Discovering the Great Masters

Combining the rich design and production quality of a fine art book with a unique and clever design scheme, this volume offers readers the opportunity to not only marvel at the beautiful works of the Great Masters, but to focus on the secret messages the artists left behind on their canvases. Discovering the Great Masters features 62 important paintings crammed with symbolism that is decoded for the reader. Ranging from Giotto's fourteenth-century painting of the Last Judgment to the nineteenth-century symbolist Gustave Moreau's depiction of Jupiter and Semele, each work has been selected for its own specific symbolic enigma. Each exquisite painting is accompanied by a unique page with die-cut windows that highlight its most important symbols with a decoded explanation of their purpose. This intriguing book examines the animals, flora, classical/religious myths and legends and what pass as "ordinary" objects in order to understand the vocabulary of the symbols that reoccur in these carefully chosen masterpieces. Among the paintings examined in this unique and fascinating book is Hugo van der Goes's Portinari Triptych, painted in 1476. At first glance the works seems to be a beautifully rendered adoration of the newborn Christ child. Upon further inspection we see it is filled with symbols just waiting to be decoded. What could some of them mean? ? A single sandal behind an adoring angel, the bare foot of the sandal's owner makes contact with holy ground, an allusion to the humble reverence felt by the onlookers toward the holy scene. ? A ceramic vessel decorated with grapes symbolizes Christ as the vessel of life; the grapes reference Jesus' suffering during the Passion. ? White and red lilies within the ceramic vessel symbolize the Virgin Mary, the white for her purity, the red foretelling the Passion of Christ. ? A glass vase holding a columbine represents the Holy Spirit. The glass refers to Jesus as the "water of life," and the translucent vase is the symbol of Mary, who carried the precious water of life. Here, it is important that this vessel is made of glass--its transparency is meant to symbolize how light passes through glass without breaking it, just as Jesus was conceived and born without the loss of Mary's virginity. Other works in this unique and fascinating book include Renaissance masterpieces such as Botticelli's Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment. The Northern Renaissance is represented by Bosch and Brueghel, whose canvases are filled with a melange of bizarre and otherworldly characters, each so strange that careful examination is necessary just to appreciate the painters' imaginative geniuses. Baroque exuberance in Rubens's and Poussin's lush canvases is a stark contrast to the rational approach of the Dutch Vermeer and his depiction of The Painter and His Model As Clio. Each and every one of the great masters featured in Discovering the Great Masters was a marvelous visual storyteller, and each featured painting is a story that becomes more fascinating as layer upon layer of symbolic meaning is revealed.