The Complete History of Art

This audio book combines three books based on the unique lecture cycle of art historian Paola Volkova. The first is “Commentary on Antiquity,” where new connections are traced between forms—from Stonehenge to Shakespeare’s Globe theater, from Crete to the Spanish bullring, from European Mediterranean culture to the conceptualism of the twentieth century—everything is linked and cannot exist without the rest. “I believe,” Paola Dmitrievna said, “that the entire history of culture we know is a continuous history of commentary. We comment on Antiquity to this day. Thanks to this endless commentary with the world’s art culture, we have psychological, intellectual, and spiritual wealth.” The second book, “Mystics and Humanists,” is devoted to the Renaissance. The artists of this period—Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Titian, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder—were not simply artists. They were philosophers charged with the major problems of their time. Returning to the ideals of Antiquity, they created a unified concept of the world, possessing inner unity; they filled traditional religious plots with earthly content. The last book included in this lecture course tells about the phenomenon of Impressionism. Édouard Manet and Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin tried to convey to the viewer impression— the beauty of everyday reality— and to pass on what the eye sees in a specific moment. And somehow, their work ended up affecting all subsequent art once and for all. The book invites the reader on an exciting journey through the centuries, where, following the art historian’s narration, they can rethink the images of the world’s art culture in a new way.