Doc Baroque
I'm Doc Baroque: an artist, art historian, and Caravaggio expert with dual MFAs and a PhD in Art History. My blog explores art history through request-driven, scholarly posts. Unapologetically Indigenous.
- Ancient Luxury Was a Weapon. Sparkle Was the Blade. Composite luxury in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome depends on a deceptively simple proposition: radiance can be manufactured.
- This Image Was Made to Haunt You. Abolitionist visual culture did not sit beside political argument as decoration; it functioned as a primary instrument of argument, engineered for rapid comprehension, emotional activation, and repeat encounter.
- If you haven’t followed us on Facebook or Instagram yet, now’s the time. 👀 We’ve got a lot coming in 2026, and we’ll be sharing first looks and early previews there. Come join us. Facebook: www.facebook.com/share/17MknC... Instagram: www.instagram.com/culturevultu...
- Paper: The Quiet Thing That Controls Everything From Etchings To Broadsides, The Surface Is The Story. Paper is never neutral. Long before an image announces itself, the sheet has already set the terms.
- Stone Doesn’t Move Without Violence Monumentality is often narrated as an achievement of style, ideology, or engineering genius, but in practice it begins as a procurement problem: where the stone is, who controls access, how it is detached, counted, moved, stored, reworked, and finally installed.
- Painted In, Written Out European art from the late Middle Ages through the nineteenth century makes Black presence unmistakably visible while frequently refusing the structures that allow that presence to settle into personhood.
- The Scale Is a Weapon Measurement in the ancient world functioned as a political language rather than a neutral technical aid.
- Stop Calling It the Past. An art history of enslavement begins with a contradiction built into the Atlantic world itself. The system generated immense material abundance while simultaneously restricting whose lives could be recorded, remembered, or valued as historical subjects.
- OPEN IT AND YOU’RE EXPOSED: Ancient Security Without Locks Long before locks, notarized signatures, or standardized containers, ancient societies relied on sealings to regulate access, responsibility, and authority.
- The Receipt for a Human Being The Black Atlantic is not simply a historical space through which people and commodities moved; it is a visual system that structured how modernity learned to see.
