Arts and Wonders
by Gregory Norminton
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ARTS AND WONDERS spans a glorius canvas, peopled by werewolves, thieves, emperors, travelling players and a forger dwarf who takes a lifetime to learn the danger of illusions. Tomasso Grilli, a dwarf gifted with an extraordinary capacity for artistic forgery (and flexible morals) recounts the story of his life, from his base beginnings in Florence, through his apprenticeship to the painter Arcimboldo, to his life of crime in Prague and subsequent banishment, to the gilded fame he finds as show more 'librarian' and collector to the court of an impoverished, ignorant ruler in the German Dukedom of Felsungrunde. Grilli's ambition and dubious skills take him to the pinnacle of success only for it to collapse beneath him like the illusion it always was. Betrayed and reviled he leaves Felsungrunde, is forced to join a group of travelling players, and finally learns the value of friendship. loyalty and honesty. The extraordinary cast of characters (some based on real historical figures) includes werewolves, an occult alchemist, a bear, a dodo, a lion and a maker of mechanical dolls. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
«Arts and Wonders» is a historical novel set in the late Renaissance to early Baroque when Europeans developed a taste for curiosities particularly the grotesque. Tommaso Grilli, the main character in the novel embodies this fad as he himself is grotesque in his short stature being born as a midget. His skill as a painter and his relentless ambition allow him to conquer a position for himself If not at the major courts of fashionable Europe at least in their margin, and with certain grandeur at an obscure German dukedom. A very entertaining, albeit very thick, novel.
This story follows Tommaso Grilli, dwarf and talented art forger, from his unhappy beginnings in Renaissance Florence to the German Dukedom of Felsengrunde. There as curator and "creator" of a fantastical Library of Arts, he makes himself indispensable to the impoverished duke.....
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- Reviews
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- Languages
- English, Russian
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