"Simply about art:
What they keep silent about in museums" by Maria Santi, summary

This book is a provocative guide to the history of fine art, created in 2017. The work’s main appeal lies in its rejection of boring academicism: the author removes the bronze veneer from great artists, revealing them as living people with flaws, fears, and everyday problems.

Color in painting and ancient civilizations

The author first suggests learning to see color: distinguishing warm from cool hues and dark from bright. The narrative then shifts to Ancient Egypt, whose culture was centered around the cult of death, yet was also distinguished by its vibrant monumentality. The Egyptians built pyramids glittering with gold tips and periodically rebelled, which speaks to their active nature.

Ancient Greece is presented as a perfect example of consumer PR. Almost no paintings have survived, and sculptures are known from Roman copies. We judge the Greeks by the cheerful myths of Odysseus and Zeus.

In the Roman Empire, the status of the artist fell to that of a slave artisan. Engineering reached such heights that Europe only reached a similar level of development by the end of the nineteenth century. Byzantium, however, preserved ancient themes, reworking them into aristocratic mosaics and iconography. Religious images served a purely functional purpose.

Middle Ages, Gothic and Ancient Rus’

Few Romanesque frescoes survive. They were long undervalued, favored over the celebrated ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Gothic architecture shatters the romantic myth of noble knights singing their own poetry. The reality was more pragmatic: living knights worshiped their lord’s wife, a natural expression of vassalage.

Old Russian art grew out of Byzantine traditions, but over time, it developed its own unique character. Stern, victorious visages gave way to softer features. Andrei Rublev brought meekness to icons, followed by the sad and compassionate faces of saints.

Renaissance

Antonello da Messina brought oil painting to Italy. Artists began to adopt the new technique, mixing paints directly on canvas. Masaccio, who lived only twenty-seven years, managed to become an innovator, but died in dire poverty. His younger brother refused to accept his inheritance due to debts.

Botticelli is portrayed as a decorative artist, whose emotionless Venuses are captivating in their detachment. Hieronymus Bosch worked in the prosperous Duchy of Burgundy. He inherited his father’s workshop and married well. His terrifying images were born not of madness but served as a reflection of the era’s salutary religious hypocrisy.

Mannerism and Baroque

Mannerism was evident in the distorted proportions and pale faces of El Greco’s subjects. Noble lords, despite the feeble appearance of the paintings’ subjects, eagerly commissioned such canvases. The Toledo nobility wanted to see themselves as holy ascetics.

The Baroque was the Catholic Church’s response to the Reformation, using pathos and eroticism to distract the faithful. Peter Paul Rubens has been called the most famous Baroque artist. His career was largely shaped by the resilience of his mother, who saved the family after the imprisonment of his lawyer father.

Caravaggio captured tense moments from the darkness with a beam of light. In "The Calling of St. Matthew," Jesus calls a tax collector in passing, and the artist deliberately leaves the Savior’s sculpted feet visible. The artist modeled "Cupid Victorious" after his assistant, a fact that could lead to the work being banned from social media today.

Art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

In France, Pierre Puget depicted the meeting between the philosopher Diogenes and Alexander the Great, focusing the viewer’s attention on the softness of the forms rather than the military threat. In Holland, there were so many masters of the brush that the craft rarely supported its creators. Jacob van Ruisdael and other landscape painters were forced to work elsewhere, and paintings were created to bring coziness to interiors. In Spain, Diego Velázquez brilliantly exploited naturalism. In his early painting, "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary," the wall scene appears as a doorway to another room, while in the foreground, a wrinkled old woman lectures a servant.

Antoine Watteau created a light rococo style with doll-like figures. However, the artist himself suffered from self-doubt, once scraping a completed work with a palette knife after a viewer’s casual criticism. In England, artists celebrated extravagant personalities like Lady Hamilton. The vibrant curtain in her portrait adds a touch of historical drama, contrasting with her scandalous past. As a child, Emma was a prostitute until she was hired by a con man to demonstrate a miracle cure for rejuvenation.

Impressionism, Symbolism and Surrealism

Edgar Degas was arrogant, Paul Cézanne suffered from infantilism, and Édouard Manet was calculating. Edvard Munch had painful relationships with women who provoked panic attacks. Vincent van Gogh emerges as a pragmatic man. He considered cypress trees as beautiful as Egyptian obelisks and planned to establish an artists’ commune under his leadership. His desire to become a pastor was also motivated more by practical considerations than by pure spirituality. The myth of van Gogh’s mad genius was largely inflated by the media to boost art sales.

Salvador Dalí was wealthy, successful, and fully realized in his art. His outrageous behavior was a deliberate strategy. He masterfully played on the public’s expectations, mocking those around him with impunity. Any artist needs to approach a problem from multiple perspectives, and the Spaniard excelled at this, employing unconventional solutions to realize his ideas.