Nature and Its Symbols (A Guide to Imagery)

Just what I was looking for. Clear ideas, great quality. We just love it.

Very informative

This is one of the greatest iconographic dictionaries ever! It is a great tool for any research in art and art history, specialle those related to iconography from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. However, you should take into consideration it is a tool and if you're making a serious investigation you'd probably need to research more books.

These books are a great tool for starting to understand symbolism. Of course the subject is so deep that one cannot expect to have entire chapters devoted to single symbols, for instance the "rose" could be a book in and of itself, but this does give you visual examples and definitely points you in the right direction. In many cases you will not get final answers to questions of symbolism, but it will without question point you in the right direction.

Great reading.

Just what I was looking for.

For anyone interested in art or art history this is an appealing title.Unfortunately the presentation is not up to the standard you would expect for an art book.1. There is no index. If you are interested in a particular symbol, you have to look through every page in the book.2. The paintings, illustrations and explanatory text are all too small. In fact, it appears everything was formated for a bigger page size but in order to save money everything was shrunk to fit on to a smaller page format. The result is: I need quite strong magnifiying glasses to read the text. And it is not easy to appreciate the magnificience of the paintings.Overall: I would not recommend this book to a friend.

In "Guide to imagery series" books I found the books on artthat give an exceptionally clear presentation of the subject.I bought 6 books ("Nature and Its Symbols" among them)and I really found what I was searching for. You can study Old andNew Testament as well as ancient mythology reading these books,understand the role of different details, symbols drawn on each picture. Inside each book there is a short description of the specific topic followed by full-colour reproductions of the pictures on this topic from different museums all over the world with detailed explanations to each picture. It was amazing to find and understand the meaning of different pictures I saw in art galleries in St.Petersburg, Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Venice, Naples and other places. Really a great selection of art works is presented in each of these books. I strongly recommend all these books to everybody who wants to understand the meaning of the pictures and get a nice art collection at home.

Produto ótimo, exatamente como esperava!

The book is excellent but it should be called 'Symbolism of Nature in Christian Religious Art', rather than Nature and its Symbols. The book looks at the symbolism of natural objects (animals, plants, flowers, food) within the context of mostly christian art. Most symbols get atleast 2 or 3 pages with a good written description and then a few very clear images of artwork which have interesting annotations explaining what the contents of the paintings symbolise. It's a really great book if you're interested in spiritual and religious symbolism.

Una guía bastante interesante para amantes del arte. Divida en los siguientes apartados: plantas, frutas, animales voladores, criaturas de la imaginación, flores, animales terrestres y animales acuáticos. Dentro que cada apartado explica aproximadamente entre 10 y 25 de los principales elementos de cada categoría, por ejemplo, en el apartado de animales, habla del león o el elefante, pero no del oso. Realiza un análisis bastante interesante, aunque escueto (de una carilla y acompañado por varias pinturas) en el que analiza la presencia de estas categoría en diversas pinturas o pasajes bíblicos, señalando sus origenes místicos, significados atribuídos y demás datos interesantes.Contras: si buscas un diccionario de símbolos muy completo o para un uso académico posiblemente se te quede corto, trata los motivos más relevantes. Los árboles se tratan de manera genérica (dentro de las plantas), no se profundiza en esa categoría.Ventajas: el diseño gráfico del libro está muy bien realizado (está repleto de reproducciones de cuadros donde además se explican con flechas los motivos), es muy agradable simplemente pasar las páginas y ojearlo supeficialmente.

This excellent series provides immediate insights into the secret world of paintings. From symbolism to use of colour this is a very accessible book that examines nature and its symbols in art. The page layout follows the standard formula with clear editing and a good selection of pictures explained. easy to manage, easy to navigate and very readable - excellent book, excellent series

Bought it as a present and my friend loved it. It has just enough info and not too much that it's overwhelming. There are beautiful pictures used to demonstrate the styles and themes used in paintings and art in general.