"After all, every picture is a history of love and hate when read from the appropriate angle", wrote Leopoldo Salas-Nicanor in 1731, and in this marvellously illuminating book Alberto Manguel sets out to find those histories explicitly or secretly woven into all kinds of works or art, drawing us - "common viewers" like himself - into the storied world of paintings, buildings and sculptures, picture postcards and even museums.
Today, we live in a kaleidoscopic new world of images. Does every picture tell a story? Taking a handful of extraordinary images - photographed, painted, built, sculpted - Alberto Manguel explores, with delight and erudition, how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must decipher or invent.
Whether delving into the love of life in the twentieth-century world of Joan Mitchell, or the brutal complexities of Picasso's treatment of his mistress, revisiting the riddles of the past in the fifteenth-century painting of Robert Campin, or the heartrending life of "the hairy girl" whose matted fur so astonished sixteenth-century Italy; laying bare the unequivocal passion of Tina Modotti or the passionate dream world of Marianna Gartner, and the colliding, unbalancing power of the architect Peter Eisenman - he helps us to enjoy and explore the visual landscape well live in.
This book is not about art history or theory - but it could inform the way we "read" this visual world, and help open our eyes and minds to its astonishing riches.
