Explore A New World
Due to the fact that we live in an era where we’re constantly barraged with different forms of media, it’s easy to shrug off art as having any significant impact on our lives.
But for thousands of years, art was an important medium to our ancestors, and many consider art to be one of the most important aspects of the human experiences, and one of our greatest talents as a species.
War and art may represent different fundamental aspects of reality, but they have successfully co-exited together for thousands of years. From depictions of ancient battles to more recent works of the World Wars, artists have always wanted to try and capture some of the darker sides of humanity, which also led to some of the best artworks ever made.
Most paintings are created with a basic idea or theme in mind; and while the viewer is often left to make up their own mind about what’s going on, there’s usually at least some kind of context available in the work for their imagination to leverage off of.
This isn’t always the case, however, and some works of art are so strange and out of touch with reality that they make almost no sense whatsoever to the viewer, if any at all.
Next to the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo is the piece of art which draws people to the Louvre in the heart of Paris. But what is the story behind this incredible work of art?
Artists are the true definition of the creative type, with their minds, passions, fears, doubts, and hearts sprawled across their canvases. And it’s not that surprising to learn that an artist might add a hidden image or text to a piece that they’re working on – as an expression of themselves, it makes sense that they would want their viewers to question every inch of their work.
Having gotten its start with a group of artists who were based in Paris in the late 1800s, all art aficionados will be aware of the Impressionists and the significant contribution that they made to art as we know it today.
The world has long admired priceless works of art in museums and galleries, so much so that they may have even had these pieces replicated or reprinted to add to their collection. This is a past-time more often experienced by the wealthy, although it’s accessible enough for us ordinary folk too.
World War 2 was arguably the most violent time in human history, where countless millions lost their lives, entire cities were destroyed, and humanity lost tremendous amounts of history and culture. In particular was the amount of artwork that was plundered during the reign of the Nazis and their war machine, where they took thousands of pieces from museums and collections from around Europe and locked them away for much of the conflict.
When we look at the world’s most well known paintings, such as the Mona Lisa, we see a piece that must have taken countless hours to complete in its entirety. It’s understood that a painting can’t really be put into a museum until it has been finished, and that an incomplete piece of art will usually be locked away until later down the road.
Religion has shaped the very nature of our societies for countless centuries, and artists from around the world and from different religions have always been passionate about what they follow, and many have devoted hundreds of hours into creating unique pieces of art that captured how they felt about their faith.
From the incredible symmetry in Islam to the cathedrals of Catholicism, religious pieces of artwork tend to be some of the best and most intricate to be found anywhere.
