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By Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University How do artists decide whether time, death, or liberty should be personified as male or female? One suggestion comes from linguistics.  For example, Roman Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: […]

February 14 is Valentine’s Day! Of course you know it’s the day in which you are supposed to express love for your sweetheart with flowers, candy, or greeting cards. And you probably know that it’s purportedly a holiday to honor an early Christian saint named Valentine. But did you know that there was more than one […]

Black History Month is observed every February in the United States and Canada. What better time to remind our readers of the many excellent resources on the topic available in the Artstor Digital Library? Black history: Image of the Black in Western Art A systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been perceived […]

Two things have been tearing through the Artstor staff recently – a nagging cold that seems to be felling us department by department, and a fascination with the British television show Downton Abbey. The series follows the lives of an aristocratic family and their servants in a fictional Yorkshire country estate. The first season is […]

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a pivotal figure in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Among his many achievements, King led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses; planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of African-Americans as voters; and directed the 1963 march on Washington […]

The Year of the Dragon begins January 23rd, marking the end of the winter season. The traditional Chinese calendar is based on a combination of lunar and solar movements; the year begins with the night of the first new moon of the lunar New Year and ends on the 15th day. This year is signified […]

The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua (better known as simply Pantagruel) was the first in a series of five satirical books by the Franciscan monk and physician François Rabelais chronicling the outrageous adventures of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel […]

Happy 87th birthday to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch from ARTstor and artist Dmitry Borshch! Mayor Koch recently posed for this portrait, which is now included in the Catalog of American Portraits maintained by The National Portrait Gallery. View more of Dmitry Borsch’s work in the ARTstor Digital Library.

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss noted that we often reserve rich foods for celebrations: “These are some of the delicacies which one would not buy and consume alone without a vague feeling of guilt.” And guilty we would feel if we were to celebrate the passing of another year without […]

“I’m trying to capture the architecture, the play of light on stone, and the beauty of the church. I try to find a way to express the spirit of the church. Sometimes I’m just moved by the shapes and the patterns.” PJ McKey “I’m trying to find hints of what moved the people who built […]