Column

Ben’s Column: Enjoying a mandorla

Ben sets his sights on new frontiers of the navel — and sometimes beyond. The mosaics of the early Christian churches at Ravenna are some of the few surviving Byzantine mosaics of their era. Ravenna’s position at the outskirts of the empire, territory later lost to the Lombards, shielded it from the iconoclastic movements of … [Read more…]

Ben’s Column: Renaissance Man

Ben sets his sights on new frontiers of the navel — and sometimes beyond. One professor of Renaissance art, visiting the Stanford Palazzo, presented on a project I found fascinating and disturbing. He was trying to use 3D room-scanning technology to “digitize” Renaissance-era buildings in Florence, and in the process restore the original art that … [Read more…]