Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?

<p>With bracing clarity James Elkins explores why images are taken to be more intricate and hard to describe in the twentieth century than they had been in any previous century. <em>Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?</em> uses three models to understand the kinds of complex meaning that pictures are thought to possess: the affinity between the meanings of paintings and jigsaw-puzzles; the contemporary interest in ambiguity and 'levels of meaning'; and the penchant many have to interpret pictures by finding images hidden within them. Elkins explores a wide variety of examples from the figures hidden in Renaissance paintings to Salvador Dali's paranoiac meditations on Millet's <em>Angelus</em> from Persian miniature paintings to jigsaw-puzzles. He also examines some of the most vexed works in history including Watteau's meaningless paintings Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Leonardo's <em>Last Supper.</em></p>