Great Paintings of the Western World - Alison Gallup - Hardcover

Expressions of humanity's most profound and mysterious feelings, great works of art speak across centuries, across continents, and across cultures. Great Paintings of the Western World, magnificently illustrated with 300 full-color images of many of the world's greatest paintings, offers an unparalleled opportunity to enrich your understanding and appreciation of the techniques, the styles, and the artistic genius that inform them. A guided tour that transports you from the prehistoric era to contemporary times, Great Paintings of the Western World opens with the Paleolithic cave paintings of Spain and France, rough images of animals, humans, and intriguing symbols that mark the birth of Western art and moves to the majestic paintings on the temples, tombs, and sarcophagi of ancient Egypt. Exquisite vases with pictorial renditions of the adventures of gods, goddesses, and heroes, all depicted in realistic, human form, preserve forever the humanist spirit of classical Greece, while the wall paintings, mosaics, and other works of art of the Roman Empire display an unmatched breadth, incorporating a wealth of styles from far-flung lands. The extraordinary impact of the rise of Christianity on art during the Middle Ages is traced in masterpieces that range from early murals in Roman catacombs to splendid illuminated manuscripts from Ireland, Italy, France, and Germany, to the stained glassed windows of Gothic cathedrals, to Giotto's sweetly spiritual frescos, harbingers of a new era to come. The Renaissance, the rebirth of culture and learning that swept through Europe at the dawn of the fourteenth century, was a period of unequaled artistic innovation. In Great Paintings of the Western World, readers will discover the creations of such immortal artists as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Titian, as well as the remarkable paintings of Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Durer, and other masters of the Northern Renaissance. The complex, often extravagant art of the Baroque and Rococo periods is represented in works by Caravaggio, Boucher, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, among others. The paintings of Neoclassicists like Jacques-Louis David mirror the renewed interest in the aesthetic and philosophical legacy of the Classical period, an influence apparent not only in the orderly composition of the works, but in the very subject matter. The romantic fascination with the interior landscape and in nature at its most primal shaped the works of artists from Goya and Delacroix on the continent to John Constable and John Turner in England, to Americans like Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and Albert Bierstadt, who sought to capture the richness of an American landscape already disappearing in the wake of industrialization and westward expansion. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, rebelling against Romanticism toward the end of the century and beyond, focused on reality: Courbet shocked the public with paintings that competed with photographic images; Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh brilliantly reproduced the actual effects of light on the artist's perceptions at different times of day and in different seasons; and Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others repudiated imaginative art (including historical subjects) and recorded without sentimentality the realities of contemporary life. Artistic experimentation soon erupted in a proliferation of creative inventiveness, and the twentieth century evolved as the age of "isms"-from Matisse's Fauvism to the Cubism of Braque and Picasso, to the surrealism of Dali and Magritte and, in America, the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. By mid-century, the very notion of "art" was called into question in the sly, cool works of Warhol, Lichtenstein, and other Pop artists represented here. As the century draws to a close, the stark realism of Lucien Freud and the Neo-Expressionism of Gerhard Richter, remind us that great art defies specific definition and remains an exciting, constantly changing expression of human feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. Great Paintings of the Western World brings the full panorama of Western art gloriously to life with entertaining and enlightening insights into the historical and social background of each period and the artists who, throughout the ages, have captivated the human imagination with the mysterious power of their art.Gallup, Alison is the author of 'Great Paintings of the Western World - Alison Gallup - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780883632598 and ISBN 0883632594.