Recent stories of note:
“Long-Lost Rubens Painting of Jesus Christ’s Crucifixion Discovered in a Paris Mansion”
Ella Feldman, Smithsonian Magazine
Some 1,500 painting, and 10,000 other works, including drawings and tapestries, are attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and his workshop. Still, it is not every day that a new work by the artist surfaces, as happened recently in Paris, when a French auctioneer identified the master’s hand in a painting during a routine property visit. The work in question, a crucifixion scene measuring forty-two by twenty-nine inches and dating to 1613, shows Christ twisting in agony and bleeding on the Cross. The most strikingly Baroque feature of the image is the stormy and obscure background, which contrasts wonderfully with the luminosity of Christ’s body. In 1610s, Rubens was revolutionizing Northern European painting by experimenting with the nascent Baroque style, which, though evident here, is manifest above all in the artist’s most celebrated treatment of the crucifixion, The Elevation of the Cross (1610), now in Antwerp Cathedral.
“Voices from the chorus”
Peter Thonemann, The Times Literary Supplement
Athens, 403 B.C., a new book by Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard on the brutal oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants that briefly ruled Athens after the city’s catastrophic defeat in the Peloponnesian War in 404 B.C., completely reframes our understanding of one of the most notorious events in ancient history, as Peter Thonemann writes in his review. After the expulsion of the tyrants and the restoration of democracy, a broad amnesty swept under the rug much of the particulars of the oligarchical regime. All the blame was pinned on a few scapegoats, such as Critias, a former associate of Socrates. Faced with such a deliberately confused historical landscape, Azoulay and Ismard have adopted an unusual but seemingly fruitful approach: taking a cue from Aristotle, they compare the key players in the “democratic crisis” of 404–03, with their shifting political affiliations, to Athenian choruses, which were ephemeral associations that could sing a comedy one day and a tragedy the next. It seems the art of political flip-flop is as old as democracy itself.
“Reviving the Study of Western Civilization”
James Hankins, Law & Liberty
When it comes to the Western canon, while much ink has been spilled on the prevalence of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in American universities, a related and equally pressing problem is the deliberately manufactured ignorance of what Western civilization actually is. As James Hankins notes in his article on the disappearance of college-level Western civilization courses, only sixteen of the top fifty American universities even offered “Western Civ” courses as an option in 2011. It is no surprise that “recent generations of Westerners believe that the West is uniquely evil,” if they “have been taught nothing at all about it,” Hankins writes. If students can only judge the West by its shadow, projected on the back wall of the classroom by tenured sophists, who will escape indoctrination? Hankins’s recently published first volume of the monumental textbook The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition may serve as a guide to those who seek a way out of the cave to discover the light of the West still glimmering around us.
