"Magus" by Anthony Grafton

“This book traces the rise of learned magic, from its medieval origins to the synthesis that Agrippa created in 1533.” (Introduction)

I think it is written for the specialist rather than the general reader. I found it confusing. Part of the reason for this is the structure of the book: each chapter focuses on the work of one or more scholars, for example, Nicholas of Cusa, Roger Bacon, Pico della Mirandeola, Johannes Trimethius and Agrippa. This meant that the information on, for example, 'natural' magic was broken up as we considered, in turn, what each of these authorities felt about it. I gained the general sense that the issue facing each of them was how to distinguish 'natural' magic (which seemed to mean the marvellous effects that could be produced by science and engineering) which was somehow 'good' from the rest which were snares and delusions set by the devil and his demons. (I suppose this equates with the issue facing alchemy - usually just off-stage in this book - of how to distil what we now call chemistry from the dross of superstition.)

Other reasons I was confused was that sometimes the author seemed to expect me to know more than I did. For example, in chapter 3 he states: “The established Latin magical library came from polyglot sources: Jewish and Muslim but also Greek. Some texts, such as the Latin Picatrix, derived their contents from even more exotic quarters.” What were these 'more exotic quarters'? I wondered. Unfortunately, he doesn't say, nor could wikipedia help.  (107) [It does n’t say where, which is frustrating. Wikipedia suggests that it is primarily Arabic; it doesn’t suggest it goes any further than Arabic, German, Greek, Latin and perhaps some early Christian]

I got even more confused about a polyglot called Samuel bin Nissim Abulfaraj who was baptized as Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada and used the pen name Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysis of Pontus. Having given all these names, Grafton then refers to him without warning as ‘Flavius’. Grafton gives no clue as to the identity of Flavius. I had to resort to Google to discover that Flavius was the first name of Mithridates. 

Selected quotes:

• “The masters of the art of hydromancy ... believed that God had not created water since the Book of Genesis described the spirit of God as hovering over the waters.” (Ch 2)
• “‘Meeting monks is generally considered an evil omen, and all the more if it takes place in the morning. For that sort of man lives mostly from the charnel house, as vultures live off corpses.'" (Ch 5, quoting Agrippa)

Heavy-going.

July 2025; 219 pages

First published in 2023 by Harvard University Press, USA

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin Books in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Other Renaissance" by Paul Strathern

Strathern attempts to show that things happening in Northern Europe during the 'Renaissance' (which he fails to define but I presume he means the period from about 1450 to 1600) were on a par with, or more important, things happening around the Mediterranean: "three of the most significant events of the entire Renaissance era would take place north of the Alps" (Prologue), those three being: the invention of movable-type printing, Protestantism, and a heliocentric universe.

To prove his thesis, he provides a number of mini-biographies of mostly well-known figures such as Gutenberg, Luther and Copernicus. Such a cherry-picked sample can't prove anything. Indeed, some of his selections (Paracelsus, for example) seem self-defeating. At one stage he suggests that “The entire Renaissance can be seen as bursting free from the constraint of systematic medieval thought.” But this is in his chapter on Montaigne and on the very next page he points out that Montaigne’s philosophy saw belief in God as a precondition and science as superficial, both attitudes which I would suspect Strathern would regard as typically mediaeval. 

He also repeatedly makes the point that much of what he would characterise as Renaissance behaviours were accompanied by a background of strife, such as the religious wars catalysed by the Lutheran revolution: “Civil turmoil has frequently been accompanied by historic transformations.” (Ch 16) But other renaissances, such as that in twelfth century Europe which led to the first universities and the explosion in demotic literatures, depend on stability (in this case the reduction in threat from Viking raids from the north, Islamic invasion from the south, and Huns and Mongols from the east).

I also think he minimises the intra-Europe links. For example, amongst other contributors to the Northern Renaissance he lists John Cabot, who was born in Genoa, Pietro Torrigiano, from Florence, and Catherine de' Medici, another Florentine. Others such as Copernicus and Nicholas of Cusa were educated or worked in Italy. 

On the other hand, if his intention is to show that developments in northern Europe were equally significant to those south of the Alps, I think he has succeeded. 

The selection of biographies seemed eclectic. As I have said, some were so well known that it scarcely seemed worthwhile rehashing the details. But there are plenty of others about whom I knew nothing, such as Dietrich of Freiburg (although he scarcely fits the time frame), François Viète, and Etienne de La Boétie, or little, such as Nicholas of Cusa, the Fuggers, Mercator, and Vesalius. Unfortunately, for some of these relative unknowns, such as Rabelais (quoted as saying both ‘If you don't want to see a fool, then break your mirror.’ and ‘A child is not a vase to be filled but a fire to be lit.’), and Montaigne, I wished there had been more information. I definitely want to read them both. Strathern can't win! He's wide-ranging but this inevitably comes at the price of an element of superficiality.

The asterisks used to indicate a footnote were extraordinarily small and so very easy to miss. This was a shame since the footnotes sometimes provided fascinating information (see the Selected Quotes below). Otherwise, it is well written (although there are a couple of typos where a date in the 1500s has suddenly been put back 100 years), easy to read and enjoyable. Overall, it is an excellent introduction to the subject.

Selected quotes:

• “There appear to be certain elements common to all these early capitalistic exchanges: a thriving commercially minded bourgeoisie, an entrepreneurial ethos willing to take risks in order to achieve gain, and a form of loosely democratic city governance.” (Ch 2)
• “At the time, the word ‘idiot’ was a general term used to describe any layman or private individual who did not hold public office.” (Ch 3 fn)
• “As a polygon inscribed in a circle increases in number of sides ... so the mind approximates to truth but never coincides with it ... Thus knowledge is at best conjecture.” (Nicholas of Cusa, Ch 3)
• “The decay in China largely came about because of the separation between the intellectuals of the court (philosophers, poets, theologians) and the common people, whose mercantile practices were leading to ever-greater efficiencies, innovations and wealth.” (Ch 3)
• “The silver for these coins would come from the mines at Joachimsthaler in Bohemia, which provided silver for coins all over Germany and Austria. such currency became known as Joachimsthalers, which became shortened to thalers - the origin of the word ‘dollar’.” (Ch 8 fn)
• "Georgius Macropedius [was] regarded by many as the greatest Latin dramatist of the 16th century. Indeed his plays were so widely known that they would later influence the young William Shakespeare. Some of Macropedius’s works were adaptations of ancient Roman comedies by Terence and Plautus.” (Ch 13)
• “Not for him the easy dismissal of human actions or monstrous behaviour as simply ‘evil’, ‘barbarous’, ‘depraved’ or the like. It is by means of such words of disapproval that we distance ourselves from such acts. Montaigne insisted that we instead identify ourselves with such acts, and try to understand how we ourselves might have committed them.” (Ch 16)
• "Ivan the Terrible ... insisted that all his close advisers and courtiers drank with him each evening to ensure that they were too drunk to oppose him, and too hungover in the morning to plot against him.” (Ch 19 fn)

A wide-ranging and enjoyable history. April 2024; 324 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Lives of the Great Artists" by Giorgio Vasari

Vasari was a renaissance artist and a friend of Michelangelo who had the idea of publishing a book of biographies of those great Italian artists, mostly from Florence, who, as he saw it, had returned painting, sculpture and architecture to the glories these arts had attained in the classical world.

The biographies are riddled with mistakes (he gets one date wrong by nearly a thousand years) and often little more than hagiographical descriptions of the listed works of that artist that Vasari has seen, but there are moments of anecdote and insight which make the reading worth while.

There are personal anecdotes:

• Giotto, the shepherd boy, being discovered by Cimabue scratching pictures of sheep on stones in the field
• Giotto, asked by a papal courtier for a drawing from the pope, received a freestyle perfect circle
• Michelangelo the forger: “Michelangelo also copied the works of other masters, with complete fidelity; he used to tinge his copies and make them appear black with age by various means, including the use of smoke, so that they could not be told apart from the originals.”

There are insights into character of an artist:

• “Cimabue ... had outstanding ability, but he was so arrogant and disdainful that if anyone remarked any fault or defect in his work or if he had noticed any himself ... he immediately rejected it, no matter how precious it might be.”
• Apropos Paolo Uccello: “Artists who devote more attention to perspective them to figures develop a dry and angular style because of their anxiety to examine things too minutely; and, moreover, they usually end up solitary, eccentric, melancholy, and poor.”
• “Masaccio ... refused to give any time to worldly cares and possessions, even to the way he dressed.”
• “Fra Filippo was so lustful that he would give anything to enjoy a woman he wanted”. Locked in his room to work by Cosimo de Medici “his animal desires drove him one night to seize a pair of scissors, make a rope from his bed-sheets and escape through a window to pursue his own pleasures for days on end.”
• “Botticelli was a follower of Savanarola’s, and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income.”
• “Leonardo ... would have been very proficient at his early lessons if he had not been so volatile and unstable; for he was always setting himself to learn many things only to abandon them almost immediately.”
• “Leonardo ...  was always fascinated when he saw a man of striking appearance, with a strange head of hair or beard; and anyone who attracted him he would follow about all day long and end up seeing so clearly in his mind’s eye that when got home he could draw him as if he were standing there in the flesh.” 
• “Raphael ... was indeed a very amorous man with a great fondness for women whom he was always anxious to serve. He was always indulging his sexual appetites.”
• “Rafael kept up his secret love affairs and pursued his pleasures with no sense of moderation.” 

In Volume Two there are some more stories, this time of artists contemporary to Vasari, many of whom he knew. Again there are some great moments:

• There is murder. Andrea del Castagno was so jealous of  Domenico Veneziano that one night he laid in “wait for him unseen around a street corner, and when Domenico came across him on his way home, he ruptured both his lute and his stomach at the same time with some lead weights ... he then beat him wickedly about the head with the same weapon. and then, leaving him lying on the ground, Andrea returned to his room ... where he left the door ajar and sat down to draw just as he had been left doing by Domenico.” After, alerted by the commotion, he ran to Domenico and “kept crying out inconsolably: ‘Oh alas, my brother, alas, my brother!’ Finally Domenico died in his arms.” He got away with it, only being discovered when he confessed on his death bed.
• There is theft by an ape. Giovanni Batista Rosso kept a pet Barbary ape who “fell in love” with one of his assistants and was dangled over a certain garden wall to plunder a vine and, when caught, was sentenced to be shackled to a weight so it could not attack the vines but instead it climbed onto the roof of the vine garden and, by jumping up and down, broke the rooftop tiles.
• There is eccentricity. Piero di Cosimo had some strange habits: “Having fallen in love with painting, he cared nothing for his creature comforts and reduced himself to eating only boiled eggs which, to economize on fire, he used to cook whenever he was boiling glue, not six or eight, but fifty at a time, keeping them in a basket and eating them one by one.” Furthermore “He could not stand babies crying, men coughing, bells ringing, or friars chanting; and when the rain was pouring down from the sky, he loved to watch it as it ricocheted off the roof-tops and hurtled on to the ground. He went in terror of lightning, and when the thunder roared he would wrap himself up in his cloak, shut fast the doors and windows, and crouch in a corner of the room till the storm abated.”
• Jacopo Pontormo liked working by himself:  Wanting to work by himself on a chapel, he “closed off the chapel with walls, hoardings, and curtains, and given himself over to complete solitude, he kept it for the space of eleven years so firmly locked up, that no living soul except himself ever went in there.”
• Francesco Mazzuoli (Parmigianino) gave up art to practise (unsuccessfully) alchemy: “Would to God that he had always pursued his studies in painting, and not indulged in fantasies of solidifying quicksilver to make himself richer than he had been created by Nature and Heaven!”
• Some artists have amazing imaginations. “He would sometimes stop to contemplate a wall at which sick people had for ages been aiming their spittle, and then he described battles between horseman, and most fantastic cities, and the most extensive landscapes ever seen: and he experienced the same with the clouds in the sky."

Some great moments from Volume 1:

• “Almighty God ...fashioned the first forms of painting and sculpture ... the ideas of softness and of unity and the clashing harmony made by light and shadow were derived from the same source.”
• “The first men were more perfect and endowed with more intelligence, seeing that they lived nearer the time of the Creation”
• “It goes without saying that the arts must have been discovered by some one person”
• “Christianity ... strove to cast out and utterly destroy every least possible occasion of sin; and in doing so it ruined or demolished all the marvellous statues, besides the other sculptures, the pictures, mosaics and ornaments representing the false pagan gods.”
• “The best historians have tried to show how men have acted wisely or foolishly, with prudence or with compassion and magnanimity; recognising that history is the true mirror of life, they have not simply given a dry, factual account of what happened to this prince or that republic but have explained the opinions, counsels, decisions, and plans that lead men to successful or unsuccessful action.” 
• “Some men become great artists by diligent application and others by study; some by imitation, somebody knowledge of the sciences .... and some by combining all or most of these things.”
• “Anyone who does violence to his nature by fanatical studies may polish one facet of his genius but cannot produce work with the facility and grace associated with artists who can put each stroke in its place temperately and with a calm and judicious Intelligence.”
• “He portrayed a dead body, foreshortened, with a crow picking out its eyes, and a drowned child, whose body, sodden with water, is arched up grotesquely.”
• “He lived to a ripe but disgruntled old age.”
• “The appearance of a man of outstanding creative talent is very often accompanied by that of another great artist at the same time and in the same part of the world so that the two can inspire and emulate each other.”
• “There are many men whom nature has made small and insignificant, but who are so fiercely consumed by emotion and ambition that they know no peace unless they are grappling with difficult or indeed almost impossible tasks and achieving astonishing results.”
• “Lumps of earth often conceal veins of gold”
• “One of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to work and study hard in order to benefit others and make his own name, and then be prevented by sickness, or perhaps death itself, from finally completing what he has begun.”
• “When a man becomes a priest for the wrong reasons the outcome is invariably shameful and unhappy.” 
• “True wealth consists in being content with just a little.”
• “The artist himself must decide after careful consideration what to reject and what to accept, using his own judgement and not relying on the theories of others.”
• “He lived honorably from his work and he spent extravagantly on his love affairs.”
• “To produce perfect work, painters and sculptors need both application and natural talent”
• “Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least; for ... they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands.”
• “He was a slow thinker, and when the wax is hard it does not take a good impression.”
• “If life was found to be agreeable than so should death, for it came from the hands of the same master.”

And volume II

• “No one ever achieved excellence in any occupation who did not, when still a child, start to put up with heat and cold, and hunger and thirst, and other discomforts. and so those people utterly deceive themselves who come to believe that they can reach an honourable level while enjoying all the world's ease and comforts; success comes from continuous study and wakefulness, not from falling asleep.”
• “Very often work in the rough, brought to birth in an instant from the art’s inspired frenzy, can express its makers concept in just a few strokes, whereas, in contrast, excessive diligence and labour often remove the force and understanding of those who never know how to lift their hands from what they are doing.”
• “If all those alive in this world believed they would still be alive after they could no longer work, many of them would not come to beg in their old age for what they consumed so unsparingly in their youth, when rich and plentiful rewards clouded their common sense and made them spend recklessly beyond their need. For seeing how harshly we regard someone who has fallen from prosperity to poverty, everyone should strive, albeit steering a decent middle course, not to have to beg a living in old age.”
• “Florence deals with its craftsman as Time does with its own works, which, which once they are done, it then undoes and consumes bit by bit.”
• “When someone teaches us excellence and gives us a good way of life, he puts us no less in his debt and must be no less regarded as a true father than the one who begets us and simply gives us life.”

June 2019; Volume 1 = 462 pages; Volume II = 373 pages

"The Devil's Doctor" by Philip Ball

Philip Ball is the author of the brilliant Critical Mass which is about phase transitions. This is a very different book. This is a biography of Paracelsus,a renaissance doctor and alchemist who was half-way between a scientist and a magician.

His real name was Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim and I has assumed that the word 'bombastic' derived from his boastful style of writing (Ball calls it "verbose, undisciplined and ungrammatical", it contains many neologisms, at least one undefined, as with other alchemical writings sometimes it seems to seek to conceal more than it reveals, and it was argumentative, frequently insulting, libellous and vituperative). But Ball tells us that 'bombast' was cotton padding "and it is from this origin that the connotation of 'puffed up' derives." (p 18)

His mum died young so he was brought up by his dad, a (probably unqualified) country doctor; they were poor and Paracelsus suffered from rickets in his youth. He was knocking around at the same sort of time as Agricola, who studied metals and mining, and Agrippa, who was an out and out magician and someone very like Paracelsus: "it is clearly unrealistic to demand too much coherence from a character as contrary as Agrippa of Nettesheim. He was apt to say whatever came into his head, and if it was not the same thing as he said the day before, it was nevertheless equally likely to offend someone." (p 87)

Ball suggests that aspects of the life of Paracelsus may have contributed to the legend of Faust and he tells the story of Johann Faust who, according to Adrien de Jonghe in Batavia, worked for Coster, the inventor of printing, but stole the secrets and sold them to Gutenberg (the reality is probably that ne of Gutenberg's backers was called Johann Fust). I must check this against Ruickbie's biography of Faustus. Furthermore, Ball points out that Simon Magus, the gnostic magician who sought to purchase church office (hence the sin of simony) and challenged St Peter to a miracle battle, had a companion called Helen of Tyre, not a million miles from the Helen of Try who appears in  Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.

Ball follows Paracelsus on his travels from North Africa to Scandinavia including a spell in Russia when he is captured by the Mongol hordes, and follows the travails of his thought through his extensive writing. It was, like all times seem to be, a very interesting time; Paracelsus met Erasmus and Zwingli of the Protestant Reformation; Osiander refused to publish a book by Paracelsus and went on to publish De Revolutionibus by Copernicus.

But there is sometimes too much detail. Detail can easily transmute the surface glitter of alchemy into base metal, though here Ball comes up with perhaps the best line of the book: "if you want men to leave no stone unturned in their enquiry into nature, say that there is gold to be found under one of them." This is the only way to make sense of the thousands of men who devoted their lives to the noxious, laborious and fruitless art of alchemy: it wasn't even as if popular opinion held alchemists in high esteem or egged them on in the societal belief that their efforts would one day be rewarded. Alchemists were hated, feared and mocked. Among the more famous and successful alchemists Ball describes is the Londoner Simon Forman who appears in The Lodger by Charles Nicholl. It struck me that the principle of The Philosopher's Stone was catalysis and that enzymes, biological catalysts are very much like The Stone in their dual ability to facilitate chemical reactions and to create life.

First and foremost, Paracelsus was a doctor and he wrote a book describing the ideal doctor (doesn't sound much like him!) who "must not be married to a bigot, should not be a runaway monk, should not practise self-abuse" and "must not have a red beard". (p 209)

But he was a rough bird who admitted "I do not wash to the satisfaction of everyone." (p 340)

But Paracelsus still dabbled in the occult. He believed that he could make a homunculus by sealing sperm into a glass vessel and heating it in horse manure for forty days. (p 344)

Unusually for a biographer, Ball continues well beyond the death of Paracelsus in Salzburg. There are two chapters devoted to tracing his legacy in detail.

Ball points out that the word 'disaster' literally means 'bad star'. "To most, astrology was just the way the world worked. But the philosopher needed a reason why - a mechanism."

There were a lot of interesting things in this book but, perhaps like the writings of Paracelsus himself, there was too much and I sometimes lost my way.

June 2016, 398 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" by Ross King

How the Sistine chapel was painted with a side order of Raphael working in the Papal Apartments.

The great thing about a Ross King book is that you learn history and history of art and at the same time you find out about the details of an artist's life. For example, originally the Sistine chapel ceiling was covered with stars, typical for vaults of that period, but subsidence led to cracking and an ugly white line of Polyfilla (or its Roman contemporary) across it so they had to repaint it. When Michelangelo started (on the flood scene) he had great problems with discolouration and mildew until someone reviewed the formula for the plaster he was using (which included Volcanic ash rather than sand) and realised he was using too much water. Michelangelo made sketches all the time of everything he saw and regularly reused things from other works of art: he seems to have stolen David's pose from a statue in Rome. Raphael also 'borrowed' often from Leonardo: the contrapposto pose of Eve in his Temptation seems to be a version of a sketch he made of Leonardo's Leda which is perhaps just as well since the original was destroyed Madam de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV. Even just discovering what contrapposto means and why artists use it made the book worth reading! Another example is Botticelli's Venus.

This book is actually three stories woven into one. Michelangelo and his team of assistants are toiling away on their scaffold frescoing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (standing, bending backwards, not lying on their backs which myth arose from a mistranslation of the Italian). Meanwhile Raphael is frescoing the Pope's private apartments with scenes such as The School of Athens. And il papa terribile, the warmongering Julius II, is fighting the Venetians and the French for mastery of the Papal States.

Three immensely contrasting personalities. Julius is larger than life, growing a white beard in defiance of canon law, hunting pheasant with guns in defiance of canon law, and eating, drinking and making love to excess (in defiance of canon law). Meanwhile, Raphael is a sweet young man with an incredibly sunny disposition, beloved by everyone, especially women, from baker's daughters to high class courtesans. And Michelangelo is slovenly, depressive, ugly, and probably chaste, moping about on his own. There is a story that an isolated Michelangelo met Raphael and his crowd of admirers one day and sneered at him for being a 'bravo'; Raphael returned by pointing out the Michelangelo was friendless like a 'hangman'.

There is so much of interest in this story told as usual with Ross King's easy-to-read narrative style. It's wonderful.

March 2016; 296 pages

Other great Ross King books I have read include:

• Leonardo and the Last Supper: a wonderful description of how a great but wayward artist produced a masterpiece
• Brunelleschi's Dome: about how the dome of the Duomo in Florence was built
• The Judgement of Paris: the rivalry between Meissonier (I'd never heard of this great artist before!) and Monet which led to the triumph of Impressionism

"The Botticelli Secret" by Marina Fiorato

Luciana Vetra, "part time model and full time whore" poses for Flora in Botticelli's Primavera. Little does she know when she purloins an unfinished sketch of the masterpiece that she is unleashing a trail of murder and treachery. For the painting holds a secret that her and novice monk Brother Guido must unravel if they are to stay one step ahead of the killers.

This is a brilliant romp through renaissance Italy visiting Florence, Pisa, Naples, Rome, Venice, Bolzano, Milan and Genoa.  The heroine is a fabulously feisty strumpet with a wonderful line in earthy epithets; the monk gives the unlikely-to-be-requited love interest and the book learning; the whores mother is a brilliantly complex character in whom the political and the maternal instincts are often at war.

There are points when it was disturbingly similar to the book that I am writing with its themes of secrets hidden within a painting, a child whose noble birth has been concealed, priests and churches and betrayal. But Fiorato has provided me with a lesson in how to write with verve and vigour and never to get bogged down in over-complicating character, scenery or plot.

And it is so much better written than the da Vinci code! March 2015; 548 pages

"Leonardo and the Last Supper" by Ross King

Ostensibly a history of a painting, this book has so much more. We learn about the wars between the Italian city states of the renaissance as the French armies sweep south (successful because warfare in mediaeval Italy was an almost bloodless affair of mercenary posturing) through Florence to take Naples, only to be defeated by Syphilis. We learn of the hothead preacher Savanorola and his cataclysmic regime in Florence. We learn of the Dominicans and the Franciscans and of Pope Alexander Borgia and his warlord son Cesare.

Most of all, of course, we learn about Leonardo. He was an illegitimate left-hander, probably gay, who was so enthusiastic about everything that he was almost constitutionally unable to actually finish anything. However, he had such enormous talent that his patrons continued to patronise him and the few artworks he actually produced were revolutionary in their impact upon art (even if, with the Last Supper, his experimental techniques meant that it deteriorated within a few years of its unveiling). And we learn about his models, including his apprentice whom he nicknamed 'devil' for his thieving and bad behaviour but whom he tolerated till his death, probably because he had a crush on him. We learn about his belief that you can tell a story from hand gestures and how he collected those gestures from watching people having arguments and how he used them in the painting. We learn about the techniques of fresco and the new use of oils that Leonardo pioneered. We learn how he composed the painting, about the religious ideas that went into it. We investigate the iconography of fruit.

By the way we watch the iciest of cold water being cascaded upon the Da Vinci code. Sophie sees the figure on Jesus' right is a woman and believes it to be Mary Magdalene rather than St John. "Leonardo was skilled at painting the difference between the sexes" states the DVC. In fact, as King shows, Leonardo rejoices in androgynous figures including another St John who is a dead ringer for the St John in the Last Supper. Both may be women, or both may have used the devilish apprentice; Leonardo seems to have liked effeminate looking young men.

This is a brilliant, fantastic and absorbing study in which the painting of a single work of art is used to enlighten a whole historical period. Wonderful. May 2014; 275 pages

Also read these reviewed books by Ross King:

• Brunelleschi's Dome about the building of the dome over the Duomo in Florence, but also lots about renaissance Florence
• The Judgement of Paris: as the Second Empire dies Impressionism is born: Meissonier, Manet, Monet and the rest; Napoleon III, the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune and much much more!

This is one of a selection of books I am reading to help me understand more about art. Others reviewed on this blog include:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• How art made the world by Nigel Spivey  which proposes that art has changed the way we think and altered our civilisations
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art