“In this book, Bruskin offers a completely unexpected, extremely tempting way of reading a visual work of art as an artistic message, radically different from all experiences of this kind known to me (for example, the memorable texts of A. Benois or A. Efros). For Bruskin, this is not a detailed narrative statement, but bright intuitive insights, nevertheless based on years of “a mind of cold observations and a heart of sorrowful observations”” (Solomon Volkov). The author writes both about the work of contemporary artists (V. Bakhchanyan, E. Bulatov, V. Nemukhin, L. Purygin, E. Steinberg, V. Yakovlev, etc.) and about the art of past eras (P. Veronese, G. Klimt, Michelangelo, J. Tintaretto, etc.), finding unexpected angles for understanding them and no less unexpected parallels. Grisha (Grigory Davidovich) Bruskin (b. 1945) is one of the most famous contemporary Russian artists, the author of works published in “ New Literary Review” of the books “Past Imperfect Tense” (2001), “Mentally by You” (2003), “Details in Letter” (2005), “Direct and Indirect Objects” (2008). On the cover is a work by G. Bruskin (a fragment of the design of the floor of the Cathedral in Siena).