Roman

Wednesday

Peter Jones

How to paint like the ancient Greeks

From our UK edition

Last week David Hockney was cited as an example of a great English artist who insisted on working, like ancient Greek sculptors, in a well-established tradition. But how did Greek painters work? Let Pliny the Elder remind us. According to Pliny, Apelles (fl. c. 330 bc) from the island of Cos ‘surpassed all painters before and after him’. Court painter to Alexander the Great, he published volumes on the principles of painting – he favoured a palette of white, black, red and yellow – and was modest enough to recognise excellence in others: indeed, he thought a certain Protogenes his equal (he bought his paintings to sell as his own), except in one respect – that he (Apelles) ‘knew when to remove his hand from the picture’.

Friday

Peter Frankopan

The real ‘Thucydides Trap’ Beijing and Washington must avoid

These are good times to be a scholar of the classical world. Last summer, Donald Trump issued an order that all federal architecture needed to be “beautiful,” noting that the Founding Fathers “wanted America’s public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue.” George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had therefore “consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, DC, on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome.” It was time to go back to these principles, said Trump. From now on “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings” in the District of Columbia.