Tag: Frank Gonzalez-Crussi
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Lovesickness in art and medicine
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Have you ever suffered the pangs of romantic passion? Count yourself lucky if you have not, for studies show that this feeling may thrive in any world culture.1 The defining characteristic of lovesickness is an obsessive thought: the lovelorn are tormented by the constant image of the unattainable love-object. This…
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Bronzino and the wages of sin
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States No one knows who first conceived the idea of using a wig or precisely when this curious idea came into being. Wigs were known in Greco-Roman antiquity, as one can see in Ovid’s “Art of Love” (Ars Amatoria: book III, verses 165–168), where the poet upbraids a woman for wearing…
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The face of a very trivial death
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Of all the objects that our eyes can see, none engrosses so large a share of our thoughts and emotions as that little patch of bodily surface—so small that an extended hand may completely cover it—which we call “the face.” For here lies embodied and supremely condensed the entire strength…