8 SEP 2026

Day 251

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.

E. H. Gombrich · The Story of Art

A small vertical wood panel painted in oil and tempera, once part of a multi-panel religious altarpiece, shown in isolation from its missing companions.

I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

Roverella Altarpiece

Italian Renaissance · 1470 · Oil, tempera on wood

Painted by Cosimo Tura in 1470, this religious polyptych no longer stands as one work. Its panels, in oil and tempera on wood, are now divided among four collections.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

II · THE IDEA · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

JEPA and I-JEPA

multimodality · arXiv 2301.08243 · Self-supervised image learning

I-JEPA learns image representations by predicting the embeddings of masked regions from a visible context, rather than reconstructing pixels. The target is semantic structure, not surface detail.

Enter lesson 6 MIN

A very tall oil painting on canvas of a religious death scene: a central reclining female figure with accompanying figures arranged around her across a wide, dim pictorial space.

III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY

Death of the Virgin

Caravaggio · 1603–1604 · Oil on canvas

Nearly four metres high and more than two across, Caravaggio’s oil on canvas treats the death of the Virgin as a wall-sized scene of religious art from 1603 or 1604.

Enter lesson 5 MIN