No better than time than the present to dive into Will and Ariel Durant's, The Story of Civilization.
Narrating Western history over 11 volumes, 10,000 pages, 4 mil words, & 375 hours of Kindle reading hours, I couldn't be more delighted.
Will file my favorite passages here 👇
The Victorian critic and artist John Ruskin believed all beauty comes from nature. Look closely at his painting of a Bleinheim Orange apple (1873), and you'll see how Ruskin's lighting and shadow animate and dramatise a simple object.
Eggs, fresh bread, a cool glass of wine, and a flower to rest your eyes on ~ I like the simplicity of 17th century German still-life specialist Georg Flegel’s ‘Snack with Fried Eggs’ (1630), State Gallery Aschaffenburg
'Still life of asparagus.' (1697) Adriaen Coorte's still lifes set against a plain dark background, are enormously appealing to the modern eye, his work fell into obscurity in the 18thC and 19thC; a reappraisal about his career was published in the 1950s.