How to Understand a Painting: Decoding Symbols in Art

by Françoise Barbe-Gall

Choosing ten symbols from the natural world (the sun, the shell, the bird) and ten man-made (the window, the book, the mirror), Françoise Barbe-Gall illuminates our understanding of how these have been used and developed in art from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century, with sixty-eight wonderfully vivid examples.
Painting has always made abundant use of forms and objects to convey abstract ideas: love, hope for eternal life, loyalty or betrayal. These recurring motifs, which were familiar to many in the past, have mostly become mysterious to the audiences of today. Today's art-lover will have to learn to look out for all the small things that can so easily seem like unimportant details, or simply decoration. But a flower, a reflection in a mirror or a bird in flight nearly always mean more than they first appear to.
From Holbein's apple of knowledge to the black cat at the foot of Manet's Olympia, from Magritte's mysterious candles to Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers, this book shows how each work makes use of the language of symbols in an original and more meaningful way.

Genres: Art

312 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2007

About the author

Françoise Barbe-Gall est une historienne d'art française, conférencière et auteure.

Barbe-Gall a fait ses études d'histoire de l'art à la Sorbonne, ainsi qu'à l'école du Louvre où elle enseigne. Parallèlement, elle dirige l'association CORETA (Comment regarder un tableau) au sein de laquelle elle donne de nombreuses conférences. Elle est régulièrement appelée à intervenir dans des séminaires en liaison avec la publicité et le marketing.

Reviews

[carelessdestiny · Rating 1 out of 5]

For me, it did exactly the opposite of what the title says. It befuddled the paintings with a sort of "inspirational" writing (she quotes the Bible a lot- even when there's no biblical reference in the picture) that ascribed emotions and future and past actions to the figures which amount to nothing more than fanciful speculation and often has no basis in the painting. It made the pictures seem rather dull.

[Gemma Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the style of this a little florid, but it brought an interesting perspective to the pictures discussed and I feel I learnt quite a bit about symbolism, particularly Christian symbolism, in art.

[Felicitas · Rating 3 out of 5]

sometimes the author interprets the paintings way too liberally but overall a nice book