The images of children that abound in Western art do not simply mirror reality; they are imaginative constructs, representing childhood as a special stage of human life, or emblematic of the human condition itself. In a compelling book ranging widely across time, national boundaries, and genres from ancient Egyptian amulets to Picasso's Guernica, Erika Langmuir demonstrates that no historic period has a monopoly on the 'discovery of childhood'. Famous pictures by great artists, as well as barely known anonymous artefacts, illustrate not only Western society's perennially ambivalent...
The images of children that abound in Western art do not simply mirror reality; they are imaginative constructs, representing childhood as a special s...
Drawing on the National Gallery s comprehensive collection of religious images, A Closer Look: Saints explains the importance of saints and their role in the history of European painting.
Erika Langmuir underlines the fundamental importance of saints in many of the National Gallery s paintings and, using examples of works by Raphael, Durer, and Crivelli, among others, explains the sometimes puzzling conventions for identifying saints by their attributes. She also describes how saints became part of the institutions of the Christian church, the different types of saints, and...
Drawing on the National Gallery s comprehensive collection of religious images, A Closer Look: Saints explains the importance of saints and ...
Painters in the past and commercial artists in our own day have relied on allegory to create "message pictures." Once thought to rival literary works or political oratory in influence and prestige, such paintings, with their references to ancient myth, the Bible, or medieval astrology, all too often puzzle modern viewers. This Closer Look guide illustrates and explains the main types of visual allegory in Western art and the contexts in which they were originally created and viewed.
Painters in the past and commercial artists in our own day have relied on allegory to create "message pictures." Once thought to rival literary wor...