The Complete History of Art. Lecture Course

Paola Volkova - Soviet and Russian art historian, cultural historian, teacher, host of the author program "Bridge over the Abyss" about masterpieces of visual arts on the "Culture" channel. A brilliant educator and storyteller, through her books, lectures, and conversations, she instilled in her students and interlocutors a sense of beauty, trying to reach their souls.
. The edition you are holding combines three books based on the unique series of lectures by art critic Paola Volkova. The first is "Commentary on Antiquity," where new connections are traced between forms - from Stonehenge to the Globe Theatre, from Crete to the Spanish corrida, from the European Mediterranean to the conceptualism of the 20th century - all of this is interrelated and cannot exist without each other. "I believe, - said Paola Dmitrievna, - that the entire history of culture that we know is a continuous history of commentary. We are still commenting on Antiquity. Thanks to this endless commentary with world artistic culture, we possess psychological, intellectual, and spiritual wealth".
. The second book "Mystics and Humanists" is dedicated 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 just artists. They were philosophers, charged with the main problems of the time. Returning to the ideals of Antiquity, they created a holistic concept of the world, possessing internal unity, filling traditional religious plots with earthly content.
. The last book included in this lecture course discusses 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 the impression, the beauty of everyday reality, and to depict what the eye sees at a specific moment, and it turned out that their creativity forever influenced all subsequent art.
. The book invites the reader on an exciting journey through the centuries, where they, following the story of the art critic, will be able to reconsider the images of world artistic culture anew.