Rowland and Charney do more than deliver a richly detailed life of this singular Renaissance figure. They raise intriguing...
The life and times of a true Renaissance man who knew everyone—and immortalized them forever.
Art history, by general consensus, began the day an Italian painter named Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) set out to write a subjective yet deeply informed series of sketches of all the major and minor players in Italian art up to his time. The result was The Lives of Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a foundational text that would establish a pantheon of greatness for centuries to come. In this absorbing and well-researched biography, two experienced art historians—Rowland (Art, Architecture, and Classics/Univ. of Notre Dame Rome Global Gateway; From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town, 2014, etc.) and Charney (The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of the Master Forgers, 2015, etc.)—map out the endlessly industrious life of one of the original gatekeepers of Western civilization. Although a superb painter who never lacked for work, Vasari regarded himself as minor league. He knew what greatness was and devoted his literary life to explaining it, using Michelangelo, his hero and friend, da Vinci, Titian, Giotto, Cellini, and dozens of others as examples, both pro and con. Vasari set standards by which some artists would live forever and others (not always fairly) would be cast into outer darkness. He was also an early celebrity journalist, although his subjects weren’t famous. In Vasari’s day, the authors write, artists were “mostly manual workers with a spotty education and intensive technical training; by conventional standards, the meanness of their hardscrabble, hardworking lives could hold no interest for aristocratic writers and readers.” Vasari not only made them interesting; he made them gods. Although his facts were sometimes wrong and judgments flawed, he helped create the idea of Art with a capital A.
Rowland and Charney do more than deliver a richly detailed life of this singular Renaissance figure. They raise intriguing questions about how tastes and standards develop.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24131-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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