The Best Art You’ve Never Seen

How would you feel if the man you considered the son of God and savior of humanity had just been murdered by the authorities?

Exactly. Which is why the resigned melancholy of so many figures in so many depositions from the Cross seems odd.

Not so the figures on the right of Niccolo Dell’Arca’s terracotta sculpture Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Their grief and horror are fresh and palpable.

Lamentation over the Dead Christ is just one of the 101 mostly little-known art works in Julian Spalding’s book The Best Art You’ve Never Seen. (The photo above—not the one in the book—is by Caroline Anderson.)

I didn’t care for every work of art featured in this book: Untitled (Trains and Tunnels), for instance, is an interesting example of outsider art by the mentally ill but hardly seems like a masterpiece of world art. But I was glad to discover Moche Vessel in the Form of a Head, Fragment of a Royal Woman’s Face, Portrait of a Black Woman, Deer in Autumn Forest, and many more. I was pleased to read the author’s case for John James Audubon as a great artist, not just a great naturalist, and it was fascinating to learn that a vast hoard of artifacts and artworks may still lie beneath the tomb of Qin Shi Huang in China.