The Art Of Arts: Rediscovering Painting

"I haven't seen such a fascinating work in years. Nobody has ever studied Erwin Panofsky so accurately and sensitively as Anita Albus has here."--Gerda Panofsky

"With Albus's book, we have been given a masterpiece. The author is a versatile genius, and this mighty work is unique in its highly original combination of knowledge of art history and technical experience."--William S. Heckscher, coauthor of "Art and Literature: Studies in Relationship

"This book enchants me with its revelations. I do not think anyone has ever succeeded so well in making clear that--contrary to popular belief--painting does not consist of taking three-dimensional objects and representing them in a two-dimensional way, but rather in the transformation of three-dimensional objects into another object which also has three dimensions--namely, the picture itself."--Claude Levi-Strauss

In this utterly original book, Anita Albus tells the story--in the birth and triumph of oil painting, the creation of perspective, and the very nature of paint itself--of how, when, and why the eye became king of all the senses.
Albus's subjects are the inventors of easel painting in oils, the van Eyck brothers and their followers. It was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern Europe that oil painting radically changed the way we perceived the world: the ear, through which we had previously received all knowledge, was replaced in importance by the eye. A painter of distinction herself, Albus re-creates this revolutionary time in all its intricacies, its familiarity, and its strangeness.
"The Art of Arts" is thus both a dazzling cultural history and the story of two explosive inventions: the so-called third dimension of deep space through perspective, and the shockingly vivid colors of a new kind of paint. Albus makes abundantly clear how, taken together, these breakthroughs not only created a new art but altered forever our perception of the world.