Art Essentials
2 total works
Looking at pictures can be a delightful, exciting or moving experience, but some pictures – and these are often the most rewarding – require some explanation before they can be fully understood. Delving into the origins, designs and themes of over 100 pictures from different periods and places, this book illuminates the art of looking at – and talking about – pictures. Woodford shows how you can read a picture by examining the formal and stylistic devices used by an artist, and explores popular themes and subject matters, and the relationship of pictures to the societies that produced them. The book is supplemented by a glossary of key terms, ranging from art movements and technical terms to religious and classical terminology, to give readers all the information they need at their fingertips.
For more than 2,000 years the art of Greece and Rome has lain at the heart of western civilization. This book recaptures the excitement of the artists who first created it. It traces the daring innovations of those who, defying traditional wisdom, explored new ideas; it describes the valiant struggles of sculptors and painters to portray – for the first time – both the complexities of the human form and the richness of human emotions. So much has been destroyed by the ravages of time that Greek and Roman art seems to consist only of impressive ruins and broken fragments. Yet the creative achievements of the Greeks and their legacy, as adapted by the Romans, have never lost their power.