Le Ciel Des Peintres

"I definitely want to paint a starry sky now. It often seems to me that the night is even more richly coloured than the day, coloured in the most intense violets, blues and greens.
If you look carefully, you'll see that some stars are lemony, others have a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow." (Vincent van Gogh, letter to his sister Wilhelmina, September 1888)

How did the painters tackle the challenge of painting the sky? How did they manage to render this almost immaterial atmosphere, which seems at odds with the thickness of the pictorial material and the frontal nature of the painting?

This first comprehensive study of representations of the sky in painting examines the question from three angles: artistic, aesthetic and historical. Through 150 masterpieces and a thematic and chronological tour in the company of 80 artists, from Giotto to Zao Wou-Ki, the book explores Western painting from the Middle Ages to the present day, from Byzantine mosaics to abstract landscape painting, from the celestial motif as a divine space to the sky as a fully pictorial experience.