Pictures and Tears is a strange and wonderful investigation into paintings and the emotions they evoke.
In past centuries, viewers were often moved by paintings. Fourth-century Greek painting depicted people in states of extreme grief, so that the viewer might respond in kind. Crying in front of paintings was commonplace in the Middle Ages. There were more tears in the eighteenth century, and then again in the age of Romanticism. Why have the last hundred years been so dry by comparison?
James Elkins writes about his encounter with Bellini's Ecstasy of St. Francis in the Frick Collection, the effect of the Rothko Chapel on visitors, our responses to Caravaggio, Greuze, Friedrich, Bouts, David, Ingres, Regnault, a Kamakura period landscape, and Van Gogh. Hundreds of correspondents shared with him their experiences of crying in front of paintings, fleshing out what becomes a history of emotion and vulnerability, and an inquiry into the nature of art.
This is a book for people who have wondered at the power of painting and been moved by it, perhaps even to tears.
