About Marcia Christoff Reina

Marcia Christoff Reina is the editor of a print magazine on Old Masters painting and an author. She lives in Milan and Washington, D.C.

The State as a Work of Art

By |2022-11-15T13:04:20-06:00November 15th, 2022|Categories: Europe, History, Marcia Christoff Reina, Timeless Essays|

It just may be the case that The Perfect State was not even a state. For, once upon a time there was a northern, medieval phenomenon as much the subject of universal myth and curiosity as that of the enchantress-republics flourishing down south: the Hanseatic League of the mid-13th to 16th centuries. Lorenzo ‘Il Magnifico‘, [...]

A Short History of the Human Soul

By |2022-09-25T17:34:37-05:00September 25th, 2022|Categories: Aristotle, Christianity, Great Books, History, Philosophy, Plato, Timeless Essays|

To understand the journey of the human imagination across civilizations and centuries, one must grasp how the utterly fascinating Hellenic invention of the “democratized” concept of moral judgment in the afterlife came into its beautiful philosophical maturity. And so they came to Rome —Acts IV. “I was not, I was, I am not, I do [...]

Why Switzerland Hates You (and Why She Should)

By |2022-09-21T09:15:02-05:00September 19th, 2022|Categories: Foreign Affairs, Marcia Christoff Reina|

Switzerland remains feisty, free, and a bright beacon in a dark age for a collapsing civilization that should be looking to its example. For those weaned on the open-borders, Leftist humanitarian brainwashing of modern times, here are a few rules from the Singapore of Central Europe. “When all the world is socialist, Switzerland will have [...]

The Mysteries of Madness and Genius

By |2022-09-05T14:54:03-05:00September 5th, 2022|Categories: Art, Beauty, Culture, History, Imagination, Marcia Christoff Reina, Philosophy, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself. “A post-mortem examination of the brain of Nietzsche might conceivably show us the [...]

Of Majesty and Anarchy

By |2022-07-29T08:25:57-05:00July 27th, 2022|Categories: Europe, Featured, History, Marcia Christoff Reina, Monarchy, Rome, Timeless Essays|

Today, wherever the intelligent among us may still be found, the idea of Monarchy shimmers and beckons along the periphery of our collective intellectual subconscious; we suspect it has something that will save us from the erosions of shabby egalitarianism, from our sordid democracies and their petulant, tiresome, subversive “rights.” “Then Perceval was told that [...]

The Beautiful Violence of Old Masters Painting

By |2022-07-20T18:09:37-05:00July 20th, 2022|Categories: Art, Beauty, Culture, History, Imagination, Marcia Christoff Reina, Timeless Essays|

The “beautiful violence” of Old Masters painting—a magnificence rooted in the study of Light and Dark as technique, as style, but most of all as a symbolic representation of the very essence of life on earth—remains timeless for its sublime understanding of that which for each human soul cannot be explained. “To define art is [...]

Why Democracy Needs Aristocracy

By |2022-07-12T14:34:56-05:00July 12th, 2022|Categories: American Founding, Aristocracy, Democracy, Marcia Christoff Reina, Politics, Timeless Essays|

The aristocratic element of democracy is its long-term quality. It has reverence for the past and it plans for the future. This is the necessary instinct democracy needs anew. Seneca, the Roman philosopher, relates the story of the murder of Callisthenes by Alexander the Great, the “everlasting crime” of the Macedonian leader. Seneca wrote: “For [...]

The Genius of Byzantium: Reflections on a Forgotten Empire

By |2022-06-30T14:23:42-05:00June 29th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Culture, History, Marcia Christoff Reina, Rome, Timeless Essays|

Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind,” as Yeats dreamed her, is not to go searching through histories and legends, glorious ruins or immortal poems. “Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire” C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire Everywhere Western man [...]

On the Nature of Wealth and the Wealth of Nature

By |2022-07-18T10:15:03-05:00March 23rd, 2018|Categories: Culture, Economic History, Economics, Gold Standard, History, Marcia Christoff Reina|

More than just the ultimate inflation hedge, the wealth of Nature—gold, forests, land, agriculture—and the cautious stewardship of these tangible assets over easily-inflated government “IOU’s” is what distinguishes wealth from riches. When King Louis XII, in the year 1499, formed the project of taking the Dukedom of Milan, to which he thought he had a [...]

Democracy, Aristocracy, and the Fate of America

By |2021-04-27T13:50:02-05:00March 12th, 2018|Categories: Aristocracy, Aristotle, Civil Society, Culture, Dante, Democracy, Great Books, History, Marcia Christoff Reina, Politics|

Only where Democracy and Aristocracy are harmonized and unified culturally can a nation really be healthy and advanced; its history becomes the awe of the world. “Be it known to you that a son is born to me; but I thank the gods not much that they have given me him as that they have [...]

Lebanon the Magnificent: An Inquiry Into Exile and Terror

By |2022-07-20T07:35:17-05:00January 30th, 2018|Categories: Culture, Foreign Affairs, Freedom, History, Islam, Marcia Christoff Reina, Politics, Religion, Terrorism|

Sphinx-like Lebanon—best known for its businessmen, bankers, and civil wars—is the ultimate example in explaining the inexplicable in the Mideast. If the dog now wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master’s stupidity in not understanding the perfectly distinct and expressive speech, he adds vocal expression—he barks—and finally an expression of attitude—he mimes or [...]

“The Habsburg Manifesto”: A Conversation in Four Acts

By |2022-07-20T07:34:27-05:00December 25th, 2017|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Culture, Marcia Christoff Reina, Philosophy, Politics, Progressivism, Theater, Time, Tradition|

Is Time itself best understood by those things in life which are Time-less? Such is the main question posed in my play, “The Habsburg Manifesto.” It is not a political play but a philosophical one, whose main theme is the inner nobility of the individual as that which withstands and transcends all politics, all ideology, [...]

The Lost Soul of History’s Greatest Yacht Builder

By |2022-07-20T07:46:34-05:00February 7th, 2017|Categories: Art, Featured, History, Marcia Christoff Reina|

The narrative quality of yacht-building—the poetry, the lore—does not exist today. Lost is the craft of designers like William Fife III, who bestowed the ever-changing, fickle waters of the sea with modern meaning and contemporary epic. To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea is in its grandest mood. [...]

Long Night’s Journey into Day: The Twilight of Knightly Men

By |2019-08-15T15:09:36-05:00September 30th, 2016|Categories: Civilization, Culture, Featured, History, Marcia Christoff Reina, Middle East, Military, War, Western Civilization|

"The East is another name for the West"—Sufi proverb In Memory of Stephen J. Masty When, in happier days, she was inscrutable "Arabia," and felix the plucky cognomen-ex-virtute honoring a mythological lineage of Sheban queens, Roman misadventure, and flourishing trade routes scented in cinnamon and frankincense, the greatest of English explorers submitted to her virgin [...]

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