We have just released a new virtual tour about the evolution of portrait painting. It is available in the Amuze – Museum Audio Tours app (iOS and Android) The genre of portrait painting has a long history with known examples from over 3000 years ago. Like most genres, the Renaissance meant a big step forward in the realism of these portraits. It is not surprising that our tour starts with a wedding portrait by one of the most famous artists of the Early Renaissance: Jan van Eyck. He painted an incredibly detailed portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife which is on display in the National Gallery. 

We just released Amuze Art Lecture #7 which discusses the largest painting in the Louvre. There will be few paintings in the world that can hang in the same room as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and still get plenty of attention. But that is exactly what happens with The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese. It is the largest painting in the largest museum in the world, painted by one of the masters of the Late Renaissance, and it is full of spectacular colors and details.

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway is a important diagonal road in the center of Philadelphia. The city hall is located at the beginning of the street. If you look down the road from the city hall, you get a great view of this street with at the end the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When you arrive to this museum via the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, you have to opportunity to walk in the footsteps of Rocky and climb the famous Rocky Stairs.

On top of the stairs, you have a wonderful view of the city of Philadelphia. And if you turn around, you can experience more history by entering the large Philadelphia Museum of Art. And you can now enjoy this museum using our latest highlights audio tour which is available for free in the Amuze – Museum Audio Tours app (available on Android and iOS).

For the sixth Amuze Art Lecture, a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens is discussed in two minutes. Daniel in the Lions’ Den is one of the highlights of the National Gallery of Art. It shows Daniel praying in the center of the lions’ den surrounded by nine Barbary lions (a type that is now extinct in the wild).

In the fifth Amuze Audio Lecture, we discuss in two minutes a painting by arguably the most popular Neoclassical painter ever. Jacques-Louis David painted the last moments in the life of Socrates, largely based on the writing of Plato who is also part of this painting. The Death of Socrates is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the fourth Amuze Art Lecture, we are looking at the Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci. In less than two minutes, you can learn about what is considered to be the first masterpiece by Da Vinci. It is located in the Uffizi Museum. Da Vinci did not paint it alone though. His master Andrea del Verrocchio started the work and left a note for Da Vinci to finish the painting.

​The Amuze app currently offers audio tours for 15 different museums and 5 virtual tours. We are glad to hear that many of you find our tours interesting, and we are always happy to listen to your feedback. One of the things we hear frequently is that a certain artwork should be added to a museum tour. While we cannot accommodate all suggestions, we love to learn about your tastes and keep track of all suggestions!
 
One museum that we get many suggestions for is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Our highlights tour consists of 16 stops, but as the museum is so big, we totally understand that we are missing a lot of highlights there. One suggestion that we got a lot was the spectacular portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent. We are happy to announce that we developed new audio on this “American Mona Lisa” and believe that it perfectly fits in our highlights tour of the Metropolitan.

In the third Amuze Art Lecture, we analyze Diego Velázquez’s painting of Venus admiring herself in the mirror. It is one of the highlights of the National Gallery in London and also part of our audio tour of this free museum in the Amuze app. We hope you enjoy our two-minute discussion of this masterpiece and if you are interested in more Amuze Art Lectures, just check out our YouTube channel.

In our new series of two-minute art lectures, we are discussing one of the masterpieces by Vincent van Gogh. In the year that the Eiffel Tower in Paris was completed and the first edition of the Wall Street Journal was published, Vincent van Gogh feverishly worked on his paintings. Among them was Irises, one of the paintings that is part of our highlights audio tour of the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Amuze app.

With museums around the world closed for the foreseeable future, we have launched a video series for you to learn about art from your home. Each lecture is about two minutes and discusses one of the artworks covered in the Amuze app. The first Amuze Art Lecture is about the Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue by Johannes Verspronck.