Ross King (1) (1962–)

I always enjoy histories of the arts (music history, literary history and art history), and Ross King is one of the best art historians writing for a broad audience. Obviously, a book (or in my case, an audio book) about art has its limitations (which copious use of Google Image search is the remedy).

The beauty of King's work is his focus on the *history* aspect - not just the history of the artists, but the history of the period more broadly. The history of the Second Empire and its fall, show more the Paris Commune of 1871, and the earliest days of the Third Republic are all here. We learn a lot about the artists, but also Napoleon III (and to a lesser extent, Napoleon Bonaparte), Wilhelm I of Prussia, and the political leaders of France in the period from 1863 onward.

The hero here is Eduard Manet; the ultimate villain is Ernest Meissonier. You might ask about the latter, "Who?" This book will tell you. Both hero and villain are portrayed not in black and white, but in varying shades of grey, with all of their human warts and foibles. A great read. show less

This isn't your average art history book. King's story of how the famous dome atop the Santa Maria del Fiore was born is engrossing and entertaining. This isn't just a book for engineers or art history nerds. It's an approachable tale to fifteenth century Florence and one of the greatest architectural marvels of that time.

Paragraphs of engineering details are broken up by Brunelleschi's colorful life: the pranks he played, the feuds he fought, and the secrets he kept. Readers come away, not show more just knowing how the dome was constructed, by who constructed it. Filippo Brunelleschi could be a called a late bloomer, as he doesn't start gaining recognition until well into adulthood, compared to his peers. Once he arrives on the scene, however, his genius makes up for lost time. Winning contest after contest with his inventions that helped construct the famous dome, it almost becomes funny just how intelligent Brunelleschi is. Even so, he still inspires awe.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in architecture, the Italian Renaissance, or a light history read. It's short, and a great addition to any library. show less

Normally I would start a book review with a brief synopsis of the story. Normally. When I have a good idea what the story is about or what the logical progression of events is. In this case I have no idea what's happening. Granted, the narrative is compelling, the descriptions of the period mesmerizing and spellbinding and the sense of reality is utterly sublime. In a nutshell, with many onion layers, digressions and diversions the story probably comes down to:

An old painter has an engaging show more conversation at a masked ball with a young gentleman who interrogates him about about the perambulations and ideally scandals of society and in particular the most famous castrati of the period. Now the painter becomes the narrator and tells the story of his travels from the country side into the heart of London society. I'm not giving anything away when I say that this outer story is of no consequence at all and doesn't add anything story-wise whatsoever. We are now firmly embedded in the life of the narrator who, as the son of a clergyman, has little or no knowledge of the real world and therefore lands in various unfortunate situations of his own inexperienced devising. Much of these events feel very much like the adventures of The Idiot in the story The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Like the Idiot our unhappy painter-to-be doesn't learn much from his experiences and keeps stumbling on and on. He meets a stunning beauty who hires him without credentials, without experience to paint her portrait. All this leads to is the introduction of another layer of narrative when the dear lady tells the tragic story of Tristano the famous (and fictitious) Venetian Castrato. All this appears to wrap up at some point because every character finds out that every other character isn't who he or she appears to be and is either the other person or is married, engaged or related to the other person. You be the judge.

Quite frankly I shouldn't be this negative, there is some amazing writing going on and the author clearly spent a tremendous amount of time researching the period and the characters. Pretty soon you will be checking the top of your head to see if your freshly powdered wig is still in it's predetermined place. Not many other books give such a vivid depiction of a historical period and only a novel like The Nature of Monsters by Clare Clark or any of the novels by Michael Gregorio come close.

Fortunately not many writers create such and astonishing amount of confusion as Ross King. When I started reading the novel I felt the strange sensation that the chaotic jumble of events felt similar somehow. Once I managed to wade deeper into the marshes I realized that I had the same sense of confusion during the reading of Ex-Libris, also by Ross King. This time I wanted to know why exactly I had such a hard time figuring out what happened and to whom. Of course the fact that the story revolves around masks and mistaken identities didn't help.

I started searching for specific passages where the progression of events doesn't make sense or doesn't add up. Here is a very good example of how the reader gets off track, sometimes even without realizing it:

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That is to say, in this moment I noticed many things about Eleanora that I had hitherto failed to notice or recognize; as if, before, I had seen her only like this, through the false image of some warping piece of glass. Unable to face this reflection I turned and, to the sounds of her laughter--as unpleasant and mirthless as her smile--plunged down the stair and into the rain. ...

(2 pages of narrative in which the protagonists stumbles through the streets of London, walks into a pub where he has two beers, enlightening conversations and other such miscellaneous interactions) ...

'Jealous', Eleanora was saying two minutes later. She was still seated before the glass, ...

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If you read the text at a normal speed, which I can't, I have to read it very slowly, you might skim over this detail and think nothing of it. But unfortunately such episodes occur all over the novel and it slowly grates at the frontal lobe. Minor additional aggravations are things like many grammatical errors and misspellings, which are completely out of tune with the otherwise carefully crafted text.

The ultimate irony is that King's non-fiction books are crystal clear in their narrative and storytelling and read much more like fiction than either Ex-Libris or Domino. I recommend reading this if you're into a good period piece and if you want to be thrown head first into London and Venice of the 18th century. show less

There is never a dull moment in this story about late 1400s Italy - a hotbed of sodomy and syphilis as well as the birthplace of magnificent art and architecture - and the circumstances by which Leonardo da Vinci came to paint “The Last Supper.” This painting, avers King, which is arguably the most famous painting in the world, “is now 80 percent by the restorers and 20 percent by Leonardo.”

Leonardo was born in 1452 near Vinci, a hamlet sixty miles west of Florence. He was born out show more of wedlock, and so was not permitted by the laws at that time to go into the family business of being a notary. His illegitimacy also barred him from the legal profession or the university. His father could have arranged to have the situation fixed, but the author observes that “for unknown reasons he never legitimized him.”

However, the plus side was that Leonardo’s status freed him for more creative pursuits.

When he was 13 or 14 Leonardo began an apprenticeship in Florence with the goldsmith, painter, and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. This was about the time Verrocchio began working for the ruling Medici family. Leonardo stayed in Verrocchio’s workshop for at least six or seven years, “learning the trade secrets essential to a painter and sculptor.”

Leonardo went to Milan at age 30. Although he was astonishingly gifted at drawing and painting, his real loves were engineering and architecture. He had hopes, inter alia, of “inventing and constructing fearsome war machines such as chariots, cannons, and catapults.”

Alas, it was his art that earned him a living, and he began doing jobs for Lodovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan, mainly because Florence’s two greatest sculptors, Andrea del Verrocchio and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, were both busy on other projects. Lodovico was especially into staging spectacles, and he often used Leonardo to help with the costumes and sets for his extravaganzas.

King comments:

“By the age of 42 - in an era when life expectancy was only forty - Leonardo had produced only a few scattered paintings, a bizarre-looking music instrument, some ephemeral decorations for masques and festivals and many hundreds of pages of notes and drawings for studies he had not yet published, or for inventions he had not yet built. There was clearly a stark gulf between his ambitions and his accomplishments. Everyone who met him, or who saw his works, was dazzled by his obvious and undeniable brilliance. But too often his ambitions had been curtailed or frustrated.”

In his private notes, however, Leonardo recorded that he was just getting started, writing, “I wish to work miracles.” He finally got his chance, although not in the way he anticipated. In late 1494 or early 1495 he received a commission to paint the Last Supper on the wall of the refectory (the room used for communal meals) of Santa Maria Delle Grazie, a Dominican convent in Milan to which Lodovico had ties.

King tells us a lot about the Dominicans, who, along with the Franciscans, were the most active religious order in Italy. He also writes about other portrayals of the Last Supper in Florence, at least some of which Leonardo would have been familiar with. In particular, the Last Supper was a popular depiction in convent and monastery refectories.

King observes:

“A Last Supper was never an easy proposition, even on spacious refectory walls. The artist had somehow to fit around a table thirteen separate figures through whom he would illustrate either the moment when Christ instituted the Eucharist or announced, to general incomprehension, that one of the number would betray him.”

The painting was intended to be a fresco, but Leonardo did not have expertise in that technique, about which King provides details. He was, on the other hand, fascinated by the possibilities of working with oil paint, still not widely used at that time. For this commission he insisted on using oils, which he also mixed with tempera. By the summer of 1497 or at the latest the spring of 1498 Leonardo had finished The Last Supper:

“The result was 450 square feet of pigment and plaster, and a work of art utterly unlike anything ever seen before - and something unquestionably superior to the efforts of even the greatest masters of the previous century.”

Leonardo had four versions of the Last Supper to guide him - one from each of the four Gospels. The details of the supper differed slightly in each account. In particular, John’s version of the Last Supper makes no mention of the institution of the Eucharist.

Dominican art was often meant to reinforce doctrinal issues. One such issue in which the Dominicans, as the church’s spiritual enforcers, took an acute interest was transubstantiation. This doctrine was established in 1215 in the opening creed of the Fourth Lateran Council, which stated that the body and and blood of Christ “are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine . . .”

(Thus) Leonardo’s Last Supper was created . . . for a band of Dominican friars who ritually commemorated Christ’s sacrifice through the celebration of the Eucharist.

John’s Gospel, in addition to omitting the Eucharist, also differs in having John, called “the disciple whom Jesus loved most,” reclining on Christ’s bosom. On this point, Leonardo also did not follow the Gospel of John, but rather used the disciple John as part of another seminal aspect of the supper, when Christ announced one of the group would betray him.

Leonardo had spent his life trying to show emotions through drawings of facial expressions and hand gestures, and depicting people in the act of speaking or listening. It was one of his preoccupations, along with linear perspective and with finding the best chemical composition of colors and their juxtapositions in art. In a treatise he wrote on painting he claimed the artist had “two principal things to paint: that is, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy; the second difficult, because it has to be represented by gestures and movements of the parts of the body.”

Part of the distinctiveness of The Last Supper is due to the perfection of these artistic techniques in his painting, revealing Leonardo’s “astounding powers of observation and unsurpassed understanding of light, movement, and anatomy.” King writes:

“Above all, it possessed more lifelike details...than anything ever created in two dimensions. An entirely new moment in the history of art had been inaugurated. . . . Art historians identify it as the beginning of the period they used to call the High Renaissance…. Leonardo had effected a quantum shift in art, a deluge that swept all before it.”

Alas, we only know of its greatness indirectly. The painting began disintegrating within twenty years of its completion. Over the years, the painting suffered from the paint’s defective adhesion to the wall; dampness, humidity, steam, smoke, soot from the convent, and the resulting mold; flooding, invasions, looting, and later even bombing in wartime. The refectory in which it was painted became a stable for Napoleon’s troops in 1796. The soldiers scratched out the apostles’ eyes and lobbed rocks at the painting. (Fortunately, the mural began some eight feet above the ground.)

By 1726 the work had become so dim and illegible that the friars began hiring restorers, some of whom were untalented frauds.

Fortunately Leonardo’s student Giampietrino (probably Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli) did a faithful copy in about 1520.

In 1977 the latest campaign for restoration began, taking a total of twenty-two years to complete before the unveiling in May 1999. Giampietrino’s work was used as a guide.

Aside from da Vinci’s work, King also includes many fascinating details about Leonardo’s personal life and about the social and political atmosphere in Europe in his time. For example, Leonardo, who was gay, had to pick up and leave town several times for “scandals,” even though homosexuality was common at the time. The author notes, interestingly, that “in the fifteenth century, Florentines were so well-known for homosexuality that the German word for sodomite was Florenzer.” The historical and religious context for the work is what gives this account so much piquancy and appeal.

Color plates are included.

Evaluation: I found this book to be so riveting I determined to move on to the author’s other works that combine stories of the origin and background of great art with riveting details of the times, such as the positively reviewed Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. show less