Once looking a bit closer, the observer is struck by the amount of symbolism within. Some art historians say that the painting is a personal statement about Constable’s turbulent emotions and his ever-changing states of mind. There are also political meanings possibly connected to the work, one theory being that the artist wished to express the clash of industrialization and nature and that he chose to do this by representing them through the clash of elements. Curious elements within the painting are the grave marker: (a symbol of death?), the ash tree (a symbol of life?), the church itself (a symbol of faith and resurrection?) and the rainbow (a symbol of renewed optimism?).

Whatever the interpretation, Constable exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1831 but continued to work on it during the years 1833 and 1834. One of his last major landscapes, it is represents the culmination of his numerous treatments of Salisbury Cathedral. Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the River, for instance, was painted about a decade earlier around 1820. But on his final two visits to Salisbury in 1829, Constable decided to undertake his most impressive image of the subject and the result is Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. The finished work is in a private collection but is currently on loan to the National Gallery in London.

It was at the first Impressionist exhibit of 1874 that the term “Impressionism” originated from the title of Monet’s 1872 work, Impression: Sunrise. And in these works from the early 1900s one sees Monet’s water lily picture plane completely filled with an impression of light and color as reflected from the surface of a lily pond. Neither people, land, nor the horizon line break the observer’s focused gaze into this cool and soothing scene of a pond on a warm summer’s day. His water lilies seem amazingly modern for its nearly abstract qualities, even more so considering its date of execution.

By the time the water lily paintings appeared, Impressionism had become widely accepted in the art world and highly influential with collectors and young artists alike. Monet favored painting directly from nature (en plein air), setting up his canvases in the outdoors to capture his fleeting “impressions” of a scene as it appeared to him under different conditions of weather or lighting. He had installed an ornamental water garden that proved to be the focal point for dozens of his explorations of color and light and it was these water lily scenes which began as a non-intentional series of color and light which soon became associated with his name and his repetitive studies of the various features of the French countryside around him. A magnificent study of color and light, Monet’s water lily paintings are his quintessential Impressionistic accomplishment.

WHAAM! is based on an image from ‘All American Men of War’ published by DC comics in 1962. Throughout the 1960s, Lichtenstein frequently drew on commercial art sources such as comic images or advertisements, attracted by the way highly emotional subject matter could be depicted using detached techniques. But by transferring this to a painting context, Lichtenstein could present powerfully charged scenes in an impersonal manner and leave it up to the viewers to decipher the meaning for themselves.

Most people were at first shocked into incomprehension by the cartoon paintings. Lichtenstein bad been inspired by American comics about war when he made this work and was not only interested in the stories they told, but also in the way that comic books were produced. He carefully studied and reproduced the way small dots of ink were printed close to each other to appear like large blocks of color on the page. It was a revolution of sorts. And “When he first did the Pop paintings,” Lichtenstein’s wife Dorothy recalls, “Roy said he looked on them with horror himself. It was almost a matter of getting beyond his own taste to continue doing them.”

His work to soon become a smashing success, Lichtenstein became the epitome of Pop art. His paintings are now everywhere, not only in the great galleries of the world but also as merchandise on mugs, T-shirts, posters and postcards. Cool, stylish and witty, Lichtenstein’s art was part of the essence of the 1960s.

With Jackson Pollock, one has said, the bigger the work, the more power, and No. 31 is said to be the most poised and intricate of all. When in 1945 Jackson Pollock found an area Picasso had not painted, sound, he and his wife moved to Long Island where they lived with no hot water and only a coal stove as heat. At night Jackson heard sounds, which he began to paint. In fact, Pollock pursued sounds ranging from insect noises to jazz, wanting in his art syncopation and fervor, too. Pollock began to spill paint, in a muscular dance, on canvases in his barn and then, with No. 31 or “One: No.31, 1950″, he broke through with his vast and visible panorama of jazz-inflected sounds and reached a fascinated audience who now saw his works of art as “Picasso paintings blown to pieces.”

Regarded as a mostly reclusive artist, but had a volatile personality, No. 31 was one of three wall-size paintings that Pollock painted in swift succession in the summer and autumn of 1950. The density of these interlacing liquid threads of paint is balanced and offset by puddles of muted, striking colors and by his now famous spattering technique. But whatever the technique, the pictorial result of this artistic tension has become a landmark in the history of Abstract Expressionism.

In the first century the Roman Empire contains many cities, but none in a more beautiful setting than the cities and towns lining the Bay of Naples. When Mt. Vesuvius began spewing volcanic ash on that fateful day, Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum are soon disappear from the face of the earth, or at least until being rediscovered in the Eighteenth Century. Suddenly, the classical world was in vogue again and art, architecture, literature and even fashion began to draw upon the discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum for inspiration.

And although the Villa of Mysteries is much like the other large villas of Pompeii, it contains one very unusual feature; a room decorated with beautiful and strange scenes. This room, known as “The Initiation Chamber,” measures 15 by 25 feet and is located in the front right portion of the villa. The term “mysteries” refers to secret initiation rites of the Classical world. The Greek word for “rite” means “to grow up”. Initiation rites, then, were originally ceremonies to help individuals achieve adulthood.

The fresco images one can see in the Villa of Mysteries seem to part of a ritual ceremony aimed at preparing privileged, protected girls for the psychological transition to life as married women. The most common interpretation of the images is that they are scenes of the initiation of a woman into a special cult of Dionysus, a mystery cult that required specific rites and rituals to become a member.

The villa may be accessed from Pompeii, being outside the main town, separated from it by a road with funerary monuments on either side as well as the city walls. The Villa of the Mysteries is considered a suburban villa, with a close relationship to the city, but outside the town. An incredible insight into the lives of the Romans who lived here two thousand years before us, the Villa of Mysteries is a fascinating time capsule and a sensational treat.

This extraordinary still life of seventeenth century life in the Spanish royal court continues to be studied today by students, critics and scholars alike. But deciphering the true meaning of Las Meninas appears to be impossible. So many questions are left unanswered that the painting allows each viewer to draw his or her own conclusions, and draw your own conclusions you must.

In the same way that people lap up celebrity magazines today, human nature has always had a tendency to be curious Valásquez catered to this with his look inside the royal’s private quarters. Up until then, royal portraiture tended to follow stiff formalities as well, not so with this work. Velázquez truly broke with tradition to let the world see a bit of normal life in the palace of Philip IV of Spain, giving the viewer the opportunity to humanize the royals.

Centered around La Infanta Margarita, who is surrounded by her ladies in waiting, the family dog and two dwarves, Velázquez made sure that those people kept behind the scenes were also worthy of being painted. And to the left of Margarita we find Velázquez himself, paintbrush and easel in hand, poised in front of an enormous canvas. By including himself in the main part of the painting Velázquez is asserting his own position as an artist. But the scene does not stop there. The most peculiar part of the painting is the fact that Velázquez has chosen to include the King and Queen only by their hazy reflections in the mirror which hangs on the back wall and his purposeful elusiveness cannot fail to raise many questions.

If Velázquez is painting the young princess, why is he doing so from behind? Perhaps Velázquez is actually painting King Philip IV and his wife as they stand before him and Margarita is simply there to observe her parents. Or was Velázquez using his status as Palace Chamberlain to play power games by placing himself at the forefront of the pictures and the royals as a mere reflection? Or was he thinking of elevating the status of the viewer to the position of the king?

What ever the reasons, everyone who admires Las Meninas must make that choice for themselves and this is probably how Velázquez intended his painting to be interpreted. And this is what makes it such an enduring and intriguing piece of art. You can see Las Meninas at Madrid’s famous Museo del Prado.

Bernini was the first sculptor to utilize the dramatic potential of light in sculpture and this is fully realized in this stunning work. The sun’s rays, coming from an unseen source, illuminate the saint and the smiling angel about to pierce her heart with a golden arrow. The figures are brought to life before our eyes. The center of gravity of the complex mass of marble is shifting and: the saint sinks down as the young satyr moves into the forefront. The focal point of the whole is the famous flame-tipped arrow so vividly described by St Teresa of Avila in her spiritual autobiography.

A Spanish mystic who lived during the Counter-Reformation, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) founded several houses for “barefoot” Carmelite friars and nuns who sought to live according to the original rule of the order. This ascetic form of monastic life was one of the many different steps described in her autobiography the Way of Perfection and needed in order to find the path to a mystical union with God.

True to Baroque sentiment, Bernini’s stunning work shows better than any other Teresa’s transfiguration, her “Sleep of God”, as described by certain Christian mystics and this amazing work offers what appears to be a real glimpse at the glory the saint has just received. Bernini is said to have spent hours at prayer each day while working on his masterpiece, attempting to seek the experience and find the expression so miraculously rendered in this monumental masterpiece.

Probably begun in 1512 and finished in 1515 in the small Alsatian hamlet of Isenheim near Colmar, the Isenheim Altarpiece is shocking in its intensity and many are even somewhat repelled by the graphic nature of the central crucifixion scene. Grünewald has shown the Cross as two roughhewn, green logs with the crossbar drawn down by its gory, dreadful weight. Christ has just expired in agony, rigor mortis has set in, and his fingers are frozen into a horrible, clutching position. The weight of his tormented body has drawn his arms almost from their sockets. Below the Cross on the right stands John the Baptist with a blood-red cloak thrown over his camel skin.

Once the altarpiece doors are opened, the tones of greenish black and blood red are transformed to flame red, gold, and blue. The left panel is the Annunciation with the angel appearing to Mary in a chapel whose Gothic vaults and tracery are drawn and painted with amazing precision. The central panel shows Mary caring for the Christ Child in the manner of a nurse while standing before a richly carved and painted portico. Then the cycle culminates in the right panel with what is probably the most astonishing Resurrection scene in Christian art.

The work of Grünewald expresses the torment of the early sixteenth century more fully than that of any other artist of the period. These tortured Gothic forms, painted before Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, express an unmistakable message of emotional intensity and terrible realism that were never reached by another artist again.

These works caused public outcry when they first appeared around 1600. And yet despite this, or perhaps even because of this, the life of St. Matthew established him as the most renowned and controversial painter in Rome of his era. Breaking with conventional formulas used in depicting saints, he used ordinary people as models and painted them with this new unforgiving realism of his. And this very rejection of tradition gave new meaning to the interpretation of traditional themes in religious painting.

Caravaggio introduced the use of tenebrism, or dramatic, selective illumination of form out of deep shadow to heighten the emotional tension of his paintings. This placed a new focus on the details and isolated the figures and was a real eye opener for other painters to follow him. It became in fact a hallmark of the Baroque period.

After his explosion on to the scene with the St. Matthew works, he received many commissions, including the monumental Death of the Virgin, which was refused by the Carmelite nuns because of the Virgin’s plebeian features. His reputation and income increased despite harsh criticism and a turbulent lifestyle. Caravaggio had an enormous impact on painting throughout Europe and strangely, his saints and angels inhabiting a somewhat sleazy contemporary Rome clearly resemble modern characters of our age.

No better illustration of this can be found among Italian masters. The scene is a vast one, yet dark with foreboding meaning. To most of the people gathered there it appears to be nothing more than a common execution. Many of them are attending to it as to a tedious duty while others work away at some menial task more or less connected with the Crucifixion, all represented without much personal feeling about the executed Christ. The painter clearly does not try to give them the proper emotions.

Owing to Tintoretto’s light-on-dark technique, his figures sometimes have a tendency to look almost a bit ghostly, but the foreground figures in the Crucifixion, grouped in a massive pyramid at the base of the cross, are defined by vigorous contours and are modeled to create a strong, almost sculpture-like effect. One little group huddled as if for protection against the hostile crowds forms the base of the composition.

This panorama of Golgotha populated by workmen, soldiers, executioners, horsemen and apostles creates a strong sense of alienation and despair and yet pure fascination. The tumult of the crowd, the grief of the apostles, and the yearning of the penitent thief seem to come to a focus in the head of Christ and grip the viewer with an urgency that is hard to explain. A monumental masterpiece of high Renaissance art, Tintoretto’s Crucifixion will remain a treasure for all time.