内容简介

Choosing ten symbols from the natural world (the sun, the shell, the bird) and ten man-made (the window, the book, the mirror), Françoise Barbe-Gall illuminates our understanding of how these have been used and developed in art from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century, with sixty-eight wonderfully vivid examples.

Painting has always made abundant use of forms and objects to convey abstract ideas: love, hope for eternal life, loyalty or betrayal. These recurring motifs, which were familiar to many in the past, have mostly become mysterious to the audiences of today. Today's art-lover will have to learn to look out for all the small things that can so easily seem like unimportant details, or simply decoration. But a flower, a reflection in a mirror or a bird in flight nearly always mean more than they first appear to.

From Holbein's apple of knowledge to the black cat at the foot of Manet's Olympia, from Magritte's mysterious candles to Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers, this book shows how each work makes use of the language of symbols in an original and more meaningful way.

作者简介

Francoise Barbe-Gall studied history of art at the Sorbonne and also at the Ecole du Louvre, where she now teaches. She also directs an association called CORETA (Comment Regarder un Tableau), for whom she gives many lectures. She is regularly called upon to participate in management workshops, where her experience of analysing images in relation to publicity and marketing is c...

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精彩摘录

这朵花征服了我们。紧张的距离改变了画作展示的内容。这幅画种，花朵失去了原有的意义和重要性，并因此发生转变。细节暗中接管了整体。赏画者失去了批判性的理智：花在这么近的距离上看，已经不再像话了，而是某个空间，还是大得出奇的空间，心音暮光，并任由眼睛在画面上自由游走。此处，一朵花的黑色花心突然震撼理智，赏画者会突然凝结，惊讶于它在他们中间唤起的私密情感。在某个时刻，他们成为画作的牺牲品，屈服、麻痹于鸦片的陷阱之中。

——引自第73页

丰塔纳只是在画布上画出裂缝，然后放下手臂，等待，就像一个算命的人，站在他刚刚打开的门前。

——引自第237页