検索キーワード： 歴史・批評

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was recognized in his lifetime as the greatest living artist, creator of a succession of masterpieces in sculpture, fresco painting, and architecture. In all his work, Michelangelo impressed his contemporaries as a forceful personality, a divine genius endowed with terribilita, or intense emotional power.

While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amid scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been, at its inception, quite so controversial.

Postmodernism claims that "modernity", which grew from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution and Marxism, has collapsed. We now live in an endlessly "contemporary" culture, a virtual world of "hyperreality" containing such strange phenomena as post-Holocaust amnesia, Disneyland, cyberspace, and Fukuyama's proclaimed "end of history".

In this series of essays, Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator, examines the current art scene with a scathing intelligence and a crystalline eloquence of writing style. Particularly amusing are his dissections of art-show catalogspeak.

In this companion volume to The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of human artistic achievement, examining painting, sculpture, architecture, theology, philosophy, history, poetry, drama, literature, dance, music, and film.