Sister Wendy's Story of Painting (Enhanced and Expanded Edition)

"The story of painting is one that is immensely rich in meaning, yet its value is all too often hidden from us by the complexities of its historians. We must forget the densities of 'history' and simply surrender to the wonder of the story." -Sister Wendy Beckett Internationally renowned art historian Sister Wendy Beckett brings her knowledge, her deep love of art, and her luminous insights to The Story of Painting- making a difficult subject accessible and stimulating to all. The Story of Painting features more than 450 masterpieces- all faithfully reproduced in rich, full color- chronicling the developments and movements in the history of painting over the past 800 years, from Gothic to Renaissance, Romanticism to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism to Modernism. Each movement is introduced by visual timelines to provide an instant overview of the significant artists and paintings of the era. This enhanced and expanded edition of The Story of Painting has almost doubled in size. It expands the existing 400 pages to 736, focusing on the approximately 450 paintings with facing pages of details for almost 200 of them. This classic art book presents the masterpieces in two ways: as the original painting appeared and, on double spread pages, as enlarged close-ups of the paintings' most pertinent details. Now the reader can study a painting as though standing in front of it in a museum, seeing the powerful effect of the whole and then studying the minutest details of brushstrokes, textures, quality of lines, and overlays of color.

Amazon.com Review
For those who've enjoyed the original, the good news is that the new edition of The Story of Painting has grown by more than 300 pages of photographs--magnified close-ups of details from nearly half the 450 paintings in the book. Fauvist paint strokes become mighty slabs; sparkling light on a Dutch still life is revealed as a series of tiny dots; the cheeks of a young man in an Italian Renaissance portrait betray a touch of five o'clock shadow. This kind of close looking is seductive, and it's an important part of Sister Wendy's direct, unpretentious approach to art.

As a history of painting, Sister Wendy's book has its strong points (works with religious or spiritual themes and those that lend themselves to psychological interpretation) as well as its lapses (a very skimpy discussion of Cubism and inadequate treatment of works from the late 20th century). Even the title is a bit of a misnomer. The painting in question is purely Western; there is nothing here about Indian or Persian miniatures, or the great tradition of Chinese landscapes.

But what Sister Wendy alone offers are vivid, personal interpretations that come from a deep well of emotional sympathy with works of art. Who else would notice the way the bagpiper in The Wedding Feast by Pieter Breughel "stares at the porridge with the longing of the truly hungry"? Who else would point out how Venus--the "older woman" pleading with "virile" Adonis not to go off to war in Titian's "Venus and Adonis"--shows us "her superb back and buttocks, beguilingly rounded, full of promise." Rather than portraying Western art as the dutiful production of "masterpieces," she revels in the physicality of paint and the variety of human experience these works represent. --Cathy Curtis