Each year 11 million people trek to the Louvre to gawk at the Mona Lisa. Many visitors clutch guide books in hand describing the painting. For some, it’s the experience of a lifetime, one they’ll talk about with friends and family for decades.
Yet some modern researchers say that the vast majority of people will never recognize the hidden messages in this painting. That’s because those hidden messages are subliminal.
Buried below the threshold of conscious awareness, Da Vinci used techniques people never notice. Not only don’t people know what they’re seeing, they would be shocked to find out.
A surprisingly large number of famous paintings fall into the same category. That is, they employ subliminal techniques to enhance the effectiveness of the work or to encode messages within portraits and landscapes. No book, however, has ever attempted to provide an overview of the technical sophistication and arcane methods that artists worldwide have used to conceal secret meaning in their work. Every Picture Hides a Story is the first book to expose the subliminal content in the world’s greatest paintings. Titillating, subversive, and building on the groundbreaking work of pioneers of art criticism, this book will enable readers to view art masterpieces with greater understanding. And their enjoyment of these works will be exponentially enhanced.
This full-color book contains 90 images of the paintings and their details.
Author Biography:
William Cane has lectured about the subliminal content in great paintings for three decades. A highly sought-after speaker on the college lecture circuit, he has appeared at more than 400 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. A close personal friend of Dr.Wilson Bryan Key—the world’s leading authority on subliminal advertising—Cane edited Key’s final manuscript about the subliminal devices used in contemporary art.
A former trial attorney, Cane is the author of a dozen books, including the international bestseller The Art Of Kissing (St. Martin’s Press 1991, revised editions 1995, 2005), translated into twenty languages. With more than 200,000 copies sold in the United States, that title is a backlist staple for St. Martin’s. Cane is also the author of a bestselling book about the Yankees, Clubhouse Confidential (with Luis Castillo, St. Martin’s 2011), The New Testosterone Treatment (with Edward Friedman, Prometheus Books 2013), The Birth Order Book of Love (Da Capo 2008), Fiction Writing Master Class (Writer’s Digest 2015), Sleeping Your Way to the Top (with W. David Brown and Terry Cralle, Sterling Publishing 2016) as well as six other nonfiction books.
Cane has appeared on more than a hundred radio and television programs talking about his books. He has been a guest on almost every major television talk show, including Today (twice), The View (three times), Dr. Oz, and Good Morning America.
Cane taught English and public speaking at the City University of New York from 2007 to 2019, and he taught English at Boston College from 1987 to 2000. He is also an image consultant at Manhattan Makeovers, specializing in helping attorneys and other professionals enhance their image through understanding the subliminal effect of color and other elements of their wardrobe.
A former commercial pilot for a major airline, Athena Pettit was educated at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Harvard Extension School, and the Smithsonian Institution, where she earned a certificate in world art history. Combining work with an abiding love of art, she has traveled to every major city in the world to study paintings in leading museums and collections. She has examined firsthand the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Sargent, Eakins, and many others in Rome, Florence, Milan, Venice, Paris, London, Moscow, St.Petersburg, Beijing, Tokyo, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Athens, Reykjavík, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
A native New Yorker, Ms. Pettit’s mother is a physician who instilled a love of the arts in her from an early age.
