* 'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the
start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of
art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into
believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe,
charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily,
the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your
composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense
of reality...' * With the same disarming force, Power of Art jolts
us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama
closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of
eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something
unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever. * The embattled
heroes - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh,
Picasso and Rothko - faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The
masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered
complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the
world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the
dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times
they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois
life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris,
and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain. * Most compelling of
all, Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight
world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such
works 'tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be
inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can
deliver. And when they do that they answer, irrefutably and
majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant
art-conscript... "OK, OK, but what's art really for?"'
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