The gravitational pull of the earth and the challenge to resist it have long inspired artists. Like Greek vases that depict the endless quest of Sisyphus to push his boulder up a hill or medieval manuscript illuminations that portray kings falling from the wheel of fortune after rising to the contraption's heights or water colors showing Dante’s lovers tossed in the whirlwind in his Inferno, images that portray the defiance of gravity or submission to it permeate the artistic world. This collection examines the ways artists from antiquity to the present day use gravity and/or levitation symbolically, metaphorically, and expressively. The 26 essays examine these opposing forces through analysis of such dualities as ascent and descent, weight and weightlessness, hope and despair, or life and death, and draw distinct lines between the works of art and texts of such writers and thinkers as Homer, Aristotle, Newton, Marx and Einstein. Together, they demonstrate that as our ideas about this essential force or space-time concept change, so too, do artists create new ways to represent visually the phenomenon of gravity.