding ancient ruins. Indeed, the monuments and artifacts left behind by ancient civilizations not only allow scholars to study the past, but also offer us a glimpse into the people who created and used them. Unfortunately, only a small number of physical remnants of the ancient past have survived. Here are ten ancient cultural and architectural landmarks that we have lost forever.

1. Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

• Date lost: c. 260s AD
• Overview: A grand temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis, a wonder of the ancient world.

In one of his poems, where he compiled one of the earliest known lists of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Greek poet Antipater of Sidon commented: “when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, ‘Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand.’” Greek geographer Pausanias was equally impressed by the place of worship, describing it as “surpassing all buildings among men.”

One of the largest ancient Greek temples, over 350 by 180 feet (about 110 by 55 meters), the temple of Artemis (Roman Diana), the goddess of hunting, was built at Ephesus (in present-day Turkey) by Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia in about 550 BC. Ephesus, one of the most influential cities in Ionian Asia Minor, was said to have been founded by an Amazonian queen and had long been associated with religious worship.

In 356, the temple of Artemis was burned by Herostatus, a man who hoped his arson would secure his fame. According to Plutarch, on the night of the fire, the goddess was absent from the temple as she was assisting in the birth of Alexander the Great. Once rebuilt, the temple soon became a wonder of the ancient world.

However, in the 260s AD, the temple of Artemis was ravaged by the Goths and later destroyed with the spread of Christianity. Today, a single column and the foundations are all that remain of the wondrous building.

2. House of Wisdom

• Date lost: 1258 AD
• Overview: A royal library built in Baghdad by the Abbasids during the Islamic Golden Age.

The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah) was a royal library and cultural center founded by the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. After overthrowing the Umayyad dynasty in 750 AD, al-Mansur transferred the capital of the Islamic world from Damascus to Baghdad, a location closer to his Persian support base.

Built at the crossroads of the Silk Road, the trading route connecting Europe to China, the new capital, distinctive for its circular form, soon became a leading center not only for trade, but also for science and culture. Indeed, the Abbasid caliphs’ extensive patronage of the arts and sciences laid the groundwork for the development of the Islamic Golden Age.

In this intellectually stimulating period, the House of Wisdom became a leading center of scholarship, where copyists, bookbinders, and librarians amassed an eclectic collection on a wide variety of topics, such as Zoroastrian religion, alchemy, astronomy, medicine, geography, and chemistry. Among those working at the House of Wisdom was mathematician and astronomer Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, usually credited as the “father of algebra.”

Scholars affiliated with the House of Wisdom also translated major works of Persian and Greek literature into Arabic, thus preserving knowledge that would have been otherwise lost. In the 14th century, these translations would play a key role in the “rediscovery” of antiquity that stood at the heart of the European Renaissance.

Unfortunately, the priceless collection held at the House of Wisdom was destroyed in 1258, when the Mongol forces sacked Baghdad.

3. Hanging Gardens of Babylon

• Date lost: 1st century AD
• Overview: Terraced gardens allegedly built by Nebuchadnezzar II; one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

According to legend, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built by King Nebuchadnezzar II as a gift for his wife Amtis of Media, who missed the green landscapes of her homeland. Besides their impressive size, the self-watering system of irrigation also impressed ancient visitors, prompting them to include the lush terraces in the list of the wonders of the world.

In ancient Mesopotamia, extensive gardens were seen as symbols of the empire’s power, impressing visitors with their exotic vegetation flourishing thanks to advanced irrigation systems. The image of a garden as a serene and enclosed place, separated from the world, has long fascinated humankind and is closely associated with the concept of paradise. The link is emphasized by the most widely accepted etymology of the word “paradise,” traced back to the Old Iranian term pairi-daeza, meaning “walled enclosure.”

According to Strabo, the gardens were “vaulted terraces, raised one above another, and resting upon cube-shaped pillars. These are hollow and filled with earth to allow trees of the largest size to be planted.” The lush vegetation was watered through a series of engines pumping water from the nearby Euphrates River.

As no certain archaeological traces of the Hanging Gardens have been found, scholars disagree on what they may have looked like, with some even doubting if they ever existed. According to some theories, the Gardens were created on the rooftops of the royal palace in Babylon. Others believe they were built within the palace’s walls.

More recently, Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has suggested the Hanging Gardens were actually built by King Sennacherib at Nineveh, a city the Assyrians, who conquered Babylon in the 7th century, called the New Babylon. Regardless of their location, the gardens are now lost forever, destroyed by an earthquake in the 1st century AD.

4. Lighthouse of Alexandria

• Date lost: c. 14th century AD
• Overview: A 350-feet-tall lighthouse on Pharos Island near Alexandria; one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The Lighthouse (or Pharos) of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, was built by Sostratus of Cnidus. The construction process began during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter and ended in about 280 BC, when his son, Ptolemy II, sat on the throne.

Erected on the island of Pharos in the harbor of Alexandria in Egypt, the impressive construction—it is said the lighthouse was more than 350 feet/110 meters high—aided ships navigating near the coastline, guiding and warning them of hazards. The tower was likely built in three stages and toppled with a statue, possibly of Alexander the Great or Ptolemy I.

The lighthouse was still active in the 12th century. By the 14th century, however, it had already been destroyed.

5. Great Library of Alexandria

• Date lost: disputed
• Overview: A royal library and leading center of scholarship built by the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandria.

Like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Great Library of Alexandria was also a leading ancient cultural center, the most famous of Classical antiquity.

The construction of the library began in about 295 BC, when Ptolemy I Soter tasked Demetrius of Phaleron, an Athenian member of Aristotle’s Peripatetic school, with overseeing the ambitious project. In the following years, the library amassed an impressive collection of books and manuscripts, and, with the nearby Museum, it became an illustrious center of research and literary and scientific scholarship.

To this day, the events that led to the Library of Alexandria’s destruction remain a matter of debate. According to Plutarch, the library was destroyed in 48 BC, when Julius Caesar set fire to the Ptolemaic fleet during the civil war between Cleopatra and his brother. “Many places were set on fire, with the result that the docks and the storehouses of grain among other buildings were burned, and also the library, whose volumes, it is said, were of the greatest number and excellence,” commented Plutarch.

According to some scholars, the Serapeum, a branch of the library located in the temple of Serapis, survived the fire. It likely remained active until 391 AD, when the bishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, demolished it following Theodosius’ decree banning pagan worship.

6. Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

• Date lost: 15th century AD
• Overview: A grand tomb built for King Mausolus of Caria and his wife, Artemis; one of the Wonders of the Ancient World.

The tomb of Mausolus, king of Caria, was built in Halicarnassus, the main city of the kingdom and the birthplace of Herodotus (the “Father of History”) between about 353 and 351 BC. Upon inheriting the throne after his father died in 377 BC, Mausolus launched a project of urban aggrandizement as part of his efforts to expand Halicarnassus’ influence in the Mediterranean.

After his death, his wife (and sister) Artemisia II, a powerful leader in her own right, tasked the leading Greek architects and artists with the construction of a monumental tomb to perpetuate Mausolus’ legacy, a project likely initiated by Mausolus himself. Architects Satyros and Pythius of Priene designed the tomb, while sculptors Leochares, Bryaxis, Scopas, and Timotheus created reliefs to adorn the massive structure’s sides.

Artemisia died shortly after the beginning of the Mausoleum’s construction, but her successors completed the work. The final result was a colossal tomb that became one of the wonders of the ancient world. According to Pliny the Elder, it was surrounded by 36 columns and surmounted by a marble chariot pulled by four horses.

The tomb stood on a hill overlooking Halicarnassus until the 15th century, when a series of earthquakes destroyed it. Today, countless stately tombs around the world, known as mausoleums from the Mausoleum in Halicarnassus, testify to the monument’s legacy and influence.

7. Colossus of Rhodes

• Date lost: toppled in 255/56 BC; destroyed in 654 AD
• Overview: A massive statue of the sun god Helius; one the the Wonders of the Ancient World.

Toward the end of the 3rd century BC, all those entering the harbor of Rhodes, the major city of the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, would have hardly missed the colossus statue of the sun god Helius, erected beside Mandrákion harbor in 282 BC.

Created by Chares of Lindos, the statue, known as the Colossus of Rhodes, was said to have taken 12 years to build. Made of bronze and reinforced with iron, the Colossus commemorated the end of Demetrius Poliorcetes’ siege of the city. Launched during the political instability of the Hellenistic world after the death of Alexander the Great, the siege aimed to persuade the Rhodians to withdraw their support for Ptolemy, the ruler of Egypt.

After the unsuccessful siege, the Rhodians used the equipment abandoned by Demetrius’ forces to erect a monument commemorating their resistance. The result was a colossal statue, 105 feet (32 meters) high, that became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Impressed by the Colossus’ size and splendor, Roman Emperor Nero built an enormous statue of himself next to the artificial lake at the center of his domus aurea (Golden House) in Rome.

The Colossus of Rhodes welcomed ships entering the city’s harbor until about 255/256 BC, when an earthquake toppled it. The fallen statue remained lying in the spot where it fell for about 900 years. “Even as it lies, it excites our wonder and admiration,” commented Pliny the Elder in his The Natural History. Then, in 654 AD, the Arab forces raiding Rhodes melted it down and sold the bronze for scraps.

8. Ancient Ruins of Palmyra

• Date lost: 2015
• Overview: An archaeological site in Syria included in the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1980.

Built on an oasis located halfway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates River, the ancient city of Palmyra (south-central Syria) rose to prominence in the 3rd century BC, when it became one of the main trading routes connecting the Roman world with the East.

Originally known as Tadmur, Tadmor, or Tudmun, the city was renamed Palmyra, meaning “city of palm trees,” by the Romans in the 1st century BC. While under Roman control, Palmyra remained a prosperous city, and, in about 129, Hadrian made it a civitas libera (free city). It was later exempted from paying taxes to the Roman Empire by Caracalla.

In the 3rd century, Zenobia, the second wife of the governor of Syria, Septimius Odaenathus (probably assassinated on her order), became queen of Palmyra, launching a successful campaign against the Romans in Anatolia. In 273, however, Emperor Aurelian, who regained control of Anatolia the year before, raided Palmyra. In 643, the city was then conquered by the Muslim general Khalid ibn al-Walid.

In 1980, the ruins of ancient Palmyra became a UNESCO World Heritage site, with thousands of visitors admiring the ancient remains every year. In May 2012, however, when ISIS took control of Palmyra during the Syrian civil war, its forces destroyed several of the site’s monuments, including the Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph, built by Septimius Severus, and the Temple of Baal Shamin.

9. Statue of Zeus at Olympia

• Date lost: 5th century AD
• Overview: A colossal statue of Zeus created by Phidias for the temple of Zeus at Olympia; one of the Wonders of the Ancient World.

Another wonder of the ancient world, the statue of Zeus at Olympia was created by the Greek sculptor Phidias, the artist who also sculpted the statue of Athena in the Parthenon at Athens.

Made of gold and ivory, the statue, located inside the temple of Zeus at Olympia, depicted Zeus, the ruler of the Greek gods, sitting on a throne made of cedarwood and adorned with precious stones, gold, ivory, and ebony. In his outstretched right hand, the colossal statue (almost 4o feet/12 meters high) held a statue of Nike, the goddess of victory. In his left hand, Zeus had a scepter.

Said to have captured the divine nature of Zeus, the statue likely survived the destruction of the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Probably moved to Constantinople, it was destroyed in a fire that ravaged the city in the 5th century.

While the statue of Zeus is now lost forever, reconstructions based on ancient Greek and Roman coins and paintings give us an idea of what it may have looked like to ancient visitors passing through Olympia.

10. Menorah From the Second Temple

• Date lost: after 71 AD
• Overview: A golden multibranched candelabra located in the Jewish temple of Jerusalem; looted by the Romans in 70 AD.

One of the bas-reliefs carved into the Arch of Titus on the via Sacra shows a seven-branched candelabra carried on litters: the menorah. The religious object was part of the spoils of war paraded through Rome during Titus’ triumph following the 70 AD sack of Jerusalem.

Until the outbreak of the First Jewish-Roman War, sparked by the sack of the Second Temple (built by Herod the Great) and the execution of thousands of Jews, the menorah was displayed inside the temple in Jerusalem. First mentioned in the book of Exodus, the design of the multibranched candelabra had been revealed to Moses directly by God on Mount Sinai.

When the Jews rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem, after finally returning from their exile in Babylon, they also forged a golden menorah and placed it inside the building. In 169 BC, however, it was taken by King Antiochus IV Epiphanes when he sacked the temple. When Judas Maccabee successfully defended his country from the Syrian kingdom’s invasion, he commissioned the creation of a new menorah, the one seized by the Roman forces in 70 AD.

After it arrived in Rome the following year, the menorah seemingly disappeared, never to be seen again. Flavius Josephus reported that most of the treasures looted by Titus were later placed inside the Temple of Peace by Emperor Vespasian. However, whether the menorah was also brought there remains unclear. Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea later wrote that the treasures were returned to Jerusalem after the sacks of Rome in 410 and 455. However, he did not explicitly mention the menorah.

Its disappearance has led to the spread of numerous legends about the menorah’s fate. One urban myth even claims that it was hidden inside the Vatican. In 2012, a scan using UV-VIS Absorption Spectrometry made by a team of scholars associated with the Arch of Titus Project revealed the menorah on the bas-relief was once painted with a yellow ochre pigment, suggesting it was indeed the golden menorah from the Second Temple.

Music that you can dance to, cry to, smile to, and even philosophize to: over the centuries, composers have plumbed the depths of music’s emotional range and place in our lives. There’s no denying that this history is dominated by big names like Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, key figures in what we call the Western canon. But, although the image of the isolated genius in a garret channeling divine inspiration is potent, no composer truly works alone. Music history is the story of many contributors, some more visible than others.

1. The Father of Opera: Jean-Baptiste Lully

There are a couple of misconceptions behind the mythological image of the godlike genius composer, embodied in Beethoven in particular. One: the composer stands apart from state affairs and ploughs his own furrow, driven by an uncompromising notion of art. Two: the composer, through his refusal to compromise, finds it difficult to make a living.

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s career contradicts both ideas. Something of a rags-to-riches figure, Lully rose up in the ranks of Louis XIV’s court, in the mid-17th century, to become the court’s foremost composer, employed to write incidental music for the king’s entertainments. As such, he was closely involved with politics (though he frequently sailed close to the wind, earning Louis’s disfavor with his sometimes tyrannical behavior and sexual misdemeanors) and ultimately quite rich.

Lully also impacted music history through his compositions. Despite his Italian birth, he is considered the father of French opera, transporting this originally Italian form of music theater to Louis’s court and making key alterations to appeal to French audiences. French opera, following Lully’s interventions, tended not to separate arias (self-contained pieces for solo voice) from recitativo (a kind of sung speech used to deliver much of the plot in operas).

He also introduced much more dance into opera, making it a more all-encompassing theatrical event. Lully was an accomplished dancer himself and innovated the genre of comédie-ballet. Many of these theatrical works were written in collaboration with the playwright Molière, an early instance of the fruitful possibilities in interactions between music and literature.

Lully is a crucial figure in music history for his changes to the relationship between vocal music and the orchestra, to the perception of ballet in music theater, and for showing, just about, that composers could get on well with rulers of state.

2. The Touring Pianist: Clara Schumann

No one embodies the developments in music across the course of the Romantic period, spanning the entire 19th century, better than Clara Schumann. A child prodigy like Mozart (benefiting, like him, from a devoted, if domineering, teacher who was also her father), she became in adulthood a consummate professional who could do it all, in keeping with new ideas about musicians and their abilities.

By the mid-19th century, audiences were flocking to hear performances by virtuosi, exceptionally talented musicians who would give dazzling displays of both their own works and works from the newly developing canon. Clara Schumann’s piano concerts were instrumental in establishing this core of composers, past and present, who were considered great. She regularly programmed music by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, and her husband Robert Schumann.

Clara Schumann is known to many as Robert’s wife, and her impact on music history is partly due to this partnership. As a prolific pianist and the daughter of Robert’s piano teacher, she influenced the style of his piano song cycles and served as his muse, with several pieces containing coded references only comprehensible to them (Robert was keen on musical cryptograms). Both Schumanns also supported Johannes Brahms early in his career, helping him on his way to becoming one of Europe’s heavyweight composers by the late 19th century.

Yet Clara changed music history on her own merits. After her husband died following a long battle with mental illness in 1854, Clara was left with eight children to support. She balanced this with a career as one of classical music’s first and foremost touring artists, at a time of vast expansion in the musical world. There was a market for chamber music concerts in cities across Europe, and Clara traveled far beyond her native Germany to Russia and to England, the latter 19 times.

She laid the groundwork for modern traditions in concert programming, blending revered canonical pieces with new, exciting works, performing everything from memory and respectfully honoring the composer’s intentions with greater accuracy than many virtuosi before her.

3. The Modernist: Arnold Schoenberg

There would most likely be no Arnold Schoenberg without Richard Wagner, the 19th-century titan whose experiments in chromaticism and the expansion of musical form changed composition forever. Although Wagner revered ancient Greek theater and aimed to revert to its principles, it was his sense of breaking free from classical limitations that made him so influential to successors as diverse as Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, and Claude Debussy.

Different again is Schoenberg, who took Wagner’s experiments in harmony one step further. Moving beyond the idea that a piece of music should find coherence in its harmonic underpinning—that is, being fixed in a key, on which all the piece’s chords are built—Schoenberg looked instead to patterns and motifs.

The twelve-tone method, also called serialism, is based on approaching all 12 notes in a chromatic scale equally. Composers using this method, such as Schoenberg and his pupils in what became known as the Second Viennese School, avoid repeating any note from the scale within a sequence (known as a ‘tone row’) and giving it greater importance than the others.

Underlying the principles of twelve-tone is a democratic perspective, which was echoed in Schoenberg’s life. His music was radically modernist, including alongside serialism a new technique called Sprechstimme or spoken singing, a delivery pitched between speech and music, on display in his song cycle Pierrot lunaire (1912).

When the Nazis came to power, they denounced the music of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School (as well as jazz) as degenerate and banned it. Refusing to be intimidated, Schoenberg emigrated to the US, where he wrote music that attacked tyrants and expressed compassion for their victims.

4. The Dissident? Dmitri Shostakovich

Like Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich proved that music can be so powerful that dictatorships see fit to restrict it. Like many artists in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich was forced to live in fear, watching out for the changing tide.

What does it mean to follow the party line as a composer? Music does not ‘say’ or ‘show’ things in the way a novel, a painting, or a work of theater can. In the case of Shostakovich’s early opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1936), it was condemned as a “muddle instead of music” after Joseph Stalin attended a performance and left before the end, disappointed with its “coarse, primitive and vulgar” sound.

According to the Soviet regime, composers ought to use a “popular musical language accessible to all.” It was about connecting with the people, not pursuing complex, formalist, avant-garde innovation. In this sense, the Soviet regime held the same mistrust towards Schoenberg and twelve-tone (and, for some time, jazz) as did the Nazi regime. Both saw atonality, arrhythmia, and dissonance as symptoms of societal decay that would have no place in their brave new worlds.

After Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and a close call with the law, Shostakovich composed music more calculated to appeal to Stalin and his associates, and rose through the ranks to receive the highest honors available in the Soviet Union—though he never felt truly secure in his position.

All this time, he wrote works “for the desk drawer” which were not performed until after Stalin’s death, including the satirical cantata Antiformalist Rayok. ‘Rayok’ is a Russian term for a comedic peep-show, and Shostakovich’s was a send-up of Soviet cultural dictates, even incorporating references to Stalin’s favorite Georgian folk song.

Shostakovich’s career is a testament to the perseverance and persistence of art. Had he been born in another time, another place, he might have done more, he felt. Yet he trod carefully, avoiding collusion but acting pragmatically to ensure he could continue writing (publicly and privately) the music that made him one of the best-loved composers of his generation.

5. The Genre-Hopper: George Gershwin

While regimes in Europe denounced jazz, often in explicitly racist terms by framing it as the music of a culture they deemed inferior, it had a different relationship to classical music in 20th-century America. Although by no means instantly embraced by white musicians and audiences, music historically made by African American composers and performers was more freely interpolated into and alongside classical forms and styles.

Many American composers in the early 20th century felt their work was hybrid by default. The European classical tradition was omnipresent. Many of America’s music teachers and publishers had come over from Europe, and its concert halls were modeled on European ones, its stages filled with European players. Yet American composers were conscious, in keeping with the trend for nationalist music sweeping Europe at the same time, that their music could express something distinctly American.

George Gershwin brought elements of jazz, ragtime, and blues into typically classical works such as concertos and operas. His sounds echo the bustling, diverse cityscape of his native New York. He was not the only composer seeking to expand the limits of classical composition in this period, but he was the most successful one.

Gershwin was a far cry from the mid-19th-century popular image of the composer, profoundly influenced by perceptions of Beethoven: a Bohemian, starving in a garret somewhere, railing against government and society. Working in 1920s New York, Gershwin benefited from the explosion of a market for popular music. As well as writing large-scale symphonic works for orchestra, he composed songs for voice and piano.

His most lucrative successes were on stage and screen. The opera Porgy and Bess (1935) was staged with an African American cast—as stipulated by George and his librettist, his brother Ira—and has become a fixture in the operatic canon, with the song ‘Summertime’ in particular becoming a lasting classic.

As well as writing songs, operas, and musicals, Gershwin recorded his music for radio and film, taking full advantage of new developments in recording technology. His openness to working across musical styles and contexts made him, according to one calculation, the richest composer of all time.

But it’s not just about the money. Gershwin’s genius lay in capturing in music a specific time and place: Jazz Age New York. As he wrote: “True music must repeat the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are American. My time is today.”

6. The Pioneer: Ethel Smyth

There were female composers before Ethel Smyth: Clara Schumann, for one. Back in the Middle Ages, the nun Hildegard of Bingen had written reams of sacred music. The Baroque period saw singer-composers such as Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini.

Some women’s compositions were eclipsed by their reputation as performers or association with male composers, as in the case of Pauline Viardot and Fanny Mendelssohn. By the late 19th century, female composers (such as Cécile Chaminade) were studying at the Paris Conservatoire and receiving instruction from female teachers (such as Louise Farrenc).

Ethel Smyth, born in 1858, was not the first woman to compose, nor the first woman to make a living from composing. She changed the course of music history, though, by being so vocal about what it was like to be a female composer. Smyth was also, arguably, the first feminist composer.

In a history still dominated by male names, Smyth’s feminist approach to being a composer is important. When the prodigiously talented Smyth began to study at the prestigious Leipzig Conservatory (founded by Felix Mendelssohn), she knew she had to work twice as hard as her male peers to gain recognition. This was a time when most music journalism still parroted the commonplace that women were mentally unsuited for writing music. She befriended Brahms, met Edvard Grieg and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, but still faced the judgment that her music was pretty good for a woman.

On top of this, Smyth was criticized for writing ‘masculine’ music. Many female composers before her had stuck to permissible forms such as songs and short, often instructive pieces. Smyth’s music was large-scale in every possible respect. She wrote a mass, string serenades, concertos, and operas. They were daring, powerful, stylistically continuing where Brahms had left off.

One of Smyth’s best-known works is ‘The March of the Women’ (1911), written in support of the women’s suffrage movement and adopted as an anthem by the Women’s Social and Political Union, of which Smyth was a member. She was arrested along with 100 other women for throwing stones at the house of a prominent politician. During her two-month stint at Holloway Prison, she could be found conducting her fellow inmates in a rousing chorus of ‘March of the Women,’ using her toothbrush as a baton.

Smyth was a keen writer too, and left several volumes of memoir, written continuously throughout her adult life until shortly before her death in 1944. These volumes are as important a contribution to music history as her music itself. They reveal Smyth as a fun-loving but uncompromising character. Her memoirs show Smyth’s strong will, her belief in her own musical abilities, and the need to blaze a trail for musical women after her. She left for posterity a decisive statement about being a female composer in a world which still, thanks to the powerful mythos of the classical canon, prizes music by men more highly.

“Correction (April 29, 2026): An earlier version of this article contained an error in the headline. It has since been updated to reflect the accurate title. We regret the error.”

Inuit art is an umbrella term because Inuit art is as varied as the people who inhabit the Nunangat (ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᓄᓇᖓᑦ), the Inuit homeland in Arctic Canada. Inuit people are not a homogeneous group—the Nunangat itself is divided into four regions. Similarly, Inuit culture is not as uniform as some might believe. Since the early 1960s, Baffin Island and Cape Dorset (Kinngait), a small village at the island’s southern tip, have been the site of a uniquely rich Inuit artistic production. To put it with Canadian journalist Sarah Milroy, “ … the resulting phenomenon is unique: with a population of 1,363, Cape Dorset may be the only community in the world where art constitutes the leading industry.” The diverse works of Inuit artists Manasie Akpaliapik, Kenojuak Ashevak, Tim Pitsiulak, and Kananginak Pootoogook, are inextricable from the wildlife and cold landscapes of Baffin Island.

1. Manasie Akpaliapik (ᒫᓇᓯ ᐊᒃᐸᓕᐊᐱᒃ)

Since the 1980s, Manasie Akpaliapik has been creating sculptures from materials such as whale bones, antlers, skulls, walrus tusks, musk ox horns, jawbones, and vertebrae. He has revolutionized Inuit and Canadian art by transforming what caribou and whales have left behind—whether willingly or unwillingly—into evocative masterpieces. In this unique relationship of mutual respect, every part of the animal is used, as each fragment, even the smallest, serves a purpose long after the animal has passed away.

In Inuit tradition, owls are believed to shepherd the spirits of the deceased into the afterlife and ravens are messengers carrying the prayers of the living to the spirit world. In Inuit traditions, as well as in Manasie’s works, the lives of human beings are inseparable from those of animals.

Born in 1955 in Ikpiarjuk (ᐃᒃᐱᐊᕐᔪᒃ)—which means “the pocket” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit—Manasie grew up in a small community of seal hunters in the northern part of Baffin Island, located in the Qikiqtaaluk (ᕿᑭᖅᑖᓗᒃ) region of Nunavut. In this predominantly Inuktitut-speaking community, both his parents, Lazaroosee Akpaliapik and Nakyuraq Akpaliapik, were carvers. He first learned to carve from his great-aunt, Paniluk Qamanirq, and his adoptive grandparents, Elisapee and Peter Kanangnaq Ahlooloo. However, at the age of twelve, Manasie was sent to a residential school in Iqaluit.

For four years, until he left school at 16, he was prohibited from speaking Inuktitut and encouraged to abandon the culture of his people and embrace Christianity on the path to assimilation. In 1980, after the tragic death of his wife and children in a house fire, he moved to Montreal, Québec.

Pond Inlet, not far from Ikpiarjuk, on northern Baffin Island, photograph by Isaac Demeester, 2021. Source: Unsplash

In Montreal, Manasie continued to carve. He also became friends with Raymond Brosseau, one of Canada’s most active art collectors and lovers of Inuit art. Every summer, he returns from his “new” home in Ontario, near Cobourg, to Ikpiarjuk, the homeland of his family and ancestors. There, he undertakes long trips with friends and family, always ready to lend him their boat to search the shores and Arctic waters of Baffin Island for whale bones and caribou antlers.

While Akpaliapik’s artworks are unique and immediately recognizable, they do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of a long-standing tradition, likely the first and oldest Indigenous culture in present-day Canada, which originated thousands of years ago in the Canadian Arctic, one of the most barren and cold regions on Earth.

Arctic Bay, photograph by Isaac Demeester, 2019. Source: Unsplash

Over the years, archaeologists have unearthed various examples of wooden masks and excavated bears and falcons dating back to the High Dorset era (or Dorset Culture). These sculptures, usually made of ivory but also bone, antler, and wood, were initially hollowed out and then perforated so as to resemble harpoon heads.

Archaeologists have also found “swimming figurines,” likely crafted between 1000 and 1200 CE by the Thule people, the ancestors of the Inuit. Usually faceless, these “swimming figurines” depict a vast array of animals, primarily waterbirds and seals, along with human beings and spirits, with their lower bodies invisible beneath the waterline.

Movement is central to Manasie’s creative process. During his journeys from Ontario to the Arctic, he immerses himself in the environment from which the whalebones and caribou antlers originate. He crafts his artworks in what he refers to as the “South,” the Canadian South, but all the materials he uses—from hair to bones—come from the North, the land where his ancestors have lived and died for centuries.

Just as people used to pay tribute to the animals they hunted through homages and rituals, Manasie honors the animals of the Arctic by incorporating their bones, hair, and antlers into his sculptures. Without them, his sculptures would not exist. Manasie’s works blur and discard established categories that tend to draw a line between the animal kingdom and the human race.

In his studio in Ontario, skulls and antlers become vessels for expressing the pain and struggles of his darker days, marked by the death of his wife and children and his alcohol addiction, as we see in his dramatic piece Self-Destruction (1995), currently housed at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec (MNBAQ).

Manasie has always been vocal about the challenges affecting Inuit communities “up in the North.” In a 2023 interview with Inuit Quarterly, he stated “Alcoholism is one of the biggest problems in the North, and that’s what I was struggling with for a long time. I’ve been sober now for seven years. They always say, if you change your life for the better, then good things will come your way. It’s true—a lot of good things are going my way.”

2. Kenojuak Ashevak (ᕿᓐᓄᐊᔪᐊᖅ ᐋᓯᕙᒃ )

In Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, Baffin Island is called Qikiqtaaluk (ᕿᑭᖅᑖᓗᒃ), meaning “very big island.” Baffin Island is indeed Canada’s largest island. Kenojuak Ashevak (1927-2013) was born here, in the igloo of her parents, Silaqqi and Ushuakjuk, in the outpost camp of Ikirasaw, on the island’s southern coast. Her father was a hunter, fur trader, and shaman, an angakkuq who claimed he could transform himself into a walrus and predict good hunting seasons. When he died prematurely in 1933, Silaqqi took her six-year-old daughter, Kenojuak, to live with her maternal grandmother, Koweesa.

Growing up with her grandmother, Kenojuak learned the crafts of her ancestors, the Nunatsiarmiut, the Inuit of Baffin Island, commonly referred to as Baffinland Eskimo by the non-Indigenous population. She mastered the complex art of processing and repairing seal skins and learned how to make resistant and waterproof amautiit, the traditional female Inuit parka made of caribou skin.

In 1952, while already married to Johnniebo Ashevak (ᔭᓂᕗ ᐊᓴᕙ), she tested positive for tuberculosis and was sent to Parc Savard Hospital, in Quebec City, one of the oldest cities in North America. She remained here, in the city founded by French explorer Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635) in 1608, for three years, until the summer of 1955. Three years that marked a turning point in her life; it was here that she began to draw extensively and met sculptor Harold Pfeiffer (1908-1997), who encouraged her to pursue beadwork, to create Inuit appliquéd bags and clothing, not just as a hobby, but as a proper job that could sustain her financially. Finally, in the mid-60s, Kenojuak moved with her husband and their children to Cape Dorset, Kinngait (ᑭᙵᐃᑦ), which means “high mountain” in Inuktitut, a hamlet at the southern tip of Baffin Island.

She spent the rest of her life on Kinngait, in her wood-frame home, where, as Sarah Milroy puts it, “she could be found lying on her stomach on a queen-size mattress in her living room, drawing and drawing, making the images that would then be turned into prints over at Kinngait Studios.”

It was in Kinngait that she met James Archibald Houston (1921-2005), designer, children’s author (and later Inuit art promoter), along with his wife Alma. They immediately recognized the beauty and potential of the sealskin bags she was designing, stitching, and beading along with other women in her community, and urged her to translate the figures and scenes she adorned her bags with onto paper. The rest is history. Ashevak’s prints are immediately recognizable for their bright colors, lively graphic buoyancy, and the round, almost dreamlike shapes of the animals she depicts.

The enchanted owls she became known for in the 1970s are always shown facing the viewer. Their feathers pop out from their bodies and extend all around them as if to surround and protect them.

Unlike those painted by other Inuit artists, including her grandson, Tim Pitsiulak, Ashevak’s animals—owls, packs of wolves traversing the Arctic, rabbits eating seaweed, foxes, and “bird humans”—inhabit a dreamlike world devoid of human figures, where the sky and the ground are often left out. In this suspended and serene void, dogs are taunted by birds flying high above them, polar bears roam the Earth accompanied by spirits, birds are caught in mating dances, and loons engage in playful wrestling with Sedna (ᓴᓐᓇ), the Inuit Goddess of the Sea. This is the world Kenojuak grew up in in the 1930s and 1940s, the world of the Canadian Arctic, where wolves and bears roamed freely, and survival could never be taken for granted.

3. Timootee “Tim” Pitsiulak (ᑎᒻ ᐱᓯᐃᓚ)

Kenojuak Ashevak passed away at the age of 85, on January 8, 2013, in her wood-frame home in Kinngait. Two years earlier, when the exhibition Inuit Modern opened in Toronto, she traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario as a visiting dignitary, accompanied by her nephew, Tim Pitsiulak (1967-2016). Tim was born in Kimmirut (ᑭᒻᒥᕈᑦ), Kuujjua, “Great River,” as it is called in Inuktitut, on southern Baffin Island, on the shore of Hudson Strait, but spent most of his life in Cape Dorset, hunting, drawing, carving, and making jewelry. His parents were Napachie and Timila Pitsiulak.

During his hunting trips, equipped with a gun and a camera, he often took pictures that would become the basis for his artworks. Like Ashevak’s, Tim Pitsiulak’s works prominently feature animals.

Unlike Ashevak’s, however, the animals in his drawings are extremely naturalistic and life-like. The photographic likeness of his white bears, narwhals, weasels, moose, muscular Greenland sharks, weary-eyed caribou, and beluga whales is striking. Animated with a liveliness and agency rarely seen in Western art, Pitsiulak’s animals are both mythical figures and sentient beings, living by their own set of values and morals, as they are caught scratching themselves or deep diving into the frigid arctic waters. The ocean, which Pitsiulak mostly paints in a uniform black and blue, is the realm of whales, walruses, and seals, where they can swim and dive and play freely.

Pitsiulak was also a skilled hunter, who deeply respected Nunavut’s wildlife while also making use of modern technologies, and it shows. In his works, he carefully blends Inuit traditional ways of life and traditions with the modernity represented by motorized boats, rifles, Ski-Doos (snow machines), and flaming orange Caterpillar Telehandlers.

Pitsiulak once said that his “inspiration to be an artist comes from my aunt, Kenojuak Ashevak, because she is the oldest and the best.” In 2013, two of his belugas and a bowhead whale were featured on Canada’s 25-cent coin. 43 years earlier, his grandmother, Kenojuak Ashevak, had seen her print, Enchanted Owl, chosen by Canada Post for a six-cent stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Northwest Territories, making her the first Inuk artist to be featured on a Canada Post stamp.

Today, Pitsiulak’s drawings, lithographs, photographs, and sculptures are housed in museums and galleries across Canada, from the Winnipeg Art Gallery to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

4. Kananginak Pootoogook (ᑲᓇᒋᓇ ᐳᑐᒍᑭ)

In 1959, at the age of 24, Kananginak Pootoogook (1935-2010) created his first print, the Legend of the Blind Man and the Bear, in collaboration with his father, Josephie, a hunter and respected camp leader. The influence of Japanese art and printmaking, introduced to the Cape Dorset Inuit community by James Houston and his wife Alma, is clear in this work. This early print encapsulates Kananginak’s artistic approach, which he maintained and honored from the 1960s (when he produced his first artworks) until his death in 2010.

The Legend of the Blind Man and the Bear transports the onlooker inside a split-open Inuit igloo. The viewer is inside and outside the igloo at the same time, just like the imposing white bear, whose hind legs are outside the igloo, in the snow, while his front legs have already crossed the igloo’s threshold. Inside the igloo, two men—perhaps a father and son—sit together. The man, armed with a bow and arrow, is ready to strike.

Though the scene is naturalistic, the title hints at the legendary origins of the scene represented here. Reality and myth go hand in hand in Pootoogook’s works.

Raised to be a hunter like his father, Kananginak’s life took a significant turn in 1957. Due to his father’s declining health, the Pootoogook family moved from the hunting camp of Ikirassak to Kinngait (Cape Dorset) in Nunavut. Here Kananginak met James Houston and his wife Alma, who dramatically changed the course of his life.

Houston, who had studied printmaking in Japan, introduced Pootoogook and the Cape Dorset community to the works of Japanese master printmaker Un’ichi Hiratsuka. Over the following years, Kananginak helped establish the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative and eventually became its main spokesperson and president of the Board of Directors.

Like most Inuit artists, Kananginak’s style is unique and immediately recognizable. While Pitsiulak primarily depicted whales, walruses, and caribou, Kananginak focused on birds—such as seagulls, ducks, flying geese, black guillemots, owls, and falcons—to the extent that he earned the nickname “the North’s Audubon,” after French-American artist and ornithologist John James Audubon (1785-1851), famous for his interest in North American bird species.

In later years, particularly from the 1980s onward, Kananginak turned his attention to contemporary Inuit society, to the issues faced by many Inuit communities in Nunavut, such as domestic violence and alcoholism, as well as the impact of outsiders—from traders to missionaries and Canadian authorities—who brought skidoos, electric tools, and heavy machinery to the remote North. Today, the name Pootoogook is synonymous with Inuit drawings and prints.

Kananginak’s niece, Annie Pootoogook (1969-2016), one of the eleven children of his brother Eegyvudluk Pootoogook (1931-2000) and artist Napachie Pootoogook, also became a renowned artist, known for her beautiful depictions of contemporary Inuit society, as seen in the tender In the Summer Camp Tent (2002) or 3 Generations (2004-5). Kananginak’s nephew, Goo Pootoogook (b. 1956), has also gained recognition.

Napachie Pootoogook was a notable artist in her own right and one of the many daughters of Pitseolak Ashoona (1904-1983). Some of her most beautiful paintings focus on Inuit women—women wearing beautiful amauti, practicing throat singing outside their igloo, and singing love songs to their children, as seen in Aqaqtuq (Singing Love Song). Ashoona’s granddaughter, Shuvinai Ashoona, is also a beloved Inuk artist.

Since the early 1960s, hundreds of Inuit prints, drawings, and sculptures have found homes in southern Canada, particularly in Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City. In museums, galleries, and corporate boardrooms, non-Inuit Canadians and foreign tourists can admire the works of Manasie Akpaliapik, Kenojuak Ashevak, Tim Pitsiulak, and Kananginak Pootoogook, compare their works and styles, and catch a glimpse of Inuit society. Some viewers will also pine for what Sarah Milroy describes as “the imagined freedoms of a life” in the Inuit Arctic, away from buzzing metropolises, among caribou, moose, and beluga whales. “Whites imagine Inuit, and Inuit imagine whites,” she writes, and “Inuit art is where their fantasies meet.”

However, Inuit art is more than just a meeting of these different perspectives. The prints, drawings, sculptures, and appliqué bags produced in Kinngait, at the southern tip of Baffin Island, have opened a much-needed window into Inuit society and culture for over 50 years.

Like many marginalized groups in the United States in the 1970s, Chicanos organized a social, political, and cultural movement to protest a myriad of issues as well as celebrate their history and material culture. Artists were key to the movement, making murals in neighborhoods to bring people together and catchy posters to call attention to a range of topics. They also explored larger themes of race, gender, memory, and identity, committing themselves to furthering the movement’s aims but also refusing to limit their desire to explore all of art’s possibilities.

Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1977-present

One of the most well-known and magisterial works of Chicano art, this wall spans half a mile in San Fernando Valley, depicting the history of ethnic peoples in California from prehistoric times to the present. Baca mused, “In 1975 when the Great Wall was still a dream, I never imagined it would lead me, the more than 400 young ‘Mural Makers’ and the 35 other artists on my team through such a moving set of experiences. Nor could I have imagined that 27 years from the date the first paint was applied to the wall that it would still be a work in progress.”

Baca was approached by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1970s to “beautify” the Tujunga flood control channel of the Los Angeles River. She co-founded the Social and Public Art Resource Center and started bringing together other artists and young people from the community to research, plan, and paint. She wrote that “the story of Los Angeles, like many great cities, begins on the banks of its river.” While “standing at the river’s edge, I saw the concreted arroyos as scars in the land. I dreamed of a ‘tattoo on the scar where the river once ran,’ and an endless narrative that would recover the stories of those who were disappeared along with the river.”

The scenes include southward migration through the Bering Strait; the development of Chumash culture; the cruelties of settler colonialism on indigenous populations; enslaved people’s experiences; the Chinese Massacre of 1871; the women’s suffrage movement; social and economic advances during WWI; Dust Bowl refugees; Black jazz music at the Dunbar hotel; Japanese internment; the Red Scare; highway construction and resident displacement; and notable Olympians of color in the mid-20th century.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio, 1984

An ofrenda is an offering to the deceased, usually within someone’s home and as part of the Mexican Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration. Mesa-Bains took the vernacular and thematic elements of the ofrenda—the objects, the evocation of memory, the celebration—and turned them into large-scale installations in art spaces. In this piece, Mesa-Bains creates a structure dedicated to the famous Mexican actress Dolores del Rio. Pink silk drapes cascade to the floor, framing the collection of objects and photographs. At the center, rose-colored tulle and delicate white lace protectively gather around the central photo of the actress. The top collection of objects consists of, among other things, dried roses, a statue of the Virgin de Guadalupe, a tiny cordial glass, and a statue of the Eiffel Tower; below, more photographs, a doll, silver fruit, and beaded jewelry rest on a glass shelf.

The mirrors used throughout the piece have a dual purpose—both to bring the viewer further into it and to connote a vanity, a traditional piece of women’s furniture. Mesa-Bains describes her works as domesticana. In an essay Mesa-Bains wrote in 1995, she explained the term: “Critical to the strategy of domesticana is the quality of paradox. Purity and debasement, beauty and resistance, devotion and emancipation are aspects of the paradoxical that activate Chicana domesticana as feminist intervention. . . . Moving past the fixation of a domineering patriarchal language, our domesticana is an emancipatory gesture of representational space and personal pose.”

Asco, First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1970

In 1970, the Chicano Moratorium, a peaceful protest calling attention to the disproportionate number of Chicanos being sent to—and dying in—Vietnam, was disrupted by police and turned into a violent riot. In the subsequent years, police continued to harass young Chicanos gathering in East Los Angeles. The avant-garde Chicano art collective Asco, which consisted of Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herron, Gronk, and Patssi Valdez, decided that they would “activate” the streets (in this case, the famous Whittier Boulevard) to stage a street performance calling attention to this discriminatory and demeaning practice.

The plan came together quickly. Gronk hung up a painting of his, The Truth of the Terror in Chile, and filmed the gathering as an intimate, eccentric dinner party. A friend, Humberto Sandoval, was the fourth human participant, with some of the other “guests” consisting of a mannequin painted as a skeleton and a mannequin of a giant baby Jesus. The artists were dressed eclectically and wore Mexican death masks and makeup. Critic Dena Yago notes that “To experience joy and self-expression, to lament the violence in their communities, to reclaim the street as a site of artistic creation—all of this amounted to a radical act of expression.”

The piece is commonly seen in its photographic form, but it was truly a performance. Gronk had to keep people who wanted to join from moving into the frame, and the artists knew they would have to be quick to avoid the ubiquitous law enforcement. Thus, while the photograph is still and serene, the actual event was madcap and rogue. Gronk remembered, “During the performance, people either honked their horns or cheered us on. But also in the back of our minds…at the time a phone call was ten cents, so we all had ten cents in our pocket just in case we had to make that phone call from jail.”

Ester Hernandez, Sun Mad, 1982

At first glance, this piece looks exactly like the famous red box of Sun-Maid raisins, a mainstay in American households. However, a closer look reveals a skeletal female figure at the center, the logo “Sun Mad” instead of “Sun-Maid,” and the unnerving subtext of “Unnaturally grown with insecticides, miticides, herbicides, fungicides.”

Hernandez wasn’t just making a political work—she was making a personal one. She explained that she created the print “as a very personal reaction to my shock when I discovered that the water in my hometown, Dinuba, California, which is the center of the raisin-raising territory, had been contaminated by pesticides for 25 to 30 years. I realized I had drunk and bathed in this water.” She’d been visiting her family and was surprised to see her mother boiling water even though it was over 100 degrees because they’d received a notice saying the water was contaminated. Hernandez knew she wanted to make a piece of art about this, but was unsure what to say. The idea for the poster finally came to her after she passed an advertisement for the Sun-Maid raisins on the highway back into Dinuba.

Mario Torero, We Are Not A Minority, Estrada Courts, 1978

Murals were some of the most important types of Chicano art, as they were located in communities themselves, could be worked on collectively, and were able to easily convey political and social messages. This work is one of many murals at the Estrada Courts, a low-income housing complex in Boyle Heights. Constructed in 1942 and expanded in 1954, it provided housing for hundreds of people, most of them Chicano.

Torero and fellow artists Rocky, El Lion, and Zade created this mural after coming together in the Chicano Park struggle in San Diego (a successful effort to prevent the park from becoming a California Highway Patrol station). It is a tribute to the revolutionary Che Guevara, an important figure in the rights movements of the 1960s. Some of the other famous murals at this site include Willie Herron and Gronk’s Moratorium—The Black and White Mural (1973), Gil Hernandez’s The Sun Bathers (1973), and Daniel Martinez’s In Memory of a Home Boy (1973).

Torero explained his and his fellow artists’ interest in painting murals: “We started developing our own world. Painting murals made us different. You go out in the world in the United States and everything is brown, white, and pale. There is no color. It’s very Puritan. It was a very frightening thing for them to see colors. The police were definitely against colors. When we put colors on our walls in the Barrio, it was a defiance of 500 years of repression.”

Mel Casa, Humanscapes

It is impossible to pick just one of Mel Casas’ Humanscapes works, given the fact that there are 150 of them and they are all aesthetically accomplished, politically and socially resonant, and astonishingly diverse in terms of subject matter even while being part of Casas’ stated goal of making “Chicano art relevant to everyone.” Curator Ruben Cordova traced the genesis of the series, accounting for their particular format: “Humanscapes [dates] to an epiphany Casas had in 1965 when he drove past the San Pedro drive-in movie theater… After several paintings of people in movie theaters, Casas arrived at an eight-by-six-foot format proportionately similar to a movie screen. The term ‘Humanscape’ may have come from his painting of a large female nude reclining on the screen. Next, Casas added stenciled captions to the bottom of his paintings, making conceptual wordplay an important aspect of his work.”

In Humanscape 41, Casas uses biting satire—suggesting that mothers “invest” their sons in the “profitable” Vietnam War—and poignant images of those mothers cradling young sons with numbers on their backs to comment on the large number of young Latino men being sent to Vietnam.

Casas was a painter even before the Chicano Movement began, influenced by the Mexican muralists of the 1930s, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Thus, critics see his work as rising up alongside, and being artistically inspired by, the Movement. He was a cofounder of Con Safo, one of the most renowned Chicano art groups of the 1960s and 1970s, and tirelessly advocated for Latino representation in art museums and cultural spaces. He was also a professor at San Antonio College for decades, mentoring young artists and contributing to the art world discourse.

Frank Romero, Death of Rubén Salazar, 1986

One of the most tragic events of the Chicano Moratorium was the death of beloved Mexican-American journalist Rubén Salazar, who worked for the Los Angeles Times and had earned his community’s respect and admiration. Salazar was covering the Moratorium and subsequent rioting and beating of peaceful protestors when he took a break in the Silver Dollar, a local bar, to grab a beer. Police fired tear gas canisters into the bar, claiming they’d seen a man with a gun enter, and killed Salazar immediately. The Chicano community was deeply distrustful of the police and believed that Salazar was targeted for his reporting.

Romero’s painting is simultaneously stylized and somewhat cartoonish as it comments on the insane juxtaposition between police in riot gear shooting military-style weapons into a homely neighborhood bar. The colors are luscious and the lines thick and dynamic. Romero told the Smithsonian that “People have told me that I use color very well. I love bright colors, and in fact, I’m fascinated with acrylic paint because the colors are so brilliant. In my training, I was told that purple is the opposite of yellow and all of that stuff, but I don’t use that as a theory, I just react instinctively to the way I feel… If you look at the paintings, they’re very beautiful. They’re in lovely pastel colors and so forth like that. So people are attracted to the image, with these, on an abstract level, and then they see what it’s about, then I hope somehow that they come away with the message.”

Karl Jenkins (b. 1944) shot to fame with Adiemus, which features a melting pot of Celtic, African, New Age, and world music elements. The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace advocates for world peace through a powerful anti-war message. Palladio drew inspiration from mathematics and architecture. Karl Jenkins blends his Welsh musical roots with contemporary writing in Tros Y Garreg, offering a unique concerto for two harps. Cantata Memoria commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan disaster with grace, honoring the victims. Finally, Eloise is an opera for children based on a classic fairytale.

Understanding Karl Jenkins in 6 Compositions

Trying to place Sir Karl Jenkins in a single category is nearly impossible. There are so many influences present in his music that it might be best to describe him as a world citizen with a classical heart. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of his music is his “cross-genre” composition, Adiemus—in Japan it is “healing music” while in Germany they refer to it as “pop music.” In the following five works, you will be taken on a rollercoaster of emotions, ideas, musical influences, and genre-defying compositions.

1. Adiemus

Karl Jenkins’s album, Adiemus: Songs of Sanctuary, propelled the composer to international fame. It is his first album and gives a glimpse of the future soundscape listeners would be drawn into. It is almost impossible to describe the album. It is a melting pot of Celtic influences mixed with African drums and rhythms. There is also a New Age slant in some tracks, classical forms and methods, and world music influences.

The titular song, Adiemus, has been used in countless film soundtracks and television commercials. Delta Airlines also used the title track for a television commercial, advertising campaigns, and pre-departure videos on Delta flights. It is interesting to note that Karl Jenkins spent some time in the advertising industry. It is fair to say he knows a lot about capturing an audience’s attention through effective soundtracks and advertising!

Adiemus is sung in a made-up language and combines classical and world music elements that create a haunting effect. The words, or vocalizations, provided by Miriam Stockley and Mary Carewe become another musical instrument in their own right. Thus, the “lyrics” (without any intrinsic meaning) become music. The result is a wall of sound, combining a full classical orchestra with multiple dubs of Stockley and Carewe’s vocals in parallel as a giant choir.

2. The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace

Guernica, by Pablo Picasso, 1937. Source: Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid

The above lyrics by an anonymous medieval poet may be simple, but they carry a strong message: be vigilant at all times and be prepared to fight.

War is as old as humanity itself. Artists have portrayed its horrors for the world to see, and composers like Beethoven give an almost shot-by-shot portrayal of the Battle of Vittoria.

Yet, the sanctity of human life never renders war a justifiable method to settle disputes. Jenkins’s The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace is a call to humanity to set aside their differences and seek out peace. It is also the composer’s most performed work, which earned him fifth place in the Classic FM Hall of Fame in 2015, and in 2023, he was named the most popular living composer in Classic FM’s Ultimate Hall of Fame. Quite an achievement for a living composer!

Jenkins borrows from the form of the Medieval mass and uses the Kyrie, Sanctus, and Benedictus to construct a narrative about the atrocities of war and calls for worldwide peace. Overall, The Armed Man starts with the call to take up arms (l’homme armé), followed by a prayer (Call to Prayer) begging for divine mercy (Kyrie). Save Me from Bloody Men, Hymn Before Action, Charge!, Angry Flames, and Torches portray the horrors of war. The aftermath (Agnus Dei, Now the Guns have Stopped) precedes a prayer of blessing (Benedictus) that is heard for the peacemakers, and when peace reigns (Better is Peace), the anti-war message is driven home. The work was commissioned by the Royal Armouries and premiered at the Royal Albert Hall in 2000.

The Sanctus, with the video of violence in the background on big screens, is almost a twisted glorification. Instead of glorifying the divine, humans glorify war and violence—they worship the gods of war. The incessant drums play a march-like rhythm akin to men marching off to war. The following section, Hymn Before Action (at 26:10), uses the text of Rudyard Kipling’s eponymous poem. While the poem is set in a military context, it meditates acceptance, courage, and self-awareness when faced with a difficult situation. The text deals with finding the strength within yourself when faced with difficult decisions and the wisdom to make the right decision for the common good.

The Benedictus is one of the most iconic sections of this mass. In its simplicity, Jenkins creates a soundscape unlike any other through the violoncello’s devastatingly high-pitched solo. When you listen carefully, you will hear that it is also the opening melody of the choir’s entrance with the word “Benedictus.” In the traditional mass setting, the Benedictus is a song of praise for the Divine’s enduring faithfulness to his promises while also expressing praise and thanksgiving for the goodness and mercy bestowed upon humanity.

3. Palladio

According to Karl Jenkins, Palladio draws inspiration from the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, and it is also a homage to him. In his day, Palladio was a celebrated architect who designed and built numerous churches and villas for wealthy families. The architect is celebrated for using harmony, order, and symmetry. Two hallmarks of Palladio’s buildings are the mathematical harmony of the proportions and his reliance on classical elements from ancient Roman models, especially Vitruvius.

The work is written in a Baroque form, namely a concerto grosso. Instead of the solo concerto where the orchestra accompanies a soloist, there is a small group of musicians playing the solo parts (concertino). The rest of the orchestra provides the accompaniment (ripieno).

In the first movement, marked Allegretto (at 00:16), the violoncellos and double basses lay the “foundation” on which the higher strings (violins and violas) build their dramatic lines. During the second movement, marked Largo (at 04:06), Jenkins follows the model set by his predecessors with a quiet middle movement. It brings a welcome respite from the drama found in the first movement. A soloist from each of the first and second violin sections plays the solo parts while the rest of the string orchestra forms the ripieno. The last movement, Vivace (at 10:29), sounds like a lively perpetual motion machine with constant movement and conversation between the different groups of instruments.

4. Tros y Garreg (Across the Stone)

Karl Jenkins’s Harp Concerto showcases his love for his native Wales while combining his ability to compose accessible music in a classical idiom with world music influences. In this work, two harps take center stage, offering listeners an exhibition of the harp’s versatility.

Jenkins drew upon Celtic Welsh melodies, especially in the fourth movement, Tros y  Garreg (Over the Stone or Crossing the Stone). The text is attributed to the Welsh poet John Ceiriog Hughes and captures a warrior’s sentiments after returning home. He contemplates all the stone must have seen throughout its life—battles lost and won, love and hatred—and yet it never speaks of those things.

In this movement, the orchestra plays a traditional Welsh melody while the harps weave their improvisation around the original melody. During the coronation of King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla in 2023, this work was featured to show the king’s longstanding and heartfelt relationship with Wales. But the connection to the newly crowned king and Jenkins also stretches back further; while still Prince of Wales, Charles commissioned a harp concerto from Jenkins, and Tros y Garreg was one of the movements.

5. Cantata Memoria for the Children

Karl Jenkins composed Cantata Memoria to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan mining disaster. On October 21, 1966, the village of Aberfan in South Wales saw a catastrophe that claimed the lives of 116 children and 28 adults. A landslide of coal waste engulfed the village and the Pantglas Junior School which stood directly in the path of the coal slide. The event left an indelible scar on the community and the nation.

But in true Karl Jenkins style, it is not all doom and gloom nor is it a documentary telling of the story of the coal slide. It is a dedication to those who lost their lives and those who had to carry on with their lives after the disaster.

There are two distinct sections to the work, lasting around 20 and 35 minutes, respectively. The multilingual text features English, Welsh, and four texts from the Requiem Mass sung in Latin. Additionally, there are words (“eg”) that are also equivalent to why and light in Dutch, English, German, Latin, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh. The aim of this is to give the work a specific local feeling but also a universal one.

Musically, apart from the texts taken from the Latin Requiem Mass, there are also quotations from John Rutter’s All Things Bright and Beautiful, an excerpt from Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, and a Welsh nursery rhyme. The Welsh love song, Myfanwy, can also be heard on the euphonium. The rescuers sang this song while digging for the victims.

The first part (starting at 6:18) deals with the intense tragedy and immediate aftermath of the coal slide. However, it is not a blow-by-blow retelling of the disaster but like a pendulum swinging among numerous points that are now part of the disaster’s legacy and memory. During the second part, the works move away from darkness toward the light. The memories and celebration of childhood feature prominently in the second part. With the final movement, Lux Eterna (eternal light), the celesta and bells are used prominently to symbolize the light that has overcome the darkness.

Jenkins and librettist Mererid Hopwood approached the subject matter and work, commissioned by S4C, a Welsh TV broadcast company, with sensitivity. Together they created a poignant ode not only to the victims of Aberfan but also to children worldwide who are caught in disasters.

6. Eloise

Lady Carol Barratt wrote the libretto for Karl Jenkins’s children’s opera, based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

After the King and Queen christened their daughter Eloise, the witch Volhek reminded them of their payment for an old promise: once they have a daughter, their sons will be taken away. Thus, Volhek turns them into ducks, and her band of Drogmires takes them away.

Eloise grows up and discovers her poor brothers’ fate and sets out to break the spell. Throughout her trials and tribulations and Volhek stealing Eloise’s voice, Eloise focuses on completing the task of weaving shirts from thistledown. She summons magical spinners to create special shirts for the ducks, and with her magical spoon, she summons three helpful men to help her succeed.

Eloise finally breaks the spell and drives wicked Volhek and the Drogmires away when the royal household arrives, and the princes are freed. Eloise’s favorite helpful man, whom she conjures again, promises to stay by her side forever.

What Inspires Karl Jenkins’s Music?

Karl Jenkins had a thorough training in the classical tradition with studies in harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration at the University of Cardiff and the Royal Academy of Music in London. So, the basic foundation is solid, but he does not sit and wait around for inspiration to strike or a muse to visit him. He incorporates his academic training with the mathematical harmony and order found in Renaissance architecture.

While some might call it inspiration, he prefers the term intuition and says he needs to write some music every day. In his own words: “I follow my nose—I don’t have a formula or a plan ahead.”

You may have noticed a wide variety of percussion in the works above, and for good reason. Jenkins started his professional music career as a jazz musician. Rather than using percussion instruments, especially drums, as a rhythmic element in his music as is the classical tradition, it holds a musical role therein as with jazz and rock music. He draws inspiration and ideas from ethnic percussion, especially South American rhythms and jazz percussion, to enrich his music.

William Hogarth was an influential English painter whose satirical paintings and engravings exposed the vices of the 18th century. Often regarded as a foundational figure in British visual culture, he forged a distinctly national artistic voice that distanced itself from European models. His work blended humor with acute observation, creating narrative cycles that captivated the public. Read on to explore his unique satirical style and its lasting historical and cultural influence.

Who Was William Hogarth?

William Hogarth was a pioneering English artist and one of the most notable satirists of the 18th century. Born in London to a financially struggling family, he experienced hardship early in life, including his father’s imprisonment in Fleet Prison due to debt. These formative incidents shaped Hogarth’s sensitivity to themes of vice, injustice, and social hypocrisy, which would later become central to his artistic identity.

Hogarth began his career in 1718 as an apprentice engraver and later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Martin’s Lane, refining his technical skill and observational eye. By 1730, he had gained fame, helping to inspire the Copyright Act of 1735 to protect artists’ rights. He also published The Analysis of Beauty and was appointed Serjeant Painter to the Crown. His distinctive style profoundly influenced British art through his engravings, paintings, and portraits. Most notably, his narrative painting and visual satire paved the way for his series of Modern Moral Subjects, which satirized the manners and morals of his time.

A Harlot’s Progress: Plate One

One of Hogarth’s earliest and most groundbreaking series, A Harlot’s Progress, marks the beginning of the Modern Moral Subject. In six scenes, he follows the tragic descent of Mary Hackabout, a young woman who arrives in London seeking opportunity but instead encounters exploitation and corruption. The series exposes a society that condemns vice while simultaneously sustaining it.

In the first plate, set outside the Bell Inn, Mary steps off the York Wagon and is immediately appraised by the infamous procuress Mother Needham, as a lecherous gentleman watches nearby. Her youthful innocence is framed against the chaotic energy of London’s streets. Through this interaction, Hogarth introduces the central theme of the cycle: how quickly vulnerability can be exploited in an urban environment driven by greed. This opening plate sets the tone for the harsher developments that will follow.

A Harlot’s Progress: Plate Three

By Plate Three, Mary is firmly trapped in the world of prostitution. Hogarth places her in a cramped, disorderly room filled with scattered garments, a broken mirror, and mocking faces. Each detail signals her decline: the shattered mirror hints at lost integrity, while the surrounding chaos reflects her unstable life. This scene marks Mary’s transition from initial victimization to inevitable consequence, preparing the viewer for the somber ending of the series.

A Harlot’s Progress: Plate Six

Plate Six concludes the cycle with Mary on her deathbed, surrounded by mourners and the stark effects of syphilis. Here, Hogarth highlights the brutal outcome of her life, underscoring how neglect and exploitation destroy vulnerable individuals. The final plate reinforces the series’ central message: moral decay is both personal and societal.

A Rake’s Progress: Plate One

Following the success of A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth created A Rake’s Progress, expanding his examination of vice through the story of a male counterpart. Across eight meticulously detailed scenes, Hogarth chronicles Tom Rakewell’s descent from sudden inheritance to madness and ruin. This series exemplifies Hogarth’s sequential narrative style, effectively telling a complete moral story through visual art—an innovative approach for its time. It reflects the realities of society, highlighting themes of luxury, vice, debt, and their consequences.

In the opening plate, Tom inherits his father’s estate, already revealing vanity and irresponsibility. Surrounded by servants, lawyers, and Sarah Young, his neglected pregnant fiancée, he begins his path toward moral corruption. Hogarth fills the scene with symbolic details—discarded household items, greedy faces, and gestures of excess—foreshadowing the reckless behavior that will ultimately lead to Tom’s downfall.

A Rake’s Progress: Plate Six

By Plate Six, Tom’s downfall has accelerated. He is depicted in a frenzied gaming den, surrounded by gamblers wholly absorbed in their wagers. At the center of the plate, he curses his misfortune as he realizes he has lost his remaining possessions. A fire rages nearby, yet the players ignore the danger—a vivid metaphor for their moral blindness. This scene not only heightens the drama but also reinforces Hogarth’s critique of reckless excess, addiction, and the social environments that encourage such destructive behavior. As the narrative progresses, the tragic end of the protagonist is revealed.

A Rake’s Progress: Plate Eight

The series concludes in the notorious Bedlam asylum, where Tom, now destitute and mentally broken, is surrounded by other sufferers and gawking visitors who treat the inmates as entertainment. Sarah Young alone remains by his side, embodying compassion in contrast to the cruelty of the onlookers. Through this tragic conclusion, Hogarth’s message becomes clear: uncontrolled debauchery inevitably leads to destruction, regardless of wealth, gender, or social status.

Marriage a-la-Mode: Plate One

Marriage A-la-Mode is a six-part satirical series that exposes the greed, decadence, and moral emptiness of aristocratic marriages built on financial convenience rather than love. Painted around 1743 and later engraved, the series depicts the marriage between the son of the Earl of Squander and the daughter of a wealthy Alderman of the City of London.

In the first plate, the young Viscount, who is already infected with syphilis, admires himself in a mirror while his future wife talks with the lawyer Silvertongue. The chained dogs in the corner serve as a powerful metaphor for the oppressive bond they are about to enter. Hogarth fills the scene with symbolic details that critique the vanity, corruption, and self-deception underlying their union.

Plate Two: The Tête à Tête

By the second plate, the marriage has deteriorated. The Viscount returns home after a night of debauchery, while the Countess lounges in boredom and indifference. The cluttered room, broken sword, and subtle erotic clues paint a picture of emotional estrangement and moral erosion.

Plate Five: The Bagnio

In the fifth plate, the story escalates dramatically. In the dim light of the candles in a bagnio, the Viscount confronts his wife and her lover, Silvertongue. A violent duel leads to the Viscount’s fatal wound, while the Countess pleads desperately for forgiveness. Silvertongue flees through the window. The scene is charged with tension and theatricality, encapsulating the personal tragedy born from social ambition and marital hypocrisy.

Plate Six: The Lady’s Death

The final plate brings the story to its grim close. The Countess, disgraced and widowed, has taken poison after Silvertongue’s execution. Her disfigured child, suffering from congenital syphilis, clings to her in her last moments. Her father, rather than offering comfort, removes the wedding ring—the object that set her suffering in motion. Hogarth concludes with a powerful indictment of aristocratic corruption, revealing how privilege can mask but not prevent moral collapse.

Beer Street and Gin Lane

In contrast to the aristocratic focus of Marriage à la Mode, Hogarth shifts to the lower classes in his companion prints Beer Street and Gin Lane. Conceived as propaganda against the Gin Craze, the engravings present two starkly opposing visions of urban life. Beer Street celebrates industrious, contented citizens enjoying wholesome beer, depicted within a clean and lively environment. Gin Lane, its dark counterpart, portrays the devastating effects of gin addiction: starvation, neglect, madness, and death. Through this juxtaposition, Hogarth extends his broader concern for public virtue and social reform, emphasizing how civic health depends on personal moderation and responsible governance.

The Four Stages of Cruelty: Cruelty in Perfection

In The Four Stages of Cruelty, Hogarth addresses the evolution of violence and the moral dangers of unchecked brutality. The series follows Tom Nero, whose youthful maltreatment of animals escalates into severe crimes. By Plate III, Cruelty in Perfection, Nero has murdered his pregnant mistress and is apprehended in a rural churchyard. A pistol and stolen goods lie at his feet, signaling his descent into criminality. Hogarth surrounds him with an enraged crowd and the body of the woman he has killed, creating a composition filled with tension and moral accusation. The plate warns viewers that a society that tolerates small acts of cruelty fosters larger, more destructive ones.

The Reward of Cruelty

The final plate, The Reward of Cruelty, presents Nero’s dissected corpse in a surgical theater following his execution. Hogarth’s unflinching portrayal of the brutal post-mortem punishment mirrors the cruelty Nero inflicted on others. The scene functions as a grim moral lesson: a life steeped in violence ultimately leads to humiliation, suffering, and premature death. Hogarth uses the horror of the spectacle to reinforce his belief in moral responsibility and social deterrence.

An Election Entertainment

Political satire forms another significant facet of Hogarth’s oeuvre. An Election Entertainment, the first engraving based on Hogarth’s final painted cycle, The Humours of an Election, lampoons the corruption and disorder of 18th-century British politics. Inspired by the Oxfordshire election of 1754, the scene depicts Whig candidates courting votes amidst bribery, drunkenness, and chaos. Hogarth copies the painted composition with precision but enriches the print with sharper satirical emphasis. The work condemns political manipulation and highlights the fragility of civic virtue—concerns that echo across his entire career.

William Hogarth’s “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism”

With Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism, Hogarth turns his satirical lens toward religion. The print presents a frenzied congregation overcome by hysteria, false visions, and clerical manipulation. Through exaggerated expressions and a crowded, turbulent composition, Hogarth critiques blind faith and the exploitation of religious devotion for personal or institutional gain. He suggests that fanaticism and ignorance are as harmful to society as the vices he condemns. Hogarth’s legacy remains as proof of the power of art that not only entertains but also reveals, provokes, and reforms the society it depicts. From political corruption to domestic hypocrisy and religious fanaticism, his works remain striking and relevant over time.

Claude Lorrain spent most of his working life in Rome. There he made his obsessive studies of the effects of light on the Campagna region. The scenes for many of his paintings deal with classical myth and history. His work is typified by the contrast of the eternity of nature and the human realm subject to time and decay. Dealing with mortality, his oeuvre is often remarked upon for its elegiac and emotional qualities.

Who Was Claude Lorrain?

Claude Lorrain, born Claude Gellée (c. 1600-82), was a Frenchman who spent almost all of his career in Rome. He was the most renowned landscape artist working in Italy, and helped to elevate the genre previously considered a lower form of art. All Claude scholars refer to an emotional impact intrinsic to his depictions of nature—often panoramic vistas containing in miniature the actions of humans. Hilliard T. Goldfarb writes of Claude’s landscapes as “a poetic means of expression” and as “informal, lyrical, and atmospheric…” A later landscape artist, John Constable, once remarked that Claude Lorrain was “the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw,” adding that he painted “the calm sunshine of the heart.”

So, what is it in Claude’s art that has provoked such praise? Can “mere” landscape art have an emotional impact? And, if so, how does Claude achieve this through his depictions of nature? This article will try to look at Claude’s art both generally and specifically by choosing three of his paintings to elucidate the general observations.

Nature and the Human

Claude’s paintings were classified as lontananze by his Italian contemporaries. Literally and roughly, this term means “distant views.” Indeed, most of his canvases portray a panoramic nature that progresses from the usual copse of trees in the foreground through to a vast natural space populated mostly by trees and water. Claude’s nature as he represents it is not only literally distant. It is an unknowable, mysterious, and eternal counterpoint to the human events that he portrays. The mortality and contingency of humans and their deeds are implicit.

These landscapes play on the tension of presence and remoteness. On the one hand, there is a sublime nature, while on the other this sublimity relativizes even the monumental cultural achievements of humanity—often embodied in the architectural elements overtaken or re-taken by nature.

Lontananze not only describes these “distant views” of nature but it also refers to the separation from, or diminution of, human affairs. There is almost always a distance from the narratives, the overt subjects of the paintings. There is no direct embroilment of the viewer nor an emotional affect from these events, yet Claude’s paintings are reputed for their emotional impact. This emotional value consists in the physical and conceptual diminution of the human within the context of the richness of an often-silent nature.

Nature is the pure eternal presence that the artist opposes to the mutable, the mortal, and the transient. But nature is not always unheeding in Claude. There are works that evince the “pathetic fallacy”: a seeming ascription to natural elements of human attributes, as some paintings share in the ructions of some of the narratives. However, this “persona” of nature—which could be termed “empathy” to a certain degree—remains the universal and indestructible context for finite actions by finite beings.

Hubert Damisch has written on the mechanics of the organization of the Claudean picture space and has noted that the artist placed his horizon and vanishing point two-fifths of the way up the picture plane. This, as Damisch says, is slightly lower than the canonical Albertian Renaissance recommendation of placing the vanishing point at the height of a fictive man with his feet on the baseline. In placing his own lower, Claude subverts the antique and Renaissance conception of “man as the measure of all things.” Claudean nature, instead, overwhelms the understanding of humanity and relegates it to the status of a mere factor of nature.

At root, his depiction of nature in itself constrains nature, and its sublimity and diminution of the works of humanity is his own oblique attempt at the mastery of the illusionistic representation of nature. In effect, he is re-casting humanity as central, though inflected and complicated by mortality.

Time and History

Marcel Roethlisberger has written of Claude’s manifold references to the passage of time. He notes that natural elements such as the sun, clouds, rippling water, the goings of peasants and animals, birds in flight, cascades of water, and the relative states of buildings all index what is seen as Claude’s overriding theme, the motives of which Roethlisberger says are “blended together ever so harmoniously.” Roethlisberger cites Claude’s incidental weather as connoting history, destiny, the seasons, and the centuries descending down to the artist’s time from the “gilded antiquity” that he paints.

Yet, it is in the combination of Claude’s incidental weather with antiquity that a mutability is established within antiquity. These scenes—often mythological—are not only a rendering of a relentless and irretrievable time, but perhaps also a visual comment on historiography, or the fitting of the past into a story, itself. Each repetition of these historical and/or mythological events re-makes the event by virtue of the subjective choices of the narrator/artist. These are depictions of the process of story-telling integral to history writing.

For example, Claude clothes his accounts—his figures and internal stories—in landscapes that are at once empathetic and relativistic of the perceived “momentousness” of human action. Sometimes, the trees sway under storm clouds, as in Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, as if the war of the Latins and the newly arrived Trojan party will rack nature itself. But the profuse richness and growth of that nature is in contrast to human action. Nature is the inexorable, the eternal, and makes minnows of protagonists in Claude’s oeuvre.

Further, Roethlisberger says that the vast Claudean spaces are “inseparable from the expanses of time” and that this is the source of the deep emotional resonance with these paintings. Time’s emotional impact automatically dredges up the fact of mortality, of growth and decay, of the emergence and dissolution of cultures and empires. Most of all—given the many exquisite representations of countrysides and ports, the mythological antique “golden age” of peace and plenty is invoked with nostalgia. Claude’s images of landscapes in peace, or in turbulence that mirrors human affairs only serve to reinforce the nostalgia for that mythic and impossible era.

Claude’s images are just that, however: images. They appeal to and incite visual delectation and emotional investment through visuality. Although they almost always take subjects from mythological or biblical narratives, they are largely not to be “read” as narratives or mere visual renditions of a text. They can be read as such but, in exclusively so doing, the spectator loses the main thread of Claude’s painting. Epochal or foundational events are made minuscule in scale and importance. Claude does not so much paint these events as he paints the journey of time which both contextualizes and qualifies them—and thereby transcends them.

Claude obsessively studied his craft in the Roman Campagna—the site of many of these epochal events in the classical canon of myth. This landscape, an eternal presence from which the stories of Aeneas and Psyche had long since faded, would have been to Claude suggestive of the irrevocability of time, as well as a reminder of these stories.

It is also instructive to know that Claude mainly painted at dawn and dusk in the Campagna. Whether he grew obsessed with time because of this or his obsession with time prompted this is immaterial. The fact remains that, as Roethlisberger says, the dimension of time is more integral to his work than it is to any other artist of his generation or to any artist of any generation.

Roethlisberger writes that the artistic convention of the representation of time as a “static entity” is subverted by the sense of “flux” and passage in the works of Claude. In essence, he is right. Indeed, not only was time’s stasis seen in much art and thought before and after Claude’s era, but it was frequently personified, as, for example, an old man, as the dancing seasons, as destiny, etc. However, Claudean time is not typified by the notion of “flux.” The artist certainly painted time as passage, as an irretrievable flow—and often literalizing this characteristic in the painting of rivers, streams, and bridges. The implication of disorder intrinsic to the concept of flux is inimical to Claude’s portrayal of time. Even in Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia, where he depicts a violent act that will lead to war and storm clouds roiling in the sky prefiguring that war, Claude’s restricted color palette and narrow tonal range ensures the unity of his conception of time and nature. The character of the unified tonality puts the action into a context of being absorbed by the passage of time.

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba (1648)

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba was commissioned by the general of the Papal army, Frédéric Maurice de la Tour d’Auvergne, Duc de Bouillon. Its biblical subject is the departure of the Queen of Sheba on a visit to King Solomon in order to trial his wisdom.

Our sighting of the queen in this port scene is distant. If the viewer is to be an implicit presence within this pictorial world, it makes two possibilities. One marks a social division—if we are to be included among the men loading luggage, or perhaps with the reclining man of the left foreground looking over with his hand raised to shield his eyes from the morning sun. On the other hand, and on the other side of the foreground, we could be associated with the two standing figures that are in discussion. These two men have a higher social status and are dressed accordingly. Their discussion is analogous to that of the spectators of the picture itself—except that the two men are presumably anticipating the future event of the meeting of the monarchs.

If the viewer is not implied to be present within the scene, his or her distance from the queen and her retinue shows the temporal passage from the mythic time of antiquity down to Claude’s time, and beyond to ours. Futurity is a theme that pervades the scene and is also exemplified by the rising sun. The sun is almost exactly central in the composition and, just as it illuminates this scene, Claude represents this biblical story through his mastery of tone and the compositional division of left from right.

The scene is both based on the mythic Christian past and the imagined; Sheba’s embarkation is not described in the relevant text, 1 Kings, chapter 10. Therefore, it is a fabrication upon a fabrication, but Claude actualizes it in a representation complicated by the sense of immateriality evidenced in the pervasive direct sunlight and the decomposition of the architecture of the left foreground. As is usual for Claude, the transience of human activity, of even its artifacts, is highlighted, especially by the dominance of the morning sky that is intensified by the low horizon line.

The image is replete with vistas that index time and humanity’s place in it. Passages, porticoes, and stairs all direct the attention to the immateriality of the works of humanity. The Corinthian columns of the left foreground are ruins, reclaimed by time and nature. There is a left-right dichotomy in the composition of the picture that again signals the mortality of human cultures. The dilapidated Corinthian column on the left marks the future of the pristinely kept royal palace from which the queen emerges. The upper reaches of the clouds have a formation that loosely resembles a natural pediment, linking the two sides of the composition, from the palace to the broken colonnade. This presages nature’s reclamation of all products of human imagination and craft.

The rippling of the waters of the port is a typical motif used by Claude to point to the quick succession of time’s moments. As Roethlisberger observes, Claude’s conception is very aptly summed up by the antique Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses: “Moments of time flee and follow, and are ever new.”

An alternative interpretation of Claude’s painting of Sheba setting out in the morning sun is that it refers to the prospective encounter with Solomon. The queen embarked to test and query the king’s reputed knowledge and justice. The book of Kings relates this encounter, and that the queen was so impressed that she presented Solomon with rare spices and 150 gold coins. In the context of the story, Claude’s rising sun can be seen as a premonition and a manifestation of Solomon’s enlightenment. However, when making this cautious relation, we must acknowledge that Claude was widely seen in his own time as “unlettered” and made the visual aspect of his art predominate. But that would not preclude the artist from at least hearing the story related to him, if he did not read it himself.

Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid (1664)

Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid is a painting from later in Claude’s long career and was commissioned by one of his most faithful patrons, Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna. The subject is taken from the ancient poet Apuleius, who relates the love between Cupid, a god of love, and the nymph, Psyche. Scholars disagree as to whether Claude’s painting marks a time before they meet or after Cupid’s abandonment of Psyche. Apuleius writes that Psyche is wafted by Zephyrus, the god of the west wind, to a “deep valley, where she was laid in a soft grassy bed of most sweet and fragrant flowers.” After she rests, she sees “in the middest and very heart of the woods, well nigh at the fall of the river…a princely edifice.”

The pictorial evidence for Claude’s scene being after the abandonment seems compelling. The entire image—with its muted color, along with the expression and pose of Psyche—is clad in a melancholy that both looks back to her loss and forward to her death. Psyche has been rejected; Apuleius writes that she grieved the loss before drowning herself in the nearest running water.

The evening light is muted in Claude’s image. The setting sun is low, and the clouds are  darkening over the castle. All of this, along with Psyche’s pose, is a traditional artistic expression of melancholy—with her elbow on her knee and the back of her hand under her chin referring to closure and valediction. The valediction is two-fold and moves from past to future—a farewell to Cupid and the imminent farewell to life. In her depression, Psyche looks out to the waters that she will die in, and which are painted in dark hues of greens and blues that convey the coldness of death.

Psyche, from Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid, by Claude Lorrain, 1664. Source: The National Gallery

Psyche’s position is encircled by trees and bushes. Her fate seems inevitable to her. The last of the evening light ebbs from the grassy glade in front of her. As surely as the day closes, so will her eyes for the final time. Her eyes are wide, as if this is the moment of her resolution, and she is about to rise from her melancholic state to commit the ultimate act. The palace is also a fortress and symbolizes the intractable will of Cupid and the resultant finality of Psyche’s fate.

El Greco began as an icon painter in Crete and ended as Spain’s most singular voice. His elongated figures, fearless color, and mystical light were first mocked, then mined by modernists. These nine works mark the turns: Italy’s training, Toledo’s breakthroughs, and the late visionary canvases that changed how painters think about space and emotion. Together, they show why El Greco feels contemporary centuries later.

1. Saint Luke Painting the Virgin: Early Crete Years

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known simply as El Greco (Italian for the Greek), was born in Crete in 1541. During the thirteenth century, Crete—being part of the Byzantine Empire for centuries—was taken over by Venice. In terms of artistic life, Venetian influence brought opportunities for a more diverse education and more structured working conditions for artists in the form of painters’ guilds. As a child from a wealthy family, El Greco had the chance to receive a high-quality education based on Greek and Latin literature and the Byzantine tradition of painting.

El Greco started his artistic career as a painter of Orthodox Christian icons. It is unclear if he was Catholic or Orthodox himself, but the mixed influence of the two traditions was evident even in the minuscule amount of his surviving works from this period. In the late 1560s, El Greco decided to move to Venice.

• Why it matters: Reveals El Greco’s roots in Byzantine icon painting, which were later transformed by his time in Venice and Toledo
• Hallmarks: Gold ground, hieratic pose, icon layout carried into later altarpieces
• Where it is today: Versions and attributions vary across European collections; attribution remains debated

2. Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple: El Greco in Italy

Venice was the center of artistic activity of the time, specifically for Greek artists looking to secure more commissions and develop their skills. Despite unique opportunities, the city could not distinguish between its many artists. Along with the legendary El Greco, Venice had a dozen other men under the same pseudonym, some of them working in the workshops of major artists like Titian. This poses a significant challenge for El Greco experts attempting to understand his Italian period.

The painting Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple is the perfect example of El Greco absorbing the influence of great Italian masters. The painting itself hides a hint of that: four figures in the bottom right corner represent Titian, Michelangelo, Giulio Clovio (an illustrator and El Greco’s close friend), and Raphael. However, despite obvious influence, El Greco was ruthless when it came to the Old Masters, claiming they knew nothing about painting.

• Why it matters: El Greco’s Italian breakthrough, absorbing Titian and Michelangelo while asserting a personal voice
• Hallmarks: Muscular poses, Venetian color, quoting Old Masters in the foreground group
• Where it is today: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis

3. Assumption of the Virgin: Arrival in Spain

El Greco’s competitive personality and his performative disdain for the great Italian masters did not make him the most adored and desirable artist in Italy. Moreover, Italy was already crowded with talented artists, so El Greco decided to move to Spain. The legendary painting Assumption of the Virgin was El Greco’s first work in Spain and the one that brought him considerable success in the country. Apart from the Virgin, the top part of the painting featured the image of the Pieta with God the Father holding Jesus instead of his mother.

El Greco’s bold use of color and proportion led many art historians to believe the artist suffered from some kind of illness or condition. Some believed he had astigmatism, which made him see objects and figures unnaturally elongated, while others decided the artist was colorblind, thus explaining the unexpectedly bright and intense colors. However, all these assumptions are shattered by El Greco’s secular portraits of his commissioners. In these pieces, he abandoned his love for dramatically distorted limbs and faces in favor of a more conventional style and colors, fully expected in paintings like these.

• Why it matters: First major Spanish commission that establishes El Greco in Toledo
• Hallmarks: Vertical thrust, blazing reds and blues, two-tier heaven and earth composition
• Where it is today: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

4. Saint Peter & Saint Paul: Inside El Greco’s Studio

In Toledo, El Greco soon created his new studio. Finally, he became known for his unique style, so he was sought after instead of being seen as yet another Greek painter in Venice. In his workshop, he painted miniature copies of his existing works and offered them as a catalog to prospective commissioners.

While El Greco frequently worked with original ideas and compositions, his most stable source of income relied on copies of the works he had made before. He painted the same image of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at least three times, adjusting the color scheme to the client’s preferences. However, his most popular subject was Saint Francis, which existed in more than 120 variations, some of which were identical.

• Why it matters: A prime example of the studio’s repeatable “catalog” works tailored to patrons
• Hallmarks: Elongated saints, charged color, small variations across multiple versions
• Where it is today: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

5. The Disrobing of Christ: Toledo Cathedral Dispute

As a painter, El Greco struggled with following orders, despite being highly regarded in Toledo. He regularly ignored his clients’ wishes after coming up with something unexpected and exciting to paint. Not all commissioners agreed to pay for his experiments, so El Greco sued them. In trials like these, the final verdict depended not on a judge but on a group of other painters invited to assess the plaintiff’s work.

The Disrobing of Christ, painted for the Toledo Cathedral, was an example of El Greco’s unconventional approach. During the late Renaissance era, followed by emotionally intense Mannerism and Baroque, Spanish art had a distinctive focus on violence and blood, emphasizing the suffering of Jesus and Christian martyrs. The disrobing of Christ, therefore, was an unpopular subject since it only anticipated torture. But the main offense taken by the Spanish public was not in the absence of gore, but in the layout of figures. El Greco painted Christ lower than his tormentors, and such disrespect was the reason for the Toledo Cathedral to decrease the payment threefold.

• Why it matters: Tests Spanish taste with an audacious composition that lowers Christ among captors
• Hallmarks: Saturated crimson, compressed crowd, dramatic upward gaze
• Where it is today: Cathedral of Toledo, Sacristy, Toledo

6. The Penitent Mary Magdalene: Repetition and Icon Memory

Penitent Mary Magdalene was one of the most popular subjects for El Greco, repainted and sold many times. Despite the constant presence of female figures like Magdalene or the Virgin Mary in his religious works, El Greco’s secular paintings never included women. The only exception was the portrait of his lover Jeronima de Las Cuevas, whom he never married, despite having a son together; however, some experts question the portrait’s attribution to El Greco.

Surprisingly, for an artist of his age and time, El Greco had no interest in realistic body proportions and anatomy. Under the complex draperies of rich tones and textures, there were no actual bodies, no limbs, torsos, bones, or muscles, only shapeless clouds of smoke. He treated facial features with the same indifference. Despite their abundance in his compositions, El Greco made no attempts to make them recognizable. The same set of facial features repeated on and on in his religious paintings. Some art experts believe the reason was El Greco’s past occupation as an icon painter in Greece. In the Byzantine tradition, faces hardly mattered, since they were replaced with attributes and symbols.

• Why it matters: Best-selling subject that shows how icon habits meet Counter-Reformation emotion
• Hallmarks: Luminous skin, stormy background, drapery that abstracts the body beneath
• Where it is today: Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

7. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz: Two-Zone Vision

One of the most famous works of El Greco, showcasing his set of skills, was The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. The count of Orgaz, or Don Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, was not El Greco’s contemporary but a town mayor who died more than two hundred years before the painting was made. The mayor introduced a yearly tax collected from Toledo residents to decorate the local church.

Two hundred years later, the tax became such a heavy burden for the locals that they refused to pay it. Thus, the parish priest asked El Greco to remind them of their duty by retelling the legend of the Count of Orgaz, who was so holy that Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine descended to assist with his burial. The painting consisted of two panels. The bottom one showed the actual burial, and the top showed the Count ascending into heaven. The complex composition demonstrated El Greco’s knowledge of Dutch group portraiture—the finest example of the style, allowing him to arrange dozens of people in a single composition.

• Why it matters: Signature masterpiece fusing a civic legend with a celestial vision
• Hallmarks: Split composition of earth and heaven, lifelike portraits, ecstatic light above
• Where it is today: Iglesia de Santo Tomé, Toledo

8. Laocoön: El Greco’s Only Myth

The Trojan priest Laocoön was the only one who warned the Trojans against accepting the gift of a giant horse and begged them to set it on fire. As a punishment, the same gods Laocoon worshipped sent giant serpents that devoured him and his sons. Laocoon’s agony was the only known mythical subject to be painted by El Greco, revealing an unexpected dimension. The Trojan Horse in the painting is not a wooden structure but a living horse with red hair.

A red horse, according to the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptical finale of the New Testament, was the sign of the Second Seal being open—one of the seven seals representing stages of the world’s end and the arrival of the Final Judgment. The figure riding the red horse is the second Horseman of the Apocalypse, representing war.  Thus, from a pagan priest, Laocoön turns into a Christ-like figure sacrificed by his own gods, left to watch the destruction of his world from afar.

• Why it matters: Turns a classical tale into an apocalyptic Christian meditation
• Hallmarks: Serpentine bodies, visionary sky, Revelation “red horse” symbolism
• Where it is today: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

9. The Opening of the Fifth Seal and the Legacy of El Greco

Despite the prominence of El Greco’s work during his lifetime, he was ridiculed and forgotten soon after his death. He did not leave behind a group of followers nor trained assistants, except for his son, who never achieved the same success.

The surprising recovery of El Greco’s legacy happened in the nineteenth century, when the views on painting started to change radically. Expressive qualities of art began to mean more than its consistency with the canons of what was acceptable. Paul Cezanne, among others, was enamored and obsessed with El Greco, borrowing color schemes from his works, while Picasso and Modigliani directly quoted him in their compositions. El Greco’s visible indifference towards the laws of physics, anatomy, and proportion could have made him a true star of the twentieth-century Expressionist movement, yet they turned him into an underappreciated master of his age.

• Why it matters: A touchstone for modernists who prized expression over strict narrative order
• Hallmarks: Fractured space, ecstatic gestures, blazing chroma
• Where it is today: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York