Pictures and Tears by James Elkins (9780415937139)

Description - Pictures and Tears by James Elkins

Pictures and Tears is a strange and wonderful investigation into paintings and the emotions they evoke. James Elkins tells the story of paintings that have made people cry, contrasting the emotions shown before works of art in the past, and the tearlessness with which most people approach works of art today. Elkins writes about his encounter with Bellini's Saint Francis in Ecstasy in the Frick collection, the effect of the Rothko chapel on visitors, our responses to Caravaggio, Greuze, Friedrich, Bouts, David, Ingres, Regnault, a Kamakura period landscape and makes an inquiry into the nature of art itself. Fourth-century Greek painting depicted people in states of extreme grief, so that the viewer might respond in kind. Crying in front of paintings was commonplace in the Middle Ages. There were more tears in the eighteenth century, and then again in the age of Romanticism. Why have the last hundred years been so dry by comparison? This is a book for anyone who has wondered at the power of painting and been moved by it, perhaps even to tears.

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