Erotic photo art has lost much of its exquisite soul since Playboy and other girlie monthlies repackaged the human body for mass-market consumption. Like much painting, sculpture and engraving, since...
Flowers are the centerpiece in the majority of pictorial still-lifes. By painting their colours and forms, artists from Brueghel to O’Keeffe have created symbols for both life and mortality. Van...
Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The...
Mega Square Herbarium is based on the work of Basilius Besler, the famous plant expert who, for the first time in history, described, painted and engraved over a thousand species of plants. His...
Those who have had the chance to hold a medieval manuscript in their hands cannot fail to have been impressed by the feeling of being in touch with a long-passed epoch. Back when a book was a true...
Mega Square In Praise of the Backside celebrates the most sensual part of the female body. The insightful text by Hans-Jürgen Döpp discusses the backside as a feature that stands for both powerful...
Behind Frida Kahlo’s portraits, lies the story of both her life and work. It is precisely this combination that draws the reader in. Frida’s work is a record of her life, and rarely can we learn so...
“I am not interested in myself as a subject for painting, but in others, particularly women…”Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt’s paintings speak of a world of opulence and...
What do the thousands of images of bras and panties on perfectly sculpted bodies that we see spread across billboards and magazines say about our society?
Michelangelo, like Leonardo, was a man of many talents; sculptor, architect, painter and poet, he made the apotheosis of muscular movement, which to him was the physical manifestation of passion. He...
For Claude Monet the designation ‘impressionist’ always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the...
Until the end of the 19th century Naïve Art, created by untrained artists and characterised by spontaneity and simplicity, enjoyed little recognition from professional artists and art critics. Naïve...
Reflecting their owner’s taste and serving as an impressive exhibition space for visitors, cabinets of curiosities were a place of interest in the houses of the wealthy in the 16th an 17th centuries....
Encounter one of history’s greatest civilisations through miniatures. In Persian Miniatures, the story of the magnificent Persian Empire is told by way of a small but vibrant artistic tradition. The...
Sargent was born in Florence, in 1856, the son of cultivated parents. When Sargent entered the school of Carolus-Duran he attained much more than the average pupils. His father was a retired...
Mega Square Shoes focuses on the history of the shoe and elevates the shoe to the rank of a work of art. The author is a leading expert on the subject and curator of France‘s Shoe Museum, which holds...
Cézanne transformed a teacup into something alive, raising still-life to the point that it ceased to be inanimate. Wassily Kandinsky said about the French artist: “He painted these things as human...
A jeweler with an established reputation through the world, Louis Comfort Tiffany was the spearhead of the Art Nouveau movement in the United States. At a time and in a country in perpetual growth,...
During the Renaissance, Italian painters would traditionally depict the wives of their patrons as Madonnas, often rendering them more beautiful than they actually were. Over centuries in religious...
