Sign up for these informative, witty, and opinionated art history classes.
A scholar looks back on a long career studying Leonardo da Vinci’s life and works.
Kemp (Emeritus, History of Art/Oxford Univ.; Art in History: 600 BC-2000 AD, 2015, etc.), who has published several books on Leonardo, is a leading expert. With the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death approaching, the author offers a wide-ranging and insightful account of his “personal relationship” with Leonardo over the past 50 years, which involves “people, institutions, events and skulduggery.” After a succinct and handy biography of the artist, Kemp devotes two chapters to “one of the colossuses of world culture,” The Last Supper. He first encountered the painting, or what then “remained” of it, in 1964. It was “momentous,” Kemp writes, but he was bothered by the “pictorial wreckage” the work had suffered over the years; the “actual painting refused to thrill.” The author is excellent in his analyses of Leonardo’s artistic “intention of the mind,” his desire to capture the painting’s “soul.” No “previous artist was as concerned with such deep causes.” Kemp’s discussion of the pros and cons of the latest restoration efforts is superb. Then it’s on to Mona Lisa and the unique opportunity he had to view the work unencumbered by its usual special wood and glass casing: “Its sense of presence is truly uncanny. It is alive.” Next up is the lively story of the 2003 theft of Madonna of the Yarnwinder from a Scottish castle and its recovery in 2007. The knotty issue of authenticity is confronted in two pieces on La Bella Principessa, followed by one on the exciting 2008 discovery of the Salvator Mundi. The final essays deal with the development of a CD-ROM for Leonardo’s 72-page Codex Leicester, the ups and downs of curating exhibitions, and Kemp’s thoughts on Dan Brown’s “fictional history,” The Da Vinci Code.
Sign up for these informative, witty, and opinionated art history classes.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-500-23956-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
