In Cicerone, A guide to the enjoyment of works of art in Italy, a milestone in the history of art, Jacob Burckhardt admits that in 1855 in the whole of Italy he does not know of paintings by Antonello da Messina that can “definitely be attributed to him apart from the portrait of a man with (...)

"But what will they say?", the American magnate Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) asked while standing in front of his sublime works of art. He saw them as “living entities” capable of communicating with the viewer pausing to contemplate them from one of the sofas in the elegant, new building between (...)