It doesn’t take particularly long to be impressed by the paintings of Johannes Vermeer even today, three and a half centuries after he painted him. But an understanding of how he achieved the particular visual effects that still inspire appreciation around the world comes only after spending a bit more time with his work, ideally in the company of a more knowledgeable viewer. Starting in the spring of this year, you’ll be able to spend time with nearly all of that work — no fewer than 25 of the 34 paintings unambiguously attributed to him — at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. “With loans from all over the world,” says the Rijksmuseum’s site, “this promises to be the largest Vermeer exhibition ever.”

“The Rijksmuseum’s exhibition in 2023 will include masterpieces such as The Girl with a Pearl Earring (Mauritshuis, The Hague), The Geographer (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main), Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) and Woman Holding a Balance (The National Gallery of Art, Washington […]

Raise a glass to the city of Dion on the Eastern slopes of Mount Olympus, considered by the ancient Greeks a divine location, where Zeus held sway.

And while we’re at it, raise a glass to Zeus’ son, Dionysus the god of fertility and theater, and most famously, wine:

…hail to you, Dionysus, god of abundant clusters! Grant that we may come again rejoicing to this season, and from that season onwards for many a year. – The Homeric hymn to Dionysus 

In the summer of 1987, archaeologists working at an excavation site near the modern village of Dion unearthed a mosaic of thousands of stone tessarae depictng “ivy-crowned Dionysus, the loud-crying god, splendid son of Zeus and glorious Semele,” raising a drinking horn as he rides nude in a chariot pulled by sea panthers.

1800 some years earlier, it had adorned the floor of a sumptuous villa’s banquet hall.

The villa was destroyed by fire, possibly as the result of an earthquake, but a layer of rich Dion mud preserved the mosaic in […]

Last month, we delved into a proposal to use digital technology to clone the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Marbles currently housed in the British Museum.

The hope is that such uncanny facsimiles might finally convince museum Trustees and the British government to return the originals to Athens.

Today, we’ll take a closer look at just how these treasures of antiquity, known to many as the Elgin marbles, wound up so far afield.

The most obvious culprit is Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, who initiated the takeover while serving as Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1798-1803.

Prior to setting sail for this posting, he hatched a plan to assemble a documentary team who would sketch and create plaster molds of the Parthenon marbles for the eventual edification of artists and architects back home. Better yet, he’d get the British government to pay for it.

The British government, eying the massive price tag of such a proposal, passed.

So Elgin used some of his heiress wife’s fortune to finance the project himself, hiring landscape painter Giovanni Battista Lusieri – described by […]

We know that Neil deGrasse Tyson was something of a wunderkind during his high school years. If you’re an OC regular, you’ve read all about how Carl Sagan personally recruited Tyson to study with him at Cornell. Deftly, politely, the young Tyson declined and went to Harvard.

There’s perhaps another side of the precocious Tyson you might not know as much about. The athletic side. While a student at The Bronx High School of Science, Tyson (class of 1976) wore basketball sneakers belonging to the Knick’s Walt “Clyde” Frazier. He ran an impressive 4:25 mile. And he captained the school’s wrestling team, during which time he conjured up a new-fangled wrestling move. In professional wrestling, Ric Flair had the dreaded Figure Four Leg Lock, and Jimmy Snuka, a devastating Superfly Splash. Tyson? He had the feared “Double Tidal Lock.” He explains and demonstrates the physics-based move in the video below, originally recorded at the University of Indianapolis.

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Great news for Open Culture readers. Taschen, the publisher of beautiful art books, is running its biannual warehouse sale. It starts today and runs through Sunday, February 5. This sale gives you the chance to buy art books at nicely discounted prices–anywhere from 25% to 75% off. Here’s a list of some notable picks, and remember that the books tend to sell out quickly:

• Berlin 1920s
• Japanese Woodblock Prints
• The Star Wars Archives. 1977–1983
• The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
• Dalí, Tarot
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Leonardo. The Complete Paintings and Drawings
• Warhol and Basquiat
• Hokusai. Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
• The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries
• Egypt, People, Gods & Pharaohs
• Covers, Jazz Records
• The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock
• William Blake Complete Drawings of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’
• The Stanley Kubrick Archives
• Bauhaus
• Film Noir

See all of the books in the sale here.

Note that Taschen is a partner of ours. So if you purchase […]