Leonardo's Nephew: Essays on Art and Artists - Hardcover

Fenton, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374185050 ISBN 13: 9780374185053

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

Culled from the The New York Review of Books, a collection of essays by a poetry professor at Oxford University, complemented by black-and-white illustrations, offers unusual approaches to the byways of art history.

About this title

Review:

This savory, erudite collection of essays makes a reader feel incomparably lucky, as if he or she is seated next to a learned, original, decently friendly fellow traveler on an intercontinental flight. Author James Fenton has a style that is both intimate and scholarly. It is always amusing and illuminating; it never cloys. The subjects of the 15 essays--all but two originally published in the New York Review of Books--include Freud's collection of statuary; the remarks of Renoir and Degas made at two parties in the same home (the artists, not on speaking terms, were invited on different nights); Jasper Johns's early life and his later use of the American flag in his paintings; a talented nephew of Leonardo da Vinci whose work was oddly described by both Vasari and Picasso; and more.

Fenton's writing is most moving in those essays that take off from a chance thought or a bit of accidentally discovered history, like the one on Freud. And those that began as book reviews are in a class by themselves. Fenton generally shreds or praises his subjects according to his own meticulous research, which refreshingly tends toward primary sources, but occasionally he simply takes the reader aside. Quoting one critic, he groans, "If this sort of writing makes you want to throw up, I quite agree." His, on the other hand, makes one want to turn back to the beginning of the book and start all over again. --Peggy Moorman

About the Author:

James Fenton is Professor of Poetry at Oxford and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His most recent book of poetry is Out of Danger (Noonday, 1995). Marketing:

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0374185050
• ISBN 13: 9780374185053
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 283