The Philosophical Meaning of Great Works of Art

Great paintings make arguments, and most of us walk past without hearing them. What was Leonardo telling us in the Mona Lisa and in his enigmatic self-portrait? Why does Rembrandt paint with almost photographic realism, why is Baroque art so charged with emotion, why do Van Gogh's canvases feel vacant and artificial, and why did Picasso paint so that a woman and a chair become hard to tell apart? Why does the Madonna dominate the early second millennium and then nearly disappear? Sungenis walks the history from the medievals to the moderns with a philosophical key a Christian reader can use, asking of each movement what it was trying to say. 87 pages, full color images.