12 Animals in World Art

The book’s main characters are twelve animals of the earth, air, and sea: from a fearsome whale to an elegant white-winged crane, from a flexible cheetah to a shy giraffe. Together they trace an unbroken path through the history of art—from the late antique mosaics of Aquileia, laid out at the dawn of Christianity in the 4th century, to the vivid performances of Joseph Beuys. In parallel, the book tells about Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Katsushika Hokusai, Eugène Delacroix, and many others. The purpose of this book is to show that the presence of animals matters not only for ecosystems and the natural world, but also for the deepest and fundamental aspects of human culture and art.