Lodovico Burnacini, Il Pomo d’Oro, Act I, Scene V, Jupiter and His Court at Banquet with Discord Floating in a Cloud above the Table, hand-colored engraving, 1668. Image via the New York Review of Books.

• The world’s twenty most stunning libraries. How many have youbeen shushed in?
• Bill Cunningham’s early photographs of New York.
• These illustrations from From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Stagingelucidate the finer points of things you didn’t know you cared about, such as stagecraft and lighting techniques in seventeenth-century opera.
• The late philosopher Bernard Williams knew what to look for in a role model: “glistening contempt for philosophy … it is only by condescension or to amuse himself that he stays and listens to its arguments at all.”
• “Hilma af Klint was an old-school spiritualist who believed that she channeled psychic and esoteric messages from the so-called High Masters—who existed in another dimension—into abstract paintings.”