Chiaro Blog
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Featured
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Chiaro 2.0 and the audio guide that knows where you've been
Published:• 5 min readChiaro 2.0 is live. The fastest recognition we have ever shipped, a guide that keeps going as long as you are curious, and context that makes every visit yours.
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What This Blog Is For
Published:• 3 min readLong-form stories about the art and landmarks Chiaro recognizes. Read them, or press play and listen the way you'd listen in the app.
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Pompeii: The City That Vesuvius Buried, and Then Preserved
Published:• 9 min readPompeii was buried alive in a single afternoon in 79 AD. The ash that killed the city is also what saved it. A walk through what the volcano left behind.
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The Striped Posts: Manet's One Trip to Venice
Published:• 11 min readManet went to Venice once, in 1874, with his brother-in-law. He came back with two paintings of the Grand Canal and a pair of striped mooring posts.
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The Square Format and the Trunk: Klimt's Forest Paintings
Published:• 12 min readBetween 1900 and 1916, Klimt spent every summer on Lake Attersee painting trees from no more than fifteen feet away. The forest paintings are what he made instead of women.
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Bitten in the Eighth Circle: Bouguereau's Dante and Virgil in Hell
Published:• 11 min readA twenty-five-year-old academic painter spent eight months painting two damned souls biting each other in the eighth circle of hell. The Salon hung it on the back wall.
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The Glare That Outlasted the Salon: Cabanel's Fallen Angel
Published:• 11 min readCabanel was twenty-three when he painted Lucifer's tears of rage. The painting was rejected from the Salon. A century later it became the most-shared image on Tumblr.
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The Painting That Looks Back: Velazquez's Las Meninas
Published:• 13 min readVelazquez painted himself painting the king and queen, who are not in the picture except as a reflection, in a Madrid room you can still stand in.
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The Painting He Could Not Stop Repainting: Monet's Woman with a Parasol
Published:• 10 min readMonet painted his wife Camille standing on a windy hilltop in 1875. Eleven years later, four years after she died, he painted her again from memory.
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The Last Provence Picture: Van Gogh's Road with Cypress and Star
Published:• 10 min readVan Gogh's Road with Cypress and Star is the last picture he painted in Provence. It is also the one where he finally told Theo what cypresses meant to him.
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The Painter Who Made the Bosphorus Famous: Aivazovsky's Tophane, 1884
Published:• 9 min readIvan Aivazovsky painted Constantinople nearly forty times. The 1884 view of the Tophane mosque is the one that explains why he kept going back.
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The Mirror That Does Not Work: Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergere
Published:• 11 min readManet's last great painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882), hides a mirror that does not work. Here is what is actually broken about it, and why.