Ars Est Mendacium

Most paintings about death want something from you. They want belief, or fear, or reverence. They want you to leave reassured that the end has been explained, domesticated, and given a narrative shape you can live with. Even when they are dark, they tend to offer instructions on how to feel. The Cup of Death  does not. It offers no lesson, no promise, no warning. It presents a moment that has already resolved itself, and asks nothing more than your willingness to witness it. The longer you stand with it, the clearer this becomes. There is no struggle underway. No moral argument is being staged. Whatever needed deciding has already happened off the canvas, somewhere internal and inaccessible to us. What remains is not drama, but procedure. That is why the painting feels so still. That stillness is not peace. It is acceptance after resistance has been spent. Painted in the late nineteenth century by  Elihu Vedder ,  The Cup of Death  shows a winged figure guiding a wom...

Photos by the author, Antietam National Battlefield , December 2025. You don’t expect to find yourself in a line of cars that feels like a vigil. Yet that’s how the evening began: creeping westbound along Route 34 , heaters humming, everyone tucked into their own little pocket of warmth while the December air hardened outside. Cars were already parked along the shoulder, neatly arranged as if part of the ritual. No chatter. No horns. Just a silent procession of headlights, each one pointed toward a field that has known more darkness than most landscapes in this country ever will. We waited along that stretch with the kind of patience people usually reserve for chapels. The radio stayed off. No one around us cracked their windows. We watched the condensation collect at the corners of the glass. At the same time, a YouTube video droned softly from a phone, the Threads of the National Tapestry episode titled “Sheer Unadulterated Violence.” An unflinching reminder of what happened here, n...