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Leonardo

One of the most accomplished human beings who ever lived, Leonardo remains the quintessential Renaissance genius. Creator of the world's most famous painting, this scientist, artist, philosopher, inventor, builder, and mechanic epitomized the great flowering of human consciousness that marks his era. And yet, so wide-ranging and prolific were his interests that he brought hardly any major undertaking to a final end.

Warhol

Andy Warhol is recognized today as the most important exponent of the Pop Art movement. He overturned the traditional understanding of art and placed in its stead a concept that retracts the individuality of the artist.

Watteau

Best known for his fêtes galantes such as the famous Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère, Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was a major proponent in the revival of the Baroque style and the formation of the Rococo movement. Watteau was inspired by the theater and in particular the commedia dell’arte, hence elaborately costumed actors, dancers, and musicians were recurrent subjects; he was also fond of bucolic scenes and portraiture. Infused with romance, drama, and joie de vivre, Watteau’s paintings depict a idyllic world of pleasure and entertainment.

Vermeer - The Complete Paintings

The 35 paintings that have come down to us from the hand of Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) place him beside Rembrandt and Frans Hals as one of the great masters of the golden age of Dutch art.

Most of his pictures (all of which are reproduced in this book) show women about their daily business. Vermeer records the tasks and duties of women, the imperatives of virtue under which their lives were lived, and the dreams that provided the substance of their contrasting counter-world.

Velázquez

Acclaimed for its blending of realism with atmosphere, and for its deeply sensitive appreciation of character, the work of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez represents the undeniable pinnacle of the golden age of Spanish painting.

Born in Seville but of Portuguese origin, Velázquez became Court Painter to Philip IV in 1623. A steady worker, using primarily sombre low-toned colouring, he met Rubens in 1628, and soon after made a first trip to Italy. The pictures painted there reveal a growing interest in both colour range and in the male nude.

Van Gogh

This richly illustrated and expert study follows the artist from the early gloom-laden paintings in which he captured the misery of peasants and workers in his homeland, through his bright and colourful Parisian period, to the work of his final years, spent under a southern sun in Arles. Here, at last, he found the light that produced the unmistakable van Gogh style. At Arles, Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise, in the feverish burst of creative energy that marked his last two-and-a-half years, he produced the 465 paintings on which his immortality rests.

Turner

As a blind person would see the world if the gift of sight suddenly returned - so might one describe the effect of Turner's paintings on the observer. John Ruskin, the uncompromising nineteenth-century defender of the painting of William Turner (1775-1851) spoke of the 'innocence of the eye', which perceived the colours and forms of the world before it recognized their significance.

Toulouse-Lautrec

Today, the painter and graphic artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) is considered as one of the most inspired portrayers of human figures. This physically handicapped scion of the old French nobility was fascinated by life around Montmartre, whose cafes, cabarets, dance halls, and bordellos presented him with the "theatre of life."

More than any other artist, Toulouse-Lautrec captured the belle époque's pursuit of fleeting pleasure: directly and without flattery, his paintings, lithographs, and posters offer a masterly and timeless image of the age.

Titian

A leading artist in the High Renaissance, Titian (Tiziano Vecelli, 1488-1576) was the Venetian school`s greatest painter and is one of the best-loved Italian artists of all time. Titian was highly regarded during his lifetime, and his renown has not diminished in the intervening centuries; so great was his ability to manipulate color, texture, and tone that he is still considered to be one of art history`s greatest technical masters.

Symbolism

May 1884 saw the publication in Paris of a fin de siècle novel that became a perverse sensation on the European cultural scene. A Rebours (translated both as Against the Grain and Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans was written as a seductive textbook of decadence, an antidote to the "banality" of the dominant literary styles, Naturalism and Realism. Symbolism, whose influence would endure well into the modernist era, was an artistic religion-substitute, a spiritually charged cult of beauty. A Symbolist picture or sculpture is deliberately mysterious.