The Philosophical Meaning of Great Works of Art: Medieval to Modern

Great paintings are arguments as much as images, and most of us walk past them without hearing what they say. What was Leonardo da Vinci telling us in the Mona Lisa and in his enigmatic self-portrait? Why did Picasso paint so that a woman and a chair became hard to tell apart, and why is so much modern art bizarre? Why is Baroque art so charged with emotion, why does Rembrandt paint with almost photographic realism, what lies behind Renoir's impressionism, and why do Van Gogh's canvases feel so vacant and artificial? Why does the Madonna dominate the early second millennium and then nearly vanish from later art?

In this study Robert Sungenis offers a philosophical key a Christian can use to read these works, walking through the history of art from the medievals to the moderns to show what each was trying to tell us.