The most hidden is not always the least visible

Visit the gallery of exercises completed by other visitors.

See a selection of our favourite animations here.

Enter a new dimension in art and look at a painting from the perspective of the artist. You will be able to read the visual forces at work in the picture and feel the tension between what can be seen and what can only be sensed. You can test your compositional abilities with exercises about The Lamentation of Christ by Giotto, Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian, The Meninas by Velázquez and Picasso's Guernica.

We present analyses of twelve very special works, with a page of introduction followed by two pages of compositional studies, full of animations. Incorporated with the three paintings mentioned above —which have a button in the right-hand menu— is a page of exercises in which you can freely manipulate all the elements of the pictures.

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  In such limited space, the selection of ideas is unavoidably personal and subjective, inevitably leaving aside many interesting aspects of each work.

  Three of the analyses (The Surrender of Breda by Velasquez, Guernica by Picasso and Gran Via by Antonio Lopez) were commissioned by the Oxford University Press and are included here with their permission.