The Madman's Gallery

Edward Brooke-Hitching

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781398503571
• eBook ISBN: 9781398503588
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Enter The Madman's Gallery - the perfect gift book for any art lover. Discover an eccentric exploration through the curious history of art, to find the strangest paintings, sculptures, drawings and other artistic oddities ever made. From the author of the bestseller The Madman's Library ( Sunday Times Literature Book of the Year 2020, Radio 4 Book of the Week ) comes an extraordinary new illustrated collection. This unique exhibition gathers more than a hundred magnificent works, each chosen for their striking beauty, weirdness and captivating story behind their creation.Obscure and forgotten treasures sit alongside famous masterpieces with secret stories to tell. Here are Doom paintings, screaming sculptures, magical manuscripts, impossible architecture, dog-headed saints, angel musketeers and the first portrait of a cannibal. Stolen art, outsider art, ghost art, revenge art, and art painted at the bottom of the sea take their place alongside scandalous art, forgeries and hoaxes, art of dreams and nightmares, and cryptic paintings yet to be decoded. Discover the remarkable Elizabethan portraits of men in flames, the mystery ofthe nude Mona Lisa, the gruesome ingredients of lost pigments, the werewolf legion of the Roman army, and the Italian monk who levitated so often he's recognised as the patron saint of aeroplane passengers. From prehistoric cave art to portraits painted by artificial intelligence, The Madman's Gallery draws on a remarkable depth of research and variety of images to form a book that surprises at every turn, and ultimately serves to celebrate the endless power and creativity of human imagination.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’ (38,000-33,000 BC) and Other Fertility Art
• 2. Nebra Sky Disc (c.1600 BC)
• 3. Colossal Heads of the Olmec (c.900 BC)
• 4. Tomb of the Diver (c.480 BC) and Other Art Made to Be Buried
• 5. Statue of Glycon, the False Snake Deity (late second century)
• 6. Doom Paintings (twelfth-thirteenth centuries)
• 7. ‘Portrait of the Devil, Codex Gigas’ (early thirteenth century)
• 8. Japanese ‘Kusozu’ (thirteenth-nineteenth centuries) and the Art of Death
• 9. Ripley Scroll (fourteenth century)
• 10. ‘Wound Man’ (fifteenth-seventeenth centuries)
• 11. ‘Arnolfini Portrait’ (1434), Jan van Eyck
• 12. ‘Crucifixion Diptych’ (c.1460) and the Tricky Art of Restoration
• 13. ‘Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro’ (c.1473-5), Piero della Francesca
• 14. ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ (1490-1500), Hieronymus Bosch
• 15. ‘Unicorn’ ‘Tapestries’ (1495-1505)
• 16. ‘Mona Vanna’, the Nude Mona Lisa (c.1510), Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno
• 17. ‘Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian I’ (1512-26), Hans Burgkmair the Elder and Others
• 18. ‘The Ugly Duchess’ (c.1513), Quentin Matsys
• 19. St Christopher Dog-head (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries)
• 20. ‘Fool’s Cap Map of the World’ (c.1580-90)
• 21. The Composite Art of Arcimboldo (1563-c.1590)
• 22. ‘Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters’ (c.1594)
• 23. ‘The Legend of the Baker of Eeklo’ (c.1550-1650), after Cornelis van Dalem
• 24. ‘Man Consumed by Flames’ (1600-10), Isaac Oliver
• 25. Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ (1612-13) and the Art of Revenge
• 26. ‘Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee’ (1633) and the Art of Theft
• 27. ‘Tapuya Woman’ (1641) and the Art of Cannibalism
• 28. ‘Portrait of Barbara Van Beck’ (c.1650)
• 29. ‘The Temptation of St Anthony’ (c.1650), Joos van Craesbeeck
• 30. ‘Ángeles Arcabuceros’ – The Art of the Angel Musketeer (seventeenth century)
• 31. Central African ‘Minkisi’ Power Figures (seventeenth-twentieth centuries)
• 32. ‘Competition on the Ponte dei Pugni in Venice’ (1673), Joseph Heintz the Younger
• 33. ‘Typus Religionis’ (c.1700) and the Art of Blasphemy
• 34. ‘Lucifer’s New Row-Barge’ (c.1722) and the Art of Satire
• 35. ‘Joseph of Cupertino Takes Flight’… (eighteenth century), Ludovico Mazzanti
• 36. The Imaginary Prisons of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1750)
• 37. The Ghost Heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1770-83)
• 38. Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ (1781) and the Art of Dreaming
• 39. Mr Barker’s Monster Panoramas (1789)
• 40. ‘Interior of a Kitchen’ (1815), Martin Drölling
• 41. Francisco Goya’s ‘Black Paintings’ (1819-23)
• 42. ‘Hikeshi-banten’ (nineteenth century) and the Art of Fighting Fire
• 43. ‘The Coronation of Inês de Castro in 1361’ (c.1849), Pierre Charles Comte
• 44. ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ (1855-64), Richard Dadd
• 45. ‘Portrait of Madame X’ (1884), John Singer Sargent
• 46. ‘Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV’ (1880-91), Ilya Repin
• 47. ‘The Roses of Heliogabalus’ (1888), Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
• 48. ‘Bream in 25 Feet of Water Off the West Coast of Scotland’ (1910), Zarh Pritchard
• 49. ‘Fate of the Animals’ (1913), Franz Marc
• 50. Raoul Hausmann’s ‘The Art Critic’ (1919-20) and the Art of Dada
• 51. Georgiana Houghton and Spiritualist Art (nineteenth-twentieth centuries)
• 52. ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (1931), Salvador Dalí and Surrealist Art
• 53. ‘The Wounded Deer’ (1946), Frida Kahlo
• 54. The ‘Eternity’ of Arthur Stace (1932-67)
• 55. James Hampton’s ‘The Throne of the Third Heaven…’ (c.1950-64) and Other Outsider Art
• 56. ‘Merda d’Artista’ (1961), Piero Manzoni
• 57. ‘Mondo Cane Shroud’ (1961), Yves Klein
• 58. The Art of Pierre Brassau (1964)
• 59. The ‘Getty Kouros’ (twentieth century) and Other Fakes and Forgeries
• 60. Marina Abramović and Performance Art
• 61. ‘Portrait of Edmond de Belamy’ (2018) and Other Art by Artificial Intelligence
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Picture Credits
• Copyright