A Curious Collection

Virgil’s poetry can make a landscape feel sheltered and a historical destiny seem immense. It also asks what happens to those excluded from that shelter or sacrificed to that destiny. Across shepherds’ songs, the labor of cultivation, and the wanderings of a defeated Trojan, he imagines people trying to preserve or establish a place in an unstable world. The beauty of the writing gives their efforts dignity, while its attention to loss prevents dignity from becoming an easy p

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, actor, and shareholder in a theatrical company whose work transformed the possibilities of dramatic language. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, he built his professional career in London while retaining close connections with his hometown. His exact birthday is unknown. April 23 is the traditional date, but the surviving parish register records his baptism on April 26. The distinction illustrates a recurring challenge in

Michelangelo Buonarroti was one of the defining artists of the Italian Renaissance. Born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni in Caprese on March 6, 1475, he worked as a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. Contemporaries called him “Il Divino”—the divine one—yet despite his mastery of several arts, Michelangelo regarded himself first as a sculptor. His family returned to Florence soon after his birth, and he spent part of his childhood in nearby Settignano, a villag

In a painting by Sandro Botticelli, a line can carry an entire scene. The curve of a shoulder leads into a streaming garment; interlaced hands give a dance its rhythm; a bowed head draws attention toward a child. His famous goddesses make these qualities immediately recognizable, but the same sensitivity to contour and gesture also shapes his Christian images, crowded narratives, and drawings of Dante’s otherworldly journey. Botticelli was born in Florence around 1445 and die

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, philologist, and teacher whose fiction helped reshape modern fantasy. Born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, in the then independent Orange Free State, now part of South Africa, he spent most of his life in England. His best-known books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, grew from interests that reached far beyond adventure: the histories of languages, the power of old stories, the pleasures of home, and the cost of losi

In Rembrandt’s The Syndics, an open book lies on the table, and several men look outward as though their work has been interrupted. One figure seems caught between sitting and standing. The painting makes a formal commission feel like an encounter: we have arrived among people already occupied with something, and their attention has turned toward us. That ability to make looking feel consequential runs through Rembrandt’s portraits, biblical scenes, drawings, and prints. [1]

In a scene preserved in the Analects, the powerful minister Ji Kangzi asks whether killing people who behave badly would make the rest good. Confucius directs attention instead to the minister’s own conduct. He compares the moral influence of those governing to wind and the people to grass: what happens above shapes what happens below. The exchange places an obligation on authority, while also revealing a political world in which influence flows chiefly from the top (Analects

A chess game acquires a second life when other people begin to study it. A move played under pressure becomes an example in a book, a position in a lesson, or a problem that later generations try to understand. Some games remain memorable because of a spectacular sacrifice. Others change the reputation of an opening, decide a championship, or reveal an unexpected way to defend. Their importance can lie in what happened at the board and in what players subsequently learned to

Maria Montessori made the ordinary details of a child’s day matter to educational thought. A chair that could be moved without help, a pitcher small enough to lift, an activity that could be repeated without interruption: such arrangements changed what children could attempt for themselves. Her classrooms gave practical form to a demanding question. How should adults organize the world so that children can become increasingly capable of acting within it? Born in Chiaravalle,

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The youngest of three sons, he grew up in a working-class family of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants from what is now Slovakia. His parents practiced Byzantine Catholicism, and his mother, Julia, encouraged his drawing. He studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, graduating in 1949 before moving to New York. His subsequent career would bring th

George Steiner devoted his life to literature while questioning what devotion to literature could accomplish. Europe’s achievements in poetry, philosophy, and music had coexisted with organized persecution and mass murder. A person could respond deeply to a work of art and still participate in cruelty. Steiner refused to let admiration for culture conceal that disturbing possibility. He also refused to abandon the works he loved because their readers had failed to become huma

At his estate in Périgord, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne worked in a tower library beneath ceiling beams painted with Greek and Latin maxims. The room offered solitude, but the book he wrote there kept returning to life beyond it: law courts, religious violence, friendship, family, travel, and illness. In the Essais, he made his own shifting judgments available for inspection. He wanted to learn how a person thinks when experience does not fit an inherited rule. Montaigne was bo

Geoffrey Chaucer, born in London in the early 1340s and traditionally said to have died on October 25, 1400, was a poet, courtier, diplomat, and royal administrator. He is often called the “Father of English Poetry” or the “Father of English Literature,” but these are later honorifics, not literal history. English literature existed long before him. Chaucer’s achievement was to expand its literary range and prestige to an extraordinary degree. He was the son of John Chaucer,

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most extraordinary figures of the Italian Renaissance. Born Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci on April 15, 1452, in or near Vinci, in Florentine territory, he became a painter, draftsman, engineer, anatomist, and investigator of nature. “Da Vinci” means “from Vinci.” Drawing united his many activities: it allowed him to study how things worked and make thought visible. Leonardo spent his early years around Vinci and was training in Andrea del Ver

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795, and died in Rome on February 23, 1821. He was twenty-five. His surviving poetry spans roughly six years; his public career lasted less than five. Keats is usually placed with Byron and Shelley in the second generation of English Romantic poets. Romanticism, however, was not a single creed. Its writers disagreed about politics, religion, nature, and the purpose of art. Keats's poems are sensuous but formally controlled. They a

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was one of cinema’s most influential directors, with a career that extended from silent filmmaking to the Hollywood of the 1970s. Born on August 13, 1899, in Leytonstone, then in Essex and now part of east London, he directed more than fifty feature films. His importance rests partly on his extraordinary command of the audience’s attention. A glance, an unanswered telephone, or an object held too tightly could acquire an urgency that dialogue alone cou

Athens and the Surviving Sources Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) lived through the ascendancy and the catastrophe of classical Athens. His adult life encompassed the age of Pericles, the Peloponnesian War, defeat by Sparta in 404 BCE, the violent government of the Thirty, and the restoration of democracy in 403. He left no philosophical writings, yet his conversations and death became central to the history of Western philosophy. In the portraits that survive, he asks people to acc

William Eggleston is an American photographer who helped transform how the art world understood color photography. He was born on July 27, 1939, in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up mainly in Sumner, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta. He became known for photographing ordinary surroundings: cars, streets, signs, houses, diners, grocery stores, empty rooms, household objects, and people encountered in everyday places. His subjects may appear simple, but his photographs often