HeyJaredReading Art
Reading Art is a newsletter that offers meditations on the philosophy, art, material culture, literature, history, and mythology of the ancient world and its many echoes and reverberations throughout later eras.
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- Sep 22, 2026
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Communiter nova dicis, nove communia: Angelo Poliziano Writes to Piero de’ Medici on Rhetorical Style (opens the original)
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Writing in Latin didn’t end with antiquity, especially when it came to writing about antiquity. Indeed, looking back to antiquity was one of the defining features of Renaissance humanism in Italy and elsewhere. Two things interest me most about this period in time: first, how humanists of the day styled themselves as quasi-Greco Roman intellectuals, particularly via their use of Latin (or Greek - see, e.g., my notes on one Valerio Chimentelli), and second, how exactly these people imagined antiq
For Better or Worse, the Commander of Mortal Life is the Mind (opens the original)
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Sallust is one of my favorite Roman historians because of his interest in history (both writing and reading) as a philosophical and moral exercise. Writing in the late Republican period in the first century BCE, he has a perspective that is somehow both very Roman in its pessimism and surprisingly optimistic at other times. Fascinated by antagonists who are morally grey and protagonists who often come within a hair’s breadth of losing everything because of their own shortcomings, Sallust’s histo
RIP Ovid, You Would Have Loved Nolan's Odyssey (opens the original)
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While Homer’s heroes are always dashing in their exploits and battles, it is his heroines who really steal the show, from otherworldly Helen to scorned Clytemnestra, crafty Circe to lovelorn Calypso. And then, of course, there’s Odysseus’ wife Penelope, infinitely more perfect and more praiseworthy than these others, whose epithets include faithful, trusty, wise, prudent, blameless, and sensible, the perfect match for Odysseus’ own crafty nature. <a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href
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