The Power of Art Author: Simon Schama Publisher: Beijing Fine Arts Photography Publishing House

The Power of Art takes us on an eye-opening and thrilling journey back to the past, from Caravaggio's David and Goliath to Picasso's Guernica, focusing on eight extraordinary masterpieces. These heroes in distress, Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko, each in their own way, faced the crisis with a resolute defiance, a fighting spirit, and a faith that defied all ridicule and shortsightedness. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered people's complacency, transformed cognition, and changed the way we see the world.

Through these vivid accounts and powerfully evocative descriptions, Schama explores the changing personalities of these artists and the spirit of their times, capturing the grandiose theater life of bourgeois Amsterdam, the passion and suspicion of revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and desolation of the Spanish Civil War.

Most fascinatingly, The Power of Art traces the extraordinary development of eight “eye-popping” works of world-class art that were born out of moments of inspiration and that “tell us what the outside world is like, what the inside world is like, that the prosaic sources of knowledge cannot tell us, while at the same time answering with unquestionable dignity the question posed by everyone who is forced to engage with art: ‘Okay, okay, but what is the point of art?’”