“As you know,” wrote Boston’s late, fictional George Apley (J. P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley) to his son John, “for a number of years I have been making a collection of Chinese bronzes. . . . I ...

A half-man, half-bird beast playing a flute. A cat’s head popping out of a snail shell. A woman barfing up a tiny demon. These are just some of the otherworldly critters that scribes in the Middle ...

To today’s audiences, medieval art can look outright bizarre. Before the stylistic shifts that defined the Renaissance, medieval illustrations often featured flat, unrealistic figures and fantastical ...