Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Las Meninas (detail), by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Arts & Letters

Volume III, Number 2 | spring 2010

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Preamble

Lady in a Veil

By Lewis H. Lapham

Despite being told that art is somehow sacred, it’s better to take a naive delight in the thing itself.

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Beauty Is Shoe

By Wendy Steiner

Is the model a subject, or is the subject a model?

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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c. 335 BC | Athens

Story Line

Aristotle devises a perfect tragedy.More

c. 550 BC | Athens

By the Scroll

Peter Quince picks the parts.More

1853 | Venice

Everlasting Laws

“To banish imperfection is to destroy expression.”More

Charts & Graphs

Working Methods

Where writers got their best work done.

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American artist Jack Tworkov.

Lewis Lapham at his desk

Painted portrait of English poet John Milton.

Writer Henry James.

Photograph of American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler.

Depiction of Greek philosopher Plato.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480

Portrait of young Arthur Schopenhauer wearing a brown suit and a cravat.

German philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno.

Arthur Schopenhauer & Theodor Adorno

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