"Simon Schama follows the success of A HISTORY OF BRITAIN with his explosive new series and book on the history of creativity. aking as his starting point eight famous painters and their great masterpieces, Schama transports the reader back to the intense moment in history when these works were conceived and born. In each case the artist - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko - is backed into a corner, facing a crisis; given a chance to confound his rivals, enemies and critics one more time. ut this is more than a story about art and artists. As Schama takes us back to the birthplace of these masterpieces - to the murderous, messianic world of Baroque Rome; paranoid, revolutionary Paris; the madhouses and brothels of Provence and the carnage of civil war Spain - a very modern history of the Western world unfolds. Schama's epic story of the unfolding force of the visual imagination will make you look at art in a way you've never looked before "