Book Details

"Museums are full of images meant to affect us deeply - not just pique our curiosity but move us to tears. Yet we resist. It is common to cry in the theater, at the opera, at concerts, or while reading books. Painting seems more distant, colder, more intellectual. This has not always been the case." "Fourth-century Greek painting depicted people in states of extreme grief, so that the viewer might respond in kind. Crying in front of paintings was commonplace in the Middle Ages. There were more tears in the eighteenth century, and then again in the age of Romanticism. Why have the last hundred years been so dry by comparison?" Pictures and Tears is a strange and wonderful investigation into paintings and the emotions they conjure. Painter and art historian James Elkins writes about his encounter with Bellini's Saint Francis in Ecstasy, the effect of the Rothko Chapel on visitors, and our responses to Caravaggio, Greuze, Friedrich, and others. This is a book for people who have wondered at the power of painting and been moved by it, perhaps even to tears.