'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...' With the same disarming force, "Power of Art" jolts us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever. The embattled heroes - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko - faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain. Most compelling of all, "Power of Art" traces the extraordinary evolution of eight world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works 'tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript...' OK, OK, but what's art really for?'

《艺术的力量》作者西蒙·沙马是位睿智严谨的学者，曾执教剑桥、牛津、哈佛等名校，现在任教于哥伦比亚大学艺术史系，主攻17世纪荷兰艺术、18世纪法国的绘画与政治、16-21世纪英国视觉艺术等方向。他的研究不限于艺术史，同时还涉及欧洲史、文化史等方面，尤其擅长将艺术家及其作品的内部精神世界与外部的社会文化变迁加以联系，相互阐释。不仅如此，他也是讲故事的行家、深受大众喜爱的电视明星，他与BBC合作的《英国史》一度改写纪录片的收视率纪录，据说甚至击败了当年红极一时的剧集《欲望都市》（Sex and the City）。