Kelly Grovier is a feature writer for BBC Culture and the author of several acclaimed studies of art, including 100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age, Art Since 1989 and A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works, all published by Thames & Hudson. His writings have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the RA Magazine and Wired magazine. His history of London's Newgate Prison, The Gaol, was a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'. He is co-founder of the scholarly journal European Romantic Review.

Ashurbanipal Hunting Lions (c. 645-635 bce) Ishtar Gate (c. 575 bc) Parthenon Sculptures (c. 444 bc) Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor (c. 210 bc) Murals, Villa of the Mysteries (c60-50 bc) Laocoön and His Sons (c.27 bc and 68 ad) Apollodorus of Damascus (?): Trajan's Column (113 ce) The Book of Kells (c. ad 800) Travellers among Mountains and Streams (c1000), Fan Kuan Bayeux Tapestry (c. 1077 or after), likely the work of women embroiderers Universal Man (1165), Hildegard of Bingen The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (c. 1427), Masaccio Ghent Altarpiece (1430-32), Jan van Eyck The Descent from the Cross (1436), Rogier Van der Weyden The Annunciation (c. 1438-47), Fra Angelico The Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c.1480), Andrea Mantegna The Birth of Venus (c.1480s), Sandro Botticelli The Mona Lisa (c.1503-6), Leonardo da Vinci The Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-1510), Hieronymous Bosch Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes (1508-1512), Michelangelo The School of Athens (1510-1511), Raphael The Isenheim Altarpiece (1509-1515), Matthias Grünewald Bacchus and Ariadne (c.1525), Titian Self-portrait (1548), Catharina van Hemessen Crucifixion (1565-87), Tintoretto The Supper at Emmaus (1601), Caravaggio The Ecstasy of St Teresa, Cornaro Chapel (1647-52), Gian Lorenzo Bernini Las Meninas (1656), Diego Velázquez Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), Johannes Vermeer Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c 1665-9), Rembrandt Van Rijn Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768), Joseph Wright of Derby The Nightmare (1781), Henry Fuseli The Third of May 1808 (1814), Francisco Goya The Hay Wain (1821), John Constable Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (exhibited 1844), JMW Turner Whistler's Mother (1871), James Abbott McNeill Whistler The Thinker (1880-1904), Auguste Rodin A Bar at The Folies-Bergère (1882), Edouard Manet Bathers at Asnieres (1884), Georges Seurat The Scream (1893), Edvard Munch Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (1904-1906), Paul Cézanne Primordial Chaos (1906), Hilma af Klint The Kiss (1907), Gustav Klimt The Dance (1909), Henri Matisse Nymphéas (1914-1926), Claude Monet Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp American Gothic (1930), Grant Wood The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dalí Guernica (1937), Pablo Picasso Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Humming-bird (1940), Frida Khalo One: Number 31 (1950), Jackson Pollock Study after Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), Francis Bacon Brillo Boxes (1964), Andy Warhol The Rothko Chapel (paintings 1965-66; chapel opened 1971), Mark Rothko Betty (1977), Gerhard Richter Backs and Fronts (1981), Sean Scully Maman (1999), Louise Bourgeois

What makes great art great? Why do some works pulse in the imagination generation after generation, century after century? From Botticellis Birth of Venus to Picassos Guernica, some paintings and sculptures have become so famous, so much a part of who we are, we no longer really look at them. We take their greatness for granted; our eyes have become near-obsolete. We need a new way of seeing.

Unsatisfied with traditional, hand-me-down interpretations of these masterpieces interested only in learning about art, and not from it, Kelly Grovier combed the surface of revered works from the Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor to Frida Kahlos self-portraits. What did he find? The key to their enduring power to move and delight us. He discovered that every truly great work is hardwired with an underappreciated detail, a flourish of strangeness, that ignites it from deep inside.

From a carved mammoth tusk (c. 40,000 bce) to Duchamps Fountain (1917), and Boschs Garden of Earthly Delights (150510) to Louise Bourgeoiss Maman (1999), a remarkable lexicon of astonishing imagery has imprinted itself onto cultural consciousness over the past 40,000 years a resilient visual vocabulary whose meaning has proved elastic and endlessly renewable from era to era.

It is to these works that Kelly Grovier devotes himself in this radical new art history. Stepping away from biography, style and the chronology of isms that preoccupies most art history to focus on the artworks themselves, Grovier tells a new story in which we learn from the artworks, not just about them. Looking closely at each work, he identifies an eye-hook the part of the artwork that bridges the divide between art and life, giving it palpable purpose and elevating its value beyond the visual to the vital and encourages us to squint through this narrow aperture to perceive the works truest meanings. This book is unique in emphasizing the durability of what is made over the ephemerality of its making and serves as a rejoinder to a growing sensibility that conceives of artists as brands and the works they create as nothing more than material commodities to hoard, hide, and flip for profit.

Lavishly illustrated with many of the most breathtaking and enduring artworks ever created, as well as many that inspired or took inspiration from them, this refreshing book will spark a debate about how it is that artworks articulate who we are and what it means to be alive in the world.