Love: From Botticelli to Kahlo

By Brad Finger

This fascinating gift book charts the many ways artists have represented the passionate bonds that shape human life -- from sacred devotion to erotic desire.

Transporting readers across centuries and cultures, this romantic volume pairs fifty artworks with brief, incisive essays that consider how love has been pictured, interpreted, and expressed in different media.

Each entry examines a single work -- ranging from early religious icons and Renaissance portraits to ornate Rococo scenes, modernist experimentations, and contemporary provocations. Moving through many registers of affection -- fidelity, enchantment, longing, sensual pleasure, heartbreak, and transcendence -- the selections unfold as a sequence of intimate encounters.

Readers are invited to consider a garden scene by Renoir, a Rococo tableau from Fragonard's Progress of Love series, Bronzino's charged allegory of Venus and Cupid, and Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, alongside masterpieces by Rodin, Klimt, Picasso, Chagall, Kahlo, and Abramovic--as well as many other artists whose works deepen and complicate the book's exploration of humanity's most powerful emotion.

Impeccably produced and extensively illustrated.Features work by Botticelli, Rodin, Klimt, Picasso, Chagall and Kahlo.Reflects on the context, atmosphere, and symbolism, of each artwork across two pages.Captures ideas on how to represent the idea of love from antiquity to contemporary day.Humanity's strongest, most enduring emotion represented in a delightful gift book.
This exquisite volume reflects love's ineffable complexity, revealing how artists have given shape and life to an emotion that is universal, elusive, and continuously reinterpreted.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3791394673
• ISBN13: 9783791394671
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Prestel Publishing
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.