In this book, artists of different times and movements coexist peacefully - on a par with Velazquez and Rembrandt are Chagall and Serov, Veronese and Zverev, the unknown author of the drawings in the cave Altamira and Aivazovsky, Vermeer and Kustodiev, the van Eyck brothers, Piero della Francesca , Giorgione, Hale, Levitan, Repin, Malevich, Modigliani, Matisse... Irina Opimakh avoids discussions about the features of composition, the nature of the stroke, stylistic subtleties and, in general, about everything that art historians write about in serious scientific works. It tells, first of all, about the fate of great creations, about the artists and the times in which they lived, about the models that inspired them. And it turns out that each painting that has become a classic of world art not only had, but continues to this day, its own special life - sometimes with a dashingly twisted plot, in which the highest flights of the human spirit are accompanied by crazy adventures, love dramas, greed and betrayal...