'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?'

《藝術的力量》作者西濛·沙馬是位睿智嚴謹的學者，曾執教劍橋、牛津、哈佛等名校，現在任教於哥倫比亞大學藝術史係，主攻17世紀荷蘭藝術、18世紀法國的繪畫與政治、16-21世紀英國視覺藝術等方嚮。他的研究不限於藝術史，同時還涉及歐洲史、文化史等方麵，尤其擅長將藝術傢及其作品的內部精神世界與外部的社會文化變遷加以聯係，相互闡釋。不僅如此，他也是講故事的行傢、深受大眾喜愛的電視明星，他與BBC閤作的《英國史》一度改寫紀錄片的收視率紀錄，據說甚至擊敗瞭當年紅極一時的劇集《欲望都市》（Sex and the City）。