Arranged chronologically spanning a range of periods and styles, this book presents a description of thirty-five famous paintings.

While in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum. Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci--clues visible for all to see--yet ingeniously disguised by the painter. Langdon joins...

As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love.

Its the early 1980s-the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable...

Jordan Bingham's first assignment on her new job is to track down a rumored Agatha Christie play, but she soon finds out that her predecessor was killed while looking for it.

Traces the history of modern art from the 1850s to the present day, and introduces the main ideas and movements of each period with a few important works and Internet links for further study.

Jane Austen's first novel--published posthumously in 1818--tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and sometime self-delusion. Though Austen's fallible heroine is repeatedly drawn into scrapes while vacationing at Bath and during her subsequent visit to Northanger Abbey, Catherine eventually triumphs, blossoming into a discerning woman who learns truths about love, life, and the heady power of literature....

"The Mona Lisa is widely recognized as one of the greatest paintings in the history of art. In 2003, the 500th anniversary of the painting, it will become the only work in the Louvre to occupy its own room. But the picture has also become an object of popular culture and consumption. Its image is used to sell everything from chocolate to champagne to automobiles, and appears on ashtrays, mouse pads, and T-shirts. More than any other art object, the...

Examines the lives of impressionist painters and the influences that shaped their work through re-created albums of letters, sketches, and photographs.