Summer Reading: "What Great Paintings Say"

This book's review from The Wall Street Journal explores how our understanding of art history’s masterworks puts some of the world's most famous paintings under a magnifying glass to uncover their most small and subtle elements and all they reveal about a bygone time, place, and culture.

Guiding our eye to the minutiae of subject and symbolism, authors Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen allow even the most familiar of pictures to come alive anew through their intricacies and intrigues. Is the bride pregnant? Why does the man wear a beret? How does the shadow of war hang over a scene of dancing? Along the way, we travel from Ancient Egypt through to modern Europe, from the Renaissance to the Roaring Twenties. We meet Greek heroes and poor German poets and roam from cathedrals to cabaret bars, from the Garden of Eden to a Garden Bench in rural France.

As each painting is picked apart and then reassembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle, these celebrated canvases captivate not only in their sheer wealth of details but also in the witness they bear to the fashions and trends, people and politics, loves and lifestyles of their time.

The history of art is a complicated subject, open to many interpretations and often lacking much of the fact that might truly explain the origins of a painting. In the past, as now for some art, pictures were commissioned by the very wealthy and almost always by men. Their wealth seems to have endowed them with undeserved respect and allowed early scholars to praise their ‘taste’ well beyond the realities of the situation.

The authors of this extraordinary piece of work have tried to discover valid sources of information, and take into account the prejudices, priorities, and levels of knowledge prevalent at the time of creation of the works they examined. Finding the truth relating to each painting’s meaning is therefore somewhat akin to building a three-dimensional chess board and its pieces out of string, paper and ice-cream. That they’ve managed to reach conclusions on certain pieces is an indication of the depth and breadth of their research.

I have learned much about what some paintings may mean by reading this comprehensive tome, but remain uncertain just what level of credibility can honestly be given to the conclusions in all cases. It’s true the authors have made their doubts and uncertainties clear, so the reader is left with at least an impression of the meanings of some very famous and some less well-known paintings.I’ve been selective in my reading of the book, because only certain subjects are of significance to the novel I’m writing, and that may have meant my understanding of the views, histories, and comments relating to those works of art are not necessarily representative of all the many paintings examined in the book.

My reading, nevertheless, has proved a valuable exercise and has certainly rewarded the effort and time by providing me with enough information, mood, and context to effectively include the subject in my current piece of fiction. So, my thanks and admiration go to the authors, without whose work I would either have remained in the dark or, a decidedly unacceptable alternative, independently come to conclusions filled with either irrelevance or inaccuracy, or both!

Book Review by Stuart Aken, a self-published author and independent publisher, Fantastic Books Publishing. He is based in Gloucesterhire, UK He now posts on Medium on a number of different topics of interest to him.

What Great Paintings Say: Old Masters in Detail by Rose-Marie & Rainer Hagen. Published by Tasche.