Trompe-l'oeil, a French term meaning to trick, the eye, describes a painting that deceives the spectator into thinking that the objects in it are real, not merely represented. To successfully fool the eye of the viewer, trompe-l'oeil artists choose objects, situations and compositional devices using as little depth as possible. A heightened form of illusionism, the art of trompe-l'oeil flourished from the Renaissance onward. The discovery of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy and advancements in the science of optics in the seventeenth-century Netherlands enabled artists to render objects and spaces with eye-fooling exactitude. Both witty and serious, trompe-l'oeil is a game artists play with spectators to raise questions about the nature of art and perception.

Post-Impressionism is a movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. Most of these painters began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.

Immediately upon his death in 1963 at the age of thirty, Piero Manzoni s reputation as a provocateur and wild child preceded him, with his most subversive work, Artist s Shit, 1961, elevating him to cult status. But what actually came before, and lay behind those thirty grams of pure artistic output? Flaminio Gualdoni sets out to explore exactly that in this biography that traces the guiding themes of Manzoni s works, lending order to a jumble of hitherto fragmented materials and setting aside any apocryphal hypotheses.

A richly illustrated and extremely enjoyable reference book on the historical evolution of the nude. From the Palaeolithic "Great Mothers" to the Greek athletes, from the Venus of Urbino by Titian to Leonardo's Virtuvian Man, from the Odalisque by Boucher to those by Ingres, to the amazons of Helmut Newton and the desolate lifeless bodies of Andres Serrano, the nude is the theme of artistic representation par excellence. The nude body as the incarnation of perfect beauty and the suspicions concerning its sensuality imposed by Christian culture; the renewed triumph of ancient beauty in the Renaissance and the study of anatomy; the visual licentiousness of the 18th century and the photographic nude; ideal beauty, eroticism, pornography; the nude also as representation of the ugly and its flaunted truthfulness in the art of the 20th century; the nude that itself becomes a work of art in the avant-garde of the post-WWII period, with performance, body art and experimental theatre. These are the threads of the narration all conducted around a rich apparatus of images. After Art of the Twentieth Century, published by Skira in four languages in 2009, Flaminio Gualdoni has now created a richly illustrated new reference book that is also extremely enjoyable to read.