Valerie Hansen explores these early economic and cultural exchanges and their long-term impact in her new book “The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began”, which originated as a college course co-taught with Mary Miller, director of the Getty Research Institute. In this episode, Hansen and Miller discuss the state of the world around the year 1000.
From celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen, a groundbreaking work of history showing that bold explorations and daring trade missions connected all of the world’s great societies for the first time at the end of the first millennium.
People often believe that the years immediately prior to AD 1000 were, with just a few exceptions, lacking in any major cultural developments or geopolitical encounters, that the Europeans hadn’t yet reached North America, and that the farthest feat of sea travel was the Vikings’ invasion of Britain. But how, then, to explain the presence of blonde-haired people in Maya temple murals at Chichén Itzá, Mexico? Could it be possible that the Vikings had found their way to the Americas during the height of the Maya empire?
Valerie Hansen, an award-winning historian, argues that the year 1000 was the world’s first point of major cultural exchange and exploration. Drawing on nearly thirty years of research, she presents a compelling account of first encounters between disparate societies, which sparked conflict and collaboration eerily reminiscent of our contemporary moment.
For readers of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, The Year 1000 is an intellectually daring, provocative account that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about how the modern world came to be. It will also hold up a mirror to the hopes and fears we experience today.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is one of the most admired painters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Known for his powerful, dramatically lit compositions, Caravaggio depicted violence and the human form with a degree of realism unprecedented at the time. He was among the most famous painters in Rome—but not only because of his skill as an artist.
Caravaggio was also notorious for his wild life and shocking temper. After being sentenced to death for murder, he fled Rome and died in exile at age 38 . Three biographies written in the decades after his death constitute nearly all that is known about the enigmatic artist.
In this two-part series, six US museum directors discuss the pandemic and its repercussions for their institutions. These candid, insightful conversations address wide-ranging topics, from the logistical challenges of when to close and how to reopen to philosophical exchanges about the role of museums in society.
The quiet comes at a time of transition for the garden. Spring always brings change and renewal, but this year Getty’s new horticulturist, Jackie Flor, has been trying to channel the vision of the garden’s creator, artist Bob Irwin, as she brings the garden back to his original intent
In this episode, Sidney talks about how Gemini GEL got started and grew into the organization it is today, sharing stories about the artists he’s worked with along the way.
In 1966, at the age of forty-one, Sidney Felsen moved from the world of accounting to that of art, founding the artists’ workshop and fine-art print publisher Gemini GEL in Los Angeles. With Gemini GEL, Sidney quickly got to work with some of the biggest artists of the twentieth century: Man Ray, Josef Albers, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few. And Gemini GEL continues its work with new generations of artists, including Julie Mehretu, Tacita Dean, and David Hammons.
What was the world like from 500 to 1500 CE? This period, often called medieval or the Middle Ages in European history, saw the rise and fall of empires and the expansion of cross-cultural exchange. 
Masterpieces of Painting surveys more than one hundred of the most exquisite and significant paintings displayed in the museum’s famed, daylight-suffused galleries. Vibrant full-color illustrations and engaging descriptions of these masterworks reveal their fascinating histories and cultural, social, and religious meanings. Sure to enchant and edify all art lovers, this book is a spellbinding tour through the history of Western painting.
Rooted in a passion for the Italian Renaissance as well as Dutch and Flemish Baroque works, the original collection of J. Paul Getty (1892–1976) has been transformed over four decades to include seminal pieces by celebrated masters such as Masaccio, Titian, Parmigianino, Cranach, El Greco, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Canaletto, Fragonard, Turner, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, and Ensor.
Boomers Daily 