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I shall take it that by "art" you mean painting. That excludes an awful lot but this may be a long answer even when limited as stated. And I'm all for simplicity. The easiest answer would be "The Dutch Masters." And, of those, none beats Vermeer. But all of them are unbelievably good when seen in reality. The National Gallery in London has an entire section devoted to the Dutch. To walk through it is to be humbled by the talent and skill so casually displayed by those guys. Right at the very end, there's an enormous painting, a still life incorporating hundreds of objects arrayed on a table. Everything there is extremely difficult to paint, including texture, reflections, fluffy things, liquids, transparencies, fruit and all the usual things you'd see in a still life. And it's all done in meticulous detail, more real than any photograph. It is so staggeringly beautiful that you are forced to look at your catalogue to see who was responsible. And they don't know. It's an exercise, a task set some unknown apprentice painter to test his mettle. And he dashed this off, eager to get to the point where he could paint what he wanted to. Those Dutch were masters indeed. |