Look who has me at Hello!
I should have asked for this for Christmas, though the $50 list price is steep enough for me to feel guilty about that (but it is under $30 on amazon.com). Today I saw it at Barnes and Noble and drooled over it while Myles played trains and piled books on Daddy to read to him.
That is how he begins. And what follows are beautifully illustrated chapters on Carvaggio, Bernini, Van Gogh, and Rothko, to name a few. The prose is completely conversational Schama. I read the Bernini chapter which he starts with the Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Oh my....is it getting warm in here.
Great art has dreadful manners. The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things; visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality.
That is how he begins. And what follows are beautifully illustrated chapters on Carvaggio, Bernini, Van Gogh, and Rothko, to name a few. The prose is completely conversational Schama. I read the Bernini chapter which he starts with the Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Oh my....is it getting warm in here.
Comments
(If you guys are getting tired of my commentaing all the time, speak up)
I am an uncultured slob. I had to Google The Ectasy of St. Theresa. And of all those arteests you name, I don't think I've even heard of anyone but Van Gogh...
I need to get to more museums.
:-)