Momentos estelares de la historia del arte

Somewhere between Rhodes and Barcelona, between a line drawn on a tablet in the fourth century B.C. and a basilica that has remained unfinished for 140 years, there is room for almost everything that human beings have tried to say without words. Carlos Cubeiro has gathered twenty such moments: the duel of brushes between Apelles and Protogenes, the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel painted with a broken neck, Rembrandt's last self-portrait, the theft of the Mona Lisa, Duchamp's Fountain, the terracotta warriors of Xi'an rescued from oblivion, the birth of Mickey Mouse, the Moka coffee pot, the exodus from the Prado Museum during the Civil War, and the Sagrada Familia finally reaching its full height... Moments that, together, sketch something akin to a portrait of humanity and that contain something of its vanity, its genius, its greed, its capacity to destroy what it does not understand or to venerate what it does not deserve. A delightful, erudite, ironic, rigorous, and literary book, ready to point out that today we visit museums with the reverence we once reserved for temples, while art disappears from classrooms as if it were dispensable. Reading it is an act of resistance.