Love
A timeless theme that cannot be ignored, love has always fascinated artists. Painters, sculptors and even architects have drawn inspiration from and illustrated it. Ever new, love has led artists to create the masterworks of their life.
From Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love to Brancusi’s The Kiss, the treatment of love has changed along with time and style, but remains, in the end, an everlasting universal language. This book illustrates love in all its strength and variety.
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© Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA
© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA
© Maurice Denis, Artists Rights Society, New York
© Tamara de Lempicka, Artists Rights Society, New York
© Pablo Picasso, Artists Rights Society, New York
Foreword
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1484–1485.
Tempera on canvas, 172.5 × 278.5 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
The representations of Love in Western art are unnumerable: loving emotion, agonies of the soul, melancholy… Love is an inexhaustible subject, handled in an original way according to the perception and lives of the artists and the writers of any time.
This work chooses to give a major place to the emotion, to praise the loving happiness. By representing the theme through a hundred and twenty pieces extending from the Middle Ages to the end of the Modern period, it proves the timelessness of love.
We invite you to admire the legendary sculptures such as the Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, Antonio Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss or Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss.
Among other mythical paintings, you will find Antoine Watteau’s The Pilgrimage on the Island of Cythera, Jean Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing or still Marc Chagall’s The Lovers in Blue. Every major artist who has celebrated the feeling of love is gathered here under your eyes.
Tamara de Lempicka, Adam and Eve, 1931.
Oil on panel, 116 × 73.
Private collection.
And what is more appropriate than poetry to illustrate this picturesque panorama? From Ovid to Verlaine, the biggest names of the literature knew how to make Eros speak.
In prose or in verse, their texts crossed the time by revealing one thousand and one faces of love. From Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Beaudelaire’s A Hemisphere in a Head of Hair, passing by Goethe’s To the Distant One, this book invites you thus for a discovery or for a rediscovery of the most famous passages of the Western literature.
Come! an Unseen Flute
Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), c. 1550.
Oil on canvas, 176 × 191 cm.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Suzanne Valadon, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 162 × 131 cm.
Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris.
John Keats (1795–1821)
Adam and Eve
Albrecht Dürer, 1504.
Engraving, 25.1 × 20 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Gentle Heart
Adam and Eve
Gustav Klimt, 1917–1918.
Oil on canvas, 173 × 60 cm.
Österreichische Galerie, Vienna.
The Hand of God
Auguste Rodin, 1896.
Marble, 94 × 82.5 × 54.9 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
Apollo and Daphne
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1622–1625.
Marble, height: 243 cm.
Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Jupiter and Io
Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 1531.
Oil on canvas, 163.5 × 70 cm.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
The Rape of Europa
Francesco Albani, 1639.
Oil on canvas, 76.3 × 97 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
