Flying Out of this World

Flights of fancy and fear, ecstatic highs, dreadful falls and beckoning skies: these are the images British film-maker Peter Greenaway collects and dissects in "Flying out of This World", the second volume in a series developed by the Louvre and devoted to innovative writing on the visual arts. As guest curator, Greenaway selected from the Louvre's collection of European prints and drawings 91 masterpieces that illustrate the human longing for flight. Greenaway's text, a compilation of brief commentaries that combine description, allusion and interpretation, illuminates the images as depictions of flight desired and denied. Including works by Redon, Goya, Brueghel, Michelangelo, Mantegna, Rubens, Poussin and Delacroix, this volume offers a combination of literary and visual art, of sight and insight. A pursuit through the Bible, classical mythology, cosmology, theology, etymology, ornithology and meteorology, "Flying out of This World" is not just an illustrated history of imagined flight, but a meditation on its meaning as a metaphor for the human condition, caught between a weighty body and a soaring spirit.