The Bigger Picture: Your Favourite Art History Podcast

In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), one of the most important masterpieces of nineteenth-century French art and a landmark in the birth of modern art. Painted in 1863 and rejected by the Paris Salon, Manet’s famouspainting challenged the strict rules of the French Academy, the hierarchy of genres, acade...

In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores one of the most haunting masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art: Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece . Created for a monastery hospital treating victims of Saint Anthony’s Fire, this extraordinary polyptych transforms disease, suffering,faith, and salvation into an unforgettable visual drama. From the plague-ridden Crucifixion a...

In this episode of  The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tukaexplores Masaccio’s  The Holy Trinity , one of the most revolutionary works of Early Renaissance art. Discover how this groundbreaking fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence became the first great masterpiece of linear perspective, shaped by the mathematical ideas of Filippo Brunelleschi and the humanist spirit of the Italian Renaissance. From...

In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel , one of the most intriguing masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. This art history podcast episode examines the painting’s mysterious identity, its extraordinary 14th-century saint roundel attributed to Bartolommeo Bulgarini, and the deeper meanings behind Botticelli’s u...

In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores Oleg Holosiy’s monumental 1990 painting Psychedelic Attack of the Blue Rabbits – a key work of the Ukrainian New Wave and a haunting, large-scale example of Neo-Expressionist painting shaped by Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From Holosiy’s own writing (“Painting begins where the world ends”) to the artwork’s fever-dr...

In this bonus episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka explores Portrait of Elke I (1969) by German artist Georg Baselitz — one of his first upside-down (inverted) paintings that helped redefine figurative painting in post-war German art. Through a close visual analysis, we unpack Baselitz’s radical inversion technique, his idea of creating visual irritation, and howhis work sits between abst...

In Episode 6 of The Bigger Picture , host Dr Peter Tuka explores The Fly (1991) by Russian artist Nikita Gashunin — a piece of Russian modern sculpture and post-Soviet contemporary art held in the Glasgow Museums collection. Created as the Soviet Union collapse unfolded in 1991, this striking found-object sculpture — an industrial assemblage welded from salvaged machinery — transforms scrap into a...

Prague, 1976. One man. Arms wide open. A crowdthat won’t come near. In this episode of The Bigger Picture , Dr Peter Tuka dives into Czech conceptual art and Eastern European performance art through Jiří Kovanda’s action art on Wenceslas Square — an experiment in public space, body politics, and everyday resistance under state surveillance inCommunist Czechoslovakia’s Normalization era (Cold War,...

In this episode of  The Bigger Picture , art historian Dr Peter Tuka offers an in‑depth exploration of Caspar David Friedrich’s  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog  (c.1818), a cornerstone of German Romanticism and one of the most iconic paintings in art history. Through detailed visual analysis, symbolism, and historical context, the episode unpacks key Romantic concepts such as the Sublime, the Roman...

In this episode of  The Bigger Picture , art historian Dr PeterTuka offers a deep, psychologically rich exploration of EdvardMunch’s  The Scream , unpacking its enduring power as an icon of anxiety, alienation, and modern existential dread. Moving beyond surface‑level art history, the episode weaves together visual analysis, Symbolist aesthetics, Munch’s diary writings, and insights into panic att...

In this episode of  The Bigger Picture , art historian Dr Peter Tuka delivers an in‑depth art history podcast analysis of Paul Gauguin’s  Vision after the Sermon  (1888), a landmark work of Post‑Impressionism and Symbolist painting. Blending vivid storytelling with scholarly insight, the episode explores Synthetism, Cloisonnism, Japanese ukiyo‑e influence, and Gauguin’s radical use of bold colour,...

The Bigger Picture: your favourite art history podcast , launches with a powerful and intellectually rich episode dedicated to Caravaggio’s  Medusa  (1597), offering a compelling blend of art history podcast storytelling, Baroque painting analysis, mythology, psychology, and visual culture. Hosted by Dr Peter Tuka, this episode translates one of the most disturbing masterpieces of the Italian Baro...