Category: Art, Music, and Literature

La Primavera by Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli is beautiful in its artistic finesse and depiction of moral themes. In spite of its initial ambiguity, the painting conveys complex–and often intentionally contradictory–themes of love, desire, and teleology through its characters and organization…

As a poet and student of literature, Dante Alghieri undoubtedly venerated human rationality. His magnum opus, The Divine Comedy, contains heroes whose virtues and vices demonstrate the heights and depths of human flourishing. However, despite its emphasis on the affairs of corporeal characters, The Divine Comedy is as much about the divine as it is about the human…