Una nuova storia dell’arte

Art is not only an aesthetic experience. It is also an instrument of politics, economics and religion. A catalyst for revolutions, a laboratory for experimentation and new technologies, art is formed by all the impulses of an era until it becomes its material and spiritual mirror.

How has art evolved over 2,500 years? What links the Renaissance artistic quest in the ideal man to a black square on a blank canvas? Why is a can of Artist’s Shit worth more on the art market than a beautiful seventeenth-century landscape? This book traces the history of visual arts in Western Europe from antiquity to modernism. In five chapters, the book offers a different view of art history. In fact, unlike the usual histories of art, the focus is not so much on a succession of admirable figures who codified the canons of Western art, but on a complex interplay of human ingenuity and imagination and rapidly changing historical circumstances.

AUTHOR
Koenraad Jonckheere – Professor of art history at the University of Ghent and director of Societal Outreach at the Faculty of Humanities. He was Director of Publications at the Centrum Rubenianum. A member of the Royal Academie for Science and the Arts of Belgium, Koenraad Jonckheere has written on portraiture, art trade, iconoclasm and Rubens.