What We Are Reading Today: ‘Tricks of the Light’ by Jonathan Crary

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Updated 30 May 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Tricks of the Light’ by Jonathan Crary

“Tricks of the Light” brings together essays by critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. 

The book is enhanced by several expansive essays on the unstable status of television, both amid its beginnings in the 1930s and then during its assimilation into new assemblages and networks in the 1980s and 90s.


What We Are Reading Today: Michelangelo and Titian

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Updated 06 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: Michelangelo and Titian

Author: William E. Wallace

In 1529, Michelangelo was in Venice when he first met Titian, Venice’s famed painter of princes, gods, and goddesses. Coming face-to-face with Titian’s drama-infused, richly colored works, the creator of David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling realized he had met a worthy opponent. Twenty-five years later, Titian came to Rome to paint the pope, and the two met again. Painting in the Vatican, Titian experienced the full power of Michelangelo’s work and vowed to surpass the achievements of his older contemporary.

Michelangelo and Titian is the untold story of history’s greatest artistic rivalry, a competition between two monumental figures more admiring of one another than either would ever admit. William Wallace brings the world of the 16th century to life, and in particular its culture of gossip and intrigue.

Wallace challenges the established narrative of this relationship as mostly one-sided, with the younger artist in competition with the reigning master.