Maria Tsaneva

Jean-Louis Andr Th odore G ricault was an influential French painter and lithographer, known for "The Raft of the Medusa" and other paintings. Although he died young, he was one of the pioneers of the Romantic Movement. His stormy career lasted little more than a decade and in that time he displayed a meteoric and many-sided genius. His love of thrilling action, his sense of swirling movement, his energetic conduct of paint, and his taste for the horrid were all to become features of Romanticism. G ricault was, at the same time avant-garde in his realism: he made studies from corpses and severed limbs for The Raft of the Medusa and painted an extraordinary series of portraits of mental patients in the clinic of his friend Dr Georget. His work had enormous influence, most notably on Delacroix.

Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto, was an Italian painter of landscapes of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching. Much of Canaletto's early artwork was painted "from nature", differing from the then customary practice of completing paintings in the studio. Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of colour - an effect produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away objects. His early works remain his most coveted and, according to many authorities, his best. One of his early pieces is The Stonemason's Yard (1729) which depicts a humble working area of the city. Later Canaletto painted grand scenes of the canals of Venice and the Doge's Palace. His large-scale landscapes portrayed the city's pageantry and waning traditions, making innovative use of atmospheric effects and strong local colors. For these qualities, his works may be said to have anticipated Impressionism.

This Art Book with Foreword and annotated reproductions by Maria Tsaneva contains 110 selected paintings and drawings of Hieronymus Bosch. In the primary identified description of Bosch's artworks, in 1560 Felipe de Guevara wrote that Bosch was regarded simply as "the originator of monsters and chimeras". In the beginning 17-th century, the Dutch Karel van Mander explained Bosch's art as "marvelous and extraordinary fantasies"; nevertheless, he finished that the paintings are "frequently less enjoyable than frightening to look at." In the 20-th century, researchers have come to sight Bosch's vision as fewer unbelievable, and acknowledged that his art reflects the conventional religious faith systems of his time. His images of sinning people, his view of Heaven and Hell are now perceived as consistent with those of late medieval didactic literature and habits. Nerveless, some critics notice Bosch as example of medieval surrealist, and parallels are repeatedly made with the modern Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Other scholars try to interpret his images using the words of Freudian psychology.