What Great Paintings Say. Masterpieces in Detail

If you thought these paintings looked familiar, look again. The fascinating coffee-table book 'What Great Paintings Say. Masterpieces in Detail' by Taschen, which is part art history and part detective work, explores 100 world-famous works of art through enlarged details, revealing the fashions and lifestyles, the loves and intrigues, the politics and the people who really make a masterpiece.

This important addition to our understanding of the masterpieces of art history puts some of the world's most famous paintings under a magnifying glass to expose their smallest and subtlest elements and everything they reveal about a bygone time, place and culture.

By focusing our attention on the details of the subject matter and symbolism, authors Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen make even the most familiar images come alive again through their complexity and intrigue. Is the bride pregnant? Why is the man wearing a beret? How does the shadow of war hang over a dance scene? Along the way, we travel from ancient Egypt to modern Europe, from the Renaissance to the roaring twenties. We meet Greek heroes and poor German poets and wander from cathedrals to cabaret bars, from the Garden of Eden to a garden bench in the French countryside.

As we take each painting apart and then reassemble it like a giant puzzle, these famous canvases fascinate not only by their enormous wealth of detail, but also by the fact that they bear witness to the fashions and trends, people and politics, loves and lifestyles of their time.

Specifications
Title: What Great Paintings Say. Masterpieces in Detail
Authors: Rose-Marie Hagen
Publisher: TASCHEN
Format: 244 x 340 x 50 mm
Size: 636 pages
Weight: 4.70 kg
Language: English
Material: Hardcover
ISBN: 9783836577496

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