Whether or not this is a “new, revolutionary way of looking at [Michelangelo],” this revelatory book is a must for art...
What it must have felt like to be Michelangelo.
In this remarkable inquiry into artistic creation, historian, painter, and sculptor Pascuzzi offers two books in one: an illustrated history about how Michelangelo the man became “Il Divino” and an analysis of how a dedicated graduate art history student who had been fascinated with Michelangelo since he was a child “learned to make works of art like him as if he were my master.” Pascuzzi gave himself a daunting task: make copies of all of Michelangelo’s 135 surviving drawings. Unlike finished works, he writes, “drawings offer a much more intimate view of an artist.” Inspired by Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, he then studied Cennini’s 14th-century art treatise, The Craftsman’s Handbook, and the less-esteemed but useful The Art Forger’s Handbook. Pascuzzi traveled to museums in the United States and Europe to copy them from the originals or exact photographic facsimiles using the “same materials, tools, and techniques as apprentices used in Michelangelo’s day.” Stepping back in time, Pascuzzi copied a drawing of animals Michelangelo completed as a 13-year-old apprentice in Ghirlandaio’s prestigious Florence workshop. With Michelangelo’s studies as his model book, “I let my eye and hand be guided by the master.” Copying drawings Michelangelo made for his David sculpture, he noticed they “reflect a new level of pen-and-ink technique.” Next up was a massive fresco, Michelangelo’s first, for the Battle of Cascina. There was evidence of a “new fluidity in Michelangelo’s drawing style,” and Pascuzzi had a “myth-busting idea,” that Michelangelo had himself copied from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. The author’s apprenticeship concludes with the drawings for the Sistine Chapel, a “true indication of his artistic maturity.”
Whether or not this is a “new, revolutionary way of looking at [Michelangelo],” this revelatory book is a must for art students and those seeking new insights into his art.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62872-915-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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