Memento moris remind us that death is inevitable, nothing afterward is assured, and what we do in that crack of light between oblivions is our responsibility.
Ed Simon
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, a staff writer for LitHub, and the author of Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (2024).
Posted inArt
The Battle Between Halloween and Reformation Day
Launched on October 31, 1517, the Protestant Reformation broke not just with the Catholic Church but with all that’s dark and demonic, wanton and witchy.
Posted inBooks
The Beautiful Pagan Soul of Piero di Cosimo
A new book provides an ideal introduction to a Renaissance painter largely known only to specialists, but who was counted among the most important of his generation.
Posted inArt
Holbein the Younger Looked Death in the Eye
Death, in the artist’s imagination, is the oblivion that spares no one, regardless of what you have or haven’t done, regardless of who you are.
Posted inArt
How Lucas Cranach the Elder Went From Making Icons to Agitprop
The artist would develop a distinctly Protestant imagery that replaced sacredness with utility, functioning essentially as propaganda minister for Martin Luther.
Posted inArt
Lavinia Fontana, the Self-Fashioned Painter
The first woman to make her living from painting captured herself and other women in the ways they wished to be perceived.
Posted inOpinion
How Modern-Day Christian Iconoclasts Lost Their Heads
The vandal who beheaded Esther Strauss’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary in labor disregarded centuries-old depictions of the mother of God as just a mother.
Posted inArt
Hildegard von Bingen’s Eternal Garden
The 12th-century mystic continues to attract devotees among both Catholic clergy and New Age gurus, Christian traditionalists and radical feminists.
Posted inArt
Caravaggio Made Darkness Visible
In his violent, carnal visions, sparks of divinity may glow even from within the blackest confines of our fallen reality.
Posted inArt
Matthias Grünewald’s Gruesome Good Friday
The 16th-century “Isenheim Altarpiece” confronts us with the reality of suffering, violence, and death in a century where violence is both omnipresent and obscured.
Posted inArt
How Giuseppe Arcimboldo Made the Familiar Bizarre
The artist’s perplexing paintings should be viewed not as mere visual puzzles, but instantiations of an occult philosophy.
Posted inArt
Albrecht Dürer, a Humanist Messiah
He believed, and demonstrated, that individuals could ascend to divine realms of knowledge.