About

Inner Surfaces – studies in art and culture.

Inner Surfaces is an independent site for essays on art, looking, and cultural memory.

My background is in education, and I hold an MA in Renaissance Studies and a PhD on Renaissance Naples from Birkbeck College, London. After many years of teaching and writing about literature and art, I am now using this site to follow a long-standing interest in painting, museums, artistic inheritance, and the ways works of art continue to press upon the present.

The essays grow out of time spent with works of art themselves — in churches, museums and collections — as well as with the books, catalogues and scholarship that surround them. The project begins with artists from central and southern Italy, especially those whose formation was connected with Naples. For now, its focus is chiefly art-historical, with close studies of individual works, artists, places, and visual traditions. Over time, its range may broaden.

Inner Surfaces is intended for readers who enjoy slow looking, careful description, and the sense that works of art do not simply belong to the past, but remain active, compelling, and unexpectedly present.

I hope you enjoy exploring the essays on this site. Support for the project is warmly welcomed and helps keep this work freely available.

John Brooke

https://donorbox.org/inner-surfaces-resonances-in-art-and-literature-837503