Reading Pictures

We say that every picture tells a story -- but does it really? Can we read a painting the way we read a book? Is there a vocabulary we can learn that will help us tease out its meaning? In Reading Pictures, Alberto Manguel, the best-selling author of A History of Reading, offers a spirited, endlessly entertaining meditation on the questions we ask ourselves when we stand in front of a work of art.

"Much as I love reading words," Manguel writes, "I love reading pictures, and I enjoy finding the stories explicitly or secretly woven into all kinds of works of art -- without, however, having to resort to arcane or esoteric vocabularies. This book grew out of the need to reclaim, for common viewers such as myself, the responsibility and the right to read these images and their stories."

Manguel coaxes the reader to look at art not from the perspective of a critic but as a curious student of life. Taking a handful of great works of art -- photographs, paintings, buildings, sculptures -- he explores, with delight and erudition, how each one attempts to tell a story that we, the viewer, must either decipher or invent. Whether delving into Picasso's treatment of his mistresses and its impact on his painting, revisiting the riddles of the past in the paintings of Caravaggio and Robert Campin, or decrypting the fearful dreamscapes of Marianna Gartner and the ghoulish portraits of Lavinia Fontana, he invites us to explore, interrogate, and revel in what we see.

Not since John Berger's Ways of Seeing has a writer so eloquently examined what happens when we are moved by a work of art. Richly illustrated with 33 color and 150 black-and-white images, Reading Pictures shows that there is no limit to the stories we can find if we know how -- and where -- to look for them.