Diane's Personal Picks

Diane's Personal Picks
• to view or purchase	As Above, So Below : A Novel of Peter Bruegel Rudy Rucker 2003, 220 pages softcover With vivid depictions of 16th-century life in the Spanish-dominated Low Countries, Rudy Rucker's fictionalized life of Bruegel draws its readers into a teeming world of politics, art, love, sin and loss. Rucker's keen insights into Peter Bruegel's spellbinding and politically subversive work underpin this animated, suspenseful, and affecting tale, a step up from Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000). Rucker's vivid imagining of Bruegel's trials and triumphs is set against a cutting indictment of the horrors of the Spanish occupation and Inquisition.
• to view or purchase	Remembering Piero: A Novel of the Early Renaissance Artist Piero della Francesca Alice Heard Williams 2004, 256 pages softcover Step into quattrocentro Italy, a time and place aflame with creativity and new ideas, with renowned artist Piero della Francesca and fictional Maddalena Castellani. Characters, paintings, and locations all come alive in the well-researched and engagingly-written tale of the talented artist and the charming young woman he loves.
• to view or purchase	Seeking the High Yellow Note: Vincent Van Gogh in Provence, a Novel Alive Heard Williams 2002, 212 pages hardcover For those who are passionate about Vincent Van Gogh, Alice Williams paints the artist's canvasses again in words as Vincent describes the paintings to his young friend Minette, and we see Provence through the eyes of an impressionist young girl and her friendship with Vincent Van Gogh. She describes Vincent's loneliness and failed friendship with Gauguin, and his dread of recurrent descents into madness. The events of his months in Provence are interwoven into the story of Minette Ginoux as she comes of age, finds love, marries her sweetheart and provides friendship to the man who was a tortured genius.
• to view or purchase	Rembrandt's Eyes Simon Schama 1999, 768 pages hardcover ISBN: 067940256X In Rembrandt's Eyes, Simon Schama--the leading historical craftsman of our era, with a career-long commitment to Dutch history--succeeds with consummate skill in bringing the heroic painter of such masterpieces as The Night Watch and Portrait of Jan Six vividly to life. The surviving fragments of archival information about Rembrandt's personal and professional history are skillfully embedded in a rich, dense tapestry of the commercial whirl and political hurly-burly of the 17th-century Low Countries.
• to view or purchase	The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo Irving Stone Reissue edition (December 1, 1996), 776 pages softcover Celebrating the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo's David, New American Library releases a special edition of Irving Stone's classic biographical novel-in which both the artist and the man are brought to life in full. A masterpiece in its own right, this novel offers a compelling portrait of Michelangelo's dangerous, impassioned loves, and the God-driven fury from which he wrested the greatest art the world has ever known.
• to view or purchase	The Forest Lover Susan Vreeland 2004, 333 pages hardcover It was Emily Carr (1871–1945)—like Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo—who first blazed a path for modern women artists. Overcoming the confines of late Victorian culture, Carr became a major force in modern art. Her boldly original landscapes are praised today for capturing an untamed British Columbia—and its indigenous peoples— just before industrialization would change it forever. In her latest novel, Susan Vreeland brings to life this fiercely independent and underappreciated figure. From illegal potlatches in tribal communities to prewar Paris, where her art was exhibited in the famed Salon d’Automne, Carr’s story is as arresting as it is vibrant.
• to view or purchase	The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals Michael Kernan 1995, 316 pages hardcover A tale of two cities, 17th-century Haarlem in the Netherlands, and 20th-century Harlem in New York City, and two struggling artists, one the real-life Dutch painter Frans Hals, the other a Columbia University graduate student named Peter Van Overloop. The link is a set of diaries, supposedly written by Hals, found in a garage and passed from one person to another until they are finally entrusted to Van Overloop to translate and authenticate. From a clever weaving of fact and fiction emerges a vivid portrait of the artist and his era, offering comparisons with the contemporary young man's life and time. The notebooks contain a fascinating portrait of a man living in the age of Rembrandt and Descartes, and bursting with a lust for the world that surrounds him.
• to view or purchase	Rembrandt's Whore Sylvie Matton 1995, 208 pages softcover Reminiscent of Tracy Chevalier's best-selling Girl with a Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's Whore is the fictional monologue of Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt's mistress, with whom he spent the last twenty years of his life. A sensitive innocent, Hendrickje escapes the harsh realities of her garrison hometown to become a servant in Rembrandt's household. She soon becomes his lover and closest confidante, filling the void left by the death of his wife and two of their children. Enlightened by the positive values of beauty, truth, love, and art, Hendrickje is fated to discover the hypocrisy and fickleness of Amsterdam society, which ostracizes her and precipitates Rembrandt's final collapse.
• to view or purchase	Girl in Hyacinth Blue Susan Vreeland 2000, 242 pages hardcover This luminous story begins in the present day, when a professor invites a colleague to his home to see a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer--but why has he hidden this important work for so long? The reasons unfold in a series of events that trace the ownership of the painting back to World War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work's inspiration. Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Nominated for the Book Sense Book of the Year.
• to view or purchase	The Passion of Artemisia Susan Vreeland 2003, 368 pages softcover Recently rediscovered by art historians, and one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era, Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Susan Vreeland tells Artemisia's captivating story, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of eighteen, and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and growing fame as an artist, set against the glorious backdrops of Rome, Florence, Genoa, and Naples.
• to view or purchase	Tulip Fever Deborah Moggach 2001, 288 pages softcover Young Sophia willingly married elderly Cornelius Sandvoort, a wealthy merchant, to escape poverty and help her family. Everything changes when her husband decides to have their portrait painted as is the custom for well-to-do families in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Jan van Loos, a talented, penniless painter, awakens Sophia's desires, and she succumbs, too, to the two Dutch passions for art and tulips. In order to flee Amsterdam together, the lovers need money, so they decide to gamble their limited resources on the latest craze of tulip speculation: if they buy the right bulb they can make a sizable fortune. Seldom has a novel so vividly evoked a time, a place, and a passion. The film rights have been sold to Steven Spielberg.
• to view or purchase	Girl with a Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier 2001, 240 pages softcover Set in 17th-century Delft, this historical novel intertwines the art of Johannes Vermeer with his life and that of a maiden servant in his household. From the few facts known about the artist, Chevalier creates the reality of the Netherlands. The parallel themes of tradesman/artist, Protestant/Catholic, and master/servant are intricately woven into the fabric of the tale. The thrust of the story is seen through the eyes of Griet, the 16-year-old daughter of a Delft tile maker who lost his sight. Griet's fate is to be hired out as a servant to the Vermeer household, and slowly Vermeer entrusts much of the labor of creating the colored paints to Griet. Griet is almost ruined when Vermeer, impressed by her instinctive grasp of color and composition, secretly makes her his assistant.
• to view or purchase	The Birth of Venus Sarah Dunant 2004, 416 pages hardcover Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.
• to view or purchase	Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling Ross King 2003, 304 pages softcover Almost 500 years after Michelangelo Buonarroti frescoed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the site still attracts throngs of visitors and is considered one of the artistic masterpieces of the world. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling unveils the story behind the art's making, a story rife with all the drama of a modern-day soap opera. Along with technical difficulties, personality conflicts, and money troubles, Michelangelo was plagued by health problems and competition in the form of the dashing and talented young painter Raphael. Author Ross King offers an in-depth analysis of the complex historical background that led to the magnificence that is the Sistine Chapel ceiling along with detailed discussion of some of the ceiling’s panels.