Delivered at the Opening of the Royal Academy, January 2, 1769. THE ADVANTAGES PROCEEDING FROM THE INSTITUTION OF A ROYAL ACADEMY.—HINTS OFFERED TO THE CONSIDERATION...

Winckelmann engages with the history and sublime suffering displayed in the epic Laocoön, an excerpt from his 1770

"It is not while we shrink, but while we defy, that we receive or convey the highest conceptions of the fate. There is no sublimity in the agony of terror. "

Courbet's "Realist Manifesto" accompanied his controversial, bold, and ultimately financially devastating "Exposition Courbet" — better known today as the "Pavilion of Realism." The exhibition...

A group of artists approached Courbet to head up a new studio — essentially to be their teacher. Courbet's response? A firm and characteristically...

Louis Leroy's 1874 review of the first Impressionist exhibition is the most famous — and most consequential — slam in art criticism history...

In 1885, James McNeill Whistler delivered what became known as the "Ten O'Clock Lecture" at Prince's Hall, Piccadilly. The timing was deliberate—late enough that...

The three-column, front-page publication of Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism in Le Figaro on February 20, 1909 was a masterful media coup ...

In 1913, Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov published their Rayonist and Futurist Manifesto, a defiant declaration of artistic independence ..

Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume IIExcerpt from the chapter on Brunelleschi by Giorgio Vasari, first published in 1550. "Many men...