The Madman's Gallery

The Strangest Paintings, Sculptures and Other Curiosities from the History of Art

New Hardback Illustrated

Postscript summary

Alongside the masterpieces of Western art runs an alternative canon of the mysterious, scandalous and downright weird. This gallery reproduces and explains a hundred such oddities, including Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Arcimboldo’s bizarre portraits composed of fruit and vegetables, Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, and the Surrealism of Dalí and Magritte alongside more obscure examples, such as Ferdinand Cheval’s Ideal Temple, built over 33 years with pebbles he collected on his rounds as a postman.

Product information

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2022
Format: Hardback
Pages: 256pp
Illustrated: Yes
Dimensions: 252x200mm
Condition: New
Weight: 1kg
ISBN: 9781398503571
Product code: 543717

Full publisher description

Enter The Madman's Gallery - the perfect gift book for any art lover. Discover an eccentric exploration through the curious history of art, to find the strangest paintings, sculptures, drawings and other artistic oddities ever made.

From the author of the bestseller The Madman's Library (Sunday Times Literature Book of the Year 2020, Radio 4 Book of the Week) comes an extraordinary new illustrated collection. This unique exhibition gathers more than a hundred magnificent works, each chosen for their striking beauty, weirdness and captivating story behind their creation.

Obscure and forgotten treasures sit alongside famous masterpieces with secret stories to tell. Here are Doom paintings, screaming sculptures, magical manuscripts, impossible architecture, dog-headed saints, angel musketeers and the first portrait of a cannibal. Stolen art, outsider art, ghost art, revenge art, and art painted at the bottom of the sea take their place alongside scandalous art, forgeries and hoaxes, art of dreams and nightmares, and cryptic paintings yet to be decoded. Discover the remarkable Elizabethan portraits of men in flames, the mystery of the nude Mona Lisa, the gruesome ingredients of lost pigments, the werewolf legion of the Roman army, and the Italian monk who levitated so often he's recognised as the patron saint of aeroplane passengers.

From prehistoric cave art to portraits painted by artificial intelligence, The Madman's Gallery draws on a remarkable depth of research and variety of images to form a book that surprises at every turn, and ultimately serves to celebrate the endless power and creativity of human imagination.

'...a feast of artistic curiosities' - The Telegraph

'What that last book did for bibliophiles, this new, beautifully produced and elegantly written anthology does for art lovers ... The research that has gone into this is prodigious, but Brooke-Hitching loves storytelling even more than scholarship, and he has a gift for it.' - The Spectator

'Extraordinary' - Artists & Illustrators

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