Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Kandice Rawlings
Leonardo da Vinci was born 562 years ago today, and we’re still fascinated with his life and work. It’s no real mystery why – he was an extraordinary person, a genius and a celebrity in his own lifetime. He left behind some remarkable artifacts in the form of paintings and writings and drawings on all manner of subjects.
By Kandice Rawlings
The Frick Collection in New York recently closed its Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis exhibition of fifteen seventeenth-century Dutch paintings on loan from the Hague museum, which is currently closed for remodeling. The show (which has already been to San Francisco, Atlanta, and Tokyo, and opens next in Bologna) was a blockbuster.
By Kandice Rawlings
The port city of Shanghai is poised to become another major center of the global art world, possibly even displacing Beijing as China’s artistic capital. Since founding a biennial and art fair in 1996 and 1997, respectively, major institutions supporting the visual arts have sprung up or expanded.
By Kandice Rawlings
Saint Francis of Assisi died on this day in 1226, and when he was canonized just two years later, the fourth of October became his feast day. Even before his sainthood was official, St Francis was a popular figure among the faithful, and the religious order he had founded already had chapters throughout Europe.
By Kandice Rawlings
Summer is over, and it’s back-to-school season. Art students are heading back to their classrooms and studios, receiving a course of training that will help them become professional artists.
By Kandice Rawlings
For anyone who’s taken (and remembers) a survey course in Western art, today’s date surely brings to mind a canonical work — Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s Third of May, 1808. The picture’s fame can be traced both to Goya’s masterful portrayal of drama and political martyrdom, and to its position as one of the first modern depictions of war. Painted some six years after the events it commemorates, this picture, and the circumstances under which Goya painted it, speak to the political instabilities of 19th-century Europe and the resulting tensions these raised for many of its artists.
In support of Indies First, a campaign run by the American Booksellers Association that supports independent bookstores, we asked Oxford University Press USA staff what their favorite independent bookstores were.
Today is National Libraries Day in the United Kingdom, and hundreds of activities and events are taking place in public libraries of all shapes and sizes — from the multi-million pound Library of Birmingham, to the tiniest local libraries run by volunteers — in order to celebrate our wonderful librarians, and the libraries they run. To celebrate National Libraries Day, we asked a few of our staff what they love about public libraries.
Selfie – the Oxford Word of the Year for 2013 – is a neologism defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”.