Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy-apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations-is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

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Explores the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid 19th century; and works which figure amongst the most lasting and generally propular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the individual artists, their interconnection and previously unpublished material of their intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews the major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012. 'I think what I want to do is to follow a trail that leads, through many twists and turns, from the religious revival of the early 19th century to Blue Period Picasso, then to Surrealism. It may take in the Children of the Raj and the discovery of Japan along the way. It leads from rather rigid moralism, to conscious immoralism, and then at last to Freud/Dali.' Edward Lucie-Smith 05/2012