Every Picture Hides a Story: The Secret Ways Artists Make Their Work More Seductive

Each year 11 million people trek to the Louvre to gawk at the Mona Lisa. Many visitors clutch guide books in hand describing the painting. For some, it’s the experience of a lifetime, one they’ll talk about with friends and family for decades. Yet some modern researchers say that the vast majority of people will never recognize the hidden messages in this painting. That’s because those hidden messages are subliminal. Buried below the threshold of conscious awareness, Da Vinci used techniques people never notice. Not only don’t people know what they’re seeing, they would be shocked to find out. A surprisingly large number of famous paintings fall into the same category. That is, they employ subliminal techniques to enhance the effectiveness of the work or to encode messages within portraits and landscapes. No book, however, has ever attempted to provide an overview of the technical sophistication and arcane methods that artists worldwide have used to conceal secret meaning in their work. Every Picture Hides a Story is the first book to expose the subliminal content in the world’s greatest paintings. Titillating, subversive, and building on the groundbreaking work of pioneers of art criticism, this book will enable readers to view art masterpieces with greater understanding. And their enjoyment of these works will be exponentially enhanced. This full-color book contains 86 images of the paintings and their details.

ISBN-13: 9781538161364

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers - Inc.

Publication Date: 11-15-2022

Pages: 312

Product Dimensions: 6.31(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.79(d)

William Cane is the author of more than a dozen books, among them such contemporary classics as The Art of Kissing, Fiction Writing Master Class, and Clubhouse Confidential. He has had a distinguished career as a professor of English at CUNY and Boston College, where he helped a generation of students discover the hidden content in works of literature and art. A former Massachusetts trial attorney, he is a highly sought-after speaker on the college lecture circuit. He has appeared on almost every major television talk show, including Today, The View, and CBS This Morning. A native of New York City, he lives in Westchester County. Anna Gabrielle earned a certificate in world art history from the Smithsonian Associates in Washington, DC. She also holds a master’s in English, with her primary area of research focusing on the hidden symbolism in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings. A former commercial pilot for a major airline, she has studied paintings in museums on six continents. She lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Leonardo da Vinci 2. Michelangelo 3. Raphael 4. Hans Holbein 5. Caravaggio 6. Titian 7. Artemisia Gentileschi 8. Diego Velázquez 9. Johannes Vermeer 10. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 11. William Bouguereau 12. John Everett Millais 13. Édouard Manet 14. Edgar Degas 15. Berthe Morisot 16. Mary Cassatt 17. Thomas Eakins 18. John William Waterhouse 19. Vincent van Gogh 20. John Singer Sargent 21. John William Godward 22. Gustav Klimt Acknowledgements Index