The highlight in this issue, easily, is the section on 15th century Flemish art, highlighting the Master of Flemalle, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden, and including eight pages of brilliant full-page detail pictures of the art, which really shows the incredible attention the artists paid to it, and as the author mentions, “is like walking through a Gothic looking glass and entering a miniature world where the realities of everyday life in the late Middle Ages seem magically conserved.” How wrong Michelangelo was to disparage these paintings! One example is two pages devoted to the table of Quentin Massys’s ‘The Money Changer and His Wife’ – beautiful!

Another interesting article, ‘Art and Taxes’, went through how donations to museums were optimized for tax accounting purposes, and how the National Gallery in Washington D.C. was assembled, which is more interesting than it sounds. At the time of the issue, in 1966, the tax on the wealthiest had recently dropped from the 91% of the FDR and DDE years to the 70% mandated by the Revenue Act of 1964, that ‘other significant act’ under LBJ in 1964. Little did the authors realize that during the Reagan years a couple of decades later, the rate would drop into 30% range (including the Tax Reform Act of 1986, when the top bracket went down from 50% to 28%, while the lowest bracket went UP from 11% to 15%). The (still) growing disparity between rich and poor dates from that outrage.

But I digress. Other articles were on the Masada, a site truly worth visiting, H.G. Wells, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, and Istanbul … but the reason for marveling over it are those Flemish detail photos. ( )