Thread by @paullicino

Art: A thread.

I really wish I'd had more art education, and sooner. If history is the story of human events and philosophy is the story of human ideas and how they changed the world, art is the story of what people cared about, for good or ill.

Art reflects culture by reflecting trends and power and privilege and concepts and the hot, flaming blood that ran through the veins of the most passionate people of its time, whether those were the people creating it, funding it or even opposing it.

It wasn't until my mid twenties that I discovered the kind of art that was for me, which was like finding a new window in my home that looked out to the most overpoweringly beautiful view I'd ever seen.

I discovered Romanticism and Pre-Raphaelites.

The free access to so many art galleries is a terrific blessing that England offers. It simultaneously exposes people to beauty, to history and to a host of ideas and threads that, if tugged, pull forth all kinds of stories and knowledge.

It's impossible to look at so much great art and not feel your heart physically, measurably, categorically swell in size. To feel your soul grow ten times larger and deeper and grander. To take a hammer to whatever dam you have built around your emotions and have them gush forth.

Look at Holbein's The Ambassadors. Peppered with details giving subtle hints about the people it depicts, their lives, the political climate.

Then, on the ground, a bizarre, terrifying, distorted skull that only looks normal when the painting is viewed from a particular angle.

Blake saw this ghost of a flea, a tree full of angels, God at his window and Satan on his stairs. Many who knew him were confused by his visions and peculiar ideas, which included racial and sexual equality.

My favourite artist is Caspar David Friedrich, with his romantic, gothic and allegorical paintings of expansive, beautiful, often haunting landscapes. As far as I know, this is the only work of his kept anywhere in Britain.

One day I'll go to Germany and look at so many more.

But my favourite painting is still An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, by Joseph Wright. It's about attitudes to science and it's six feet tall, nearly eight feet across and so detailed you can see the reflections of candlelight in the tiny tools on the table.

Other paintings in this thread:
Cardinal de Richelieu, by de Champaigne
Elizabeth, by van Herwijck or van der Meulen
At Handeck, by Calame
Saint Eulalia and The Lady of Shalott, by Waterhouse
The Ambassadors, by Holbein
The Ghost of a Flea, by Blake
Winter Landscape, by Friedrich

And here's a detail from Two Followers of Cadmus devoured by a Dragon, by van Haarlem, just in case you thought all of this stuff was very placid. I happen to like a lot of the calmer work out there, but the art world has more than its fair share of the dramatic and visceral.

A postscript: Caspar David Friedrich's The Tree of Crows is his only work hanging in the Louvre and I almost ran around that place all day long until I found it and looked at every single brush stroke that traced out the shape of each bird.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tree_…

Post-postcript: I'm particularly awed when it comes to nighttime scenes in art from the mid 1600s onward, when the moon becomes markedly magical.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_in_…

Post-post-postscript: Women politely bored by mansplaining in the works of Edmund Leighton.