"Blue Ruin" by Hari Kunzru

The hook: During a pandemic, protagonist Jay is a gig economy zero-hours driver. He delivers groceries to a posh house in its own estate in the countryside. At the door is Alice, an old girlfriend, who left him for his best friend, with whom she is still living. Jay is sick and collapses, so Alice hides him in a barn on the land until he gets well.

As Jay recovers, he reminisces in an extended flashback and we learn about how he studied art in London and became a performance artist and how he met, loved, lived with and lost Alice to Rob, his friend, a fellow student who is now a successful artist.

As the book progresses, we start to discover more of Jay's story and exactly why he is no longer making art. And the pressures of both the pandemic and the art world combine to bring things to a frightening climax.

It's an fascinating exploration of a subculture that spans everything from starving in squats to multi-millionaire collectors. There is a huge amount of verisimilitude in the descriptions of the drug-fuelled lifestyle associated with that world. Sometimes, the narrative seems a little plot heavy, although it doesn't seem to actually go anywhere (which is perfectly consonant with the theme). There are intimate portrayals of the personalities within it, vulnerable and insecure like the rest of us, but obsessed by the idea that making marks on a piece of canvas (or videoing a performance, or building a sculpture, or ...) is perhaps more important than anything else. 

The narrator-protagonist is quite an impressive person for a casual worker in the gig economy. Not only is he a legend on the internet (and totally unaware of the fact, rather like the eponymous hero of Vernon Subutex 1) but he is an art-school graduate qualified to crew and navigate ships whose interior monologue is full of learned references, not just concepts with art (which suffuse the book):

• The ship of Theseus: a concept in classical philosophy (p 25)
• The (un)examined life: a concept from Socrates (p 30)
• The science of metabolism (p 33)
• Marlowe's Faust (p 123)

Blue Ruin is a painting of a "giant white cruise ship disgorging passengers into a semi-submerged city ... In the foreground, crowded into the frame, were the tourists, horrific semi-human figures, all wearing orange life vests." (p 230)

The pandemic context, the feeling that we are living in a dystopia, perhaps nearing an apocalyptic end of times, and the theme of  rootlessness and anonymity in a world (of art) where reputation is crucial, are the primary colours in this bleak portrait of the pointlessness of life.

Selected quotes: (page numbers refer to the Simon & Schuster 2024 edition)

"If people viewed me in a certain way because I was cleaning a toilet or picking up trash, that was on them, not me." (p 4)

"My beard is turning white and my eyes are sinking into their sockets like pebbles slowly dropping down a well. ... if I catch sight of myself in a mirror, on a good day I'm reminded of a piece of driftwood. Knotted, ground down by sand and water." (p 5)

"It's a fiction we seem to demand, that a person be substantially the same throughout their lives - human ships of Theseus, each part replaced, but in some essential way unchanging. We are less continuous than we pretend. There are jumps, punctuations, sudden reorganizations of selfhood." (p 25)

"Surrounded by students signaling distressed bohemia, all patches and thrift store irony." (p 29)

"Maybe she could live the unexamined life. Mine presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices." (p 30)

"Later I would discover Rob's sponge-like quality, his ability to metabolise culture, efficiently and rapidly, to break down its sugars and use them to grow." (p 33)

"As I stepped inside, my feet sank into the deep-pile carpet of the vestibule and something metaphysical closed all around me, a feeling that my reality had just forked and the life in which I hadn't crossed that threshold was now utterly irretrievable." (p 97)

"If technique or craft wasn't what made someone a good artist, what did? The conventional answer was that a good artist was someone who had good ideas." (p 106)

"We smoked weed from the moment we woke up in the morning, moving about our pale green undersea world like unquiet ghosts. Occasionally the real world would intrude, but usually it felt as if we'd slipped through the cracks, the difference between inner and outer space collapsing until reality was purely a function of what we'd ingested that day. At first it seemed exciting, as if we'd found an illicit truth, a doorway in to a place that was inaccessible to normal people, but gradually the returns diminished, and instead of beauty and wonder, our artificial paradise began to feel like a trap." (p109)

"I looked at the face that had launched a thousand of my twenty-something ships." (p 123)

"It was as if I'd come upon a portal, a point where the world was touched by some other nearby reality. The birch glade had been sliced up like a vertical louvre, the filigree of branches and dappled light superimposed on another near-identical version of itself, segements of splinters of a second forest transposed or rhymed with the first, or - that was it - reflected." (p 130)

"I've worked alongside men for weeks, sometimes months, withouyt finding out a single piece of personal information, or being asked one question about myself." (p 145)

"The work of all artists - was an alibi for the desire to put a frame around a certain part of life, to declare that inside the frame was art, and outside was not." (p 161)

"Only in the system we have, where everyone is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self, is anonymity a kind of death." (p 180)

"But I've been travelling for years. ... going somewhere isn't the point. The point is finding somewhere to stay." (p 213)

July 2025; 257 pages

Published in the USA by Knopf and in the UK by Simon & Schuster, 2024

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

The Guardian review suggested that both characters and plots were stereotypes. 

Other books about art and artists reviewed on this blog:

• Literary fiction:
• My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
• The Masterpiece by Emile Zola
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Murder mysteries
• The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte: set in the world of art restoration.
• The Brutal Art by Jesse Kellerman: set in the world of New York art galleries.

And, unreviewed here but utterly brilliant in my eyes, is my own novel with an painting protagonist: Bally and Bro which only costs £1.99 on kindle.

"The Flanders Panel" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A murder mystery set in the art world in Madrid. With a large dose of chess.

Julia is an art restorer working on a Flemish painting showing two men playing chess as a woman at a window reads. An X-ray of the painting reveals a hidden inscription: who killed the knight? She consults her ex-lover Álvaro, an art historian, the woman who is arranging the sale of the painting Menchu, her 'guardian', the gloriously camp César, an antique dealer, and shabby down at heal chess genius Muñoz. They start investigating the painting. Then Álvaro is found dead.

By reverse-playing the game shown on the painting, Muñoz works out who captured the knight. This part of the mystery is solved by the 50% turning point. Then Julia keeps finding cards with chess moves written on them and she realises that Álvaro's killer is playing the game (as black) on from the position shown in the painting and that more deaths must occur before either white or black's king is check-mated. The murder mystery must be solved before Julia, the white queen, becomes another victim.

I love this sort of murder mystery with added historical puzzles and it was a classic example of its kind. The chess problems were explained so even a layman like myself was able to understand. But I expected more than I received. I was disappointed that the characters were such stereotypes: all the art world people were elegant and cultured and bitchy and the others included a dumb gigolo, a stupid policeman and the chess expert who was the classic private investigating loner in his shabby dress and his diffident manner. It was also disappointing that the historical mystery was solved in the first half, and so easily. There was a certain amount of what felt like padding in the middle as the characters talked of chess in Freudian terms and considered layers of meaning in terms of chess, and Bach (the owner of the painting was, wouldn't you know, an ex-conductor), and recursiveness: the influence of Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter was acknowledged in the epigraphs to chapters 9 and 11. 

A fun murder mystery but I was expecting more.

Selected quotes:

• “Life is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.” (Ch 1)
• “He had the unmistakable air of someone defeated before the battle has even started, of someone who, when he opens his eyes each morning, awakens only to failure.” (Ch 8)
• “Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father.” (Ch 9)
• “An exception doesn't prove anything; it invalidates or destroys any rule. That's why you have to be very careful with inductive reasoning.” (Ch 11)
• “In all businesses, unimpeachable honesty is the surest route to death from starvation.” (Ch 15)

July 2025; 295 pages

First published in Madrid by Alfaguara SA in 1990

My edition, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, was published by Harper Collins in 1994

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

Detailed summary of the plot: spoiler alert

Julia is an art restorer restoring a picture of two men playing chess as a woman watches. X-rays show a hidden inscription, in Latin: Quis necavit equitem: Who killed the knight? 

She goes to see art historian (and ex-lover) Álvaro; he identifies the people in the picture and points out that one was already dead. Art dealer Menchu tries to negotiate herself a larger percentage of the sale on the basis that this discovery will increase the value of the painting. She and Julia, with Julia's ex-guardian César, are trying to work out who killed the knight and waiting for Álvaro but he sends documents instead.

César and Julia go to a chess club and recruit expert player Muñoz who proposes to play the game shown in the painting backwards to discover who captured the white knight.

The police interview Julia in connection with Álvaro's death. Was it accident? But he died before he sent the documents. Suspicious!

César gives Julia a gun to defend herself.

Muñoz solves the mystery of who killed the knight. But now Julia discovers a card giving a further move and she and Muñoz realise that the game is now being played forward and that 'capturing'; a piece means a murder. And Julia, the white queen, is under threat. And she seems to be followed by a blue Ford.

While she is at the antique market, Julia's car is tampered with and another card is left. She and César see the blue Ford and attack it, Julia with the pistol. It’s the police. They have been tailing her 

The card Julia found has further moves in the game which they analyse with Muñoz.

Menchu has got wasted in a night club. Julia collects her in a taxi and takes her back to her flat. Next morning Julia goes out and while she is away from the flat, Menchu is murdered (there's another card left by the body, with yet further moves) and the painting stolen. 

The police arrest Menchu's boyfriend, gigolo Max, who tells Julia that Menchu planned to steal the painting but it was obviously taken by the man who murdered her.

Julia is working late in the restoration area of the Prado when she gets a phone call telling her to go to Room 12 and look at the painting by Brueghel the Elder called The Triumph of Death. There’s another card with more moves.

Julia and Muñoz go to confront the murderer. Muñoz plays against the murderer to the end of the game; he wins. The murderer explains how (and why) the crimes were committed. 

"The Age of Light" by Whitney Scharer

 

A fictionalised biography of Lee Miller, a model, photographer, and journalist. It focuses on the three years she spent in Paris as the assistant, student, collaborator and lover of Man Ray but there are also glimpses of the many other aspects of her life.

She must have been a truly remarkable person. She was raped by an uncle, contracting gonorrhoea from the encounter, when she was seven. Her modelling career began with her father taking nude photographs of her when she was a teenager; it took off when, about to step into the road in New York, she was saved from being hit by a car by Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue; it ended when a shot of her was used in an advert for menstrual pads. She went to Paris at the end of the 1920s to become an artist and ended up working and living with Man Ray. This was the height of surrealism. She discovered the technique of solarization which became a feature of the photographs of Man Ray and her. (The book credits her with discovering the technique but it would be more correct to say that she rediscovered it, it had previously been described in print in 1859.) The book suggests that she left Man Ray after he claimed credit for some photographs of a girl's head in a Bell Jar (I wonder whether this photo suggested the title of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?) which won a prize; she felt that he was trying to control her. Whilst in Paris she also acted in one of Jean Cocteau's films and modelled for the French Vogue.

Her subsequent career was with the English Vogue. She was first a fashion photographer and correspondent and then a photo-journalist, at first during the London Blitz and then joining the American troops after the D-Day landings. She took a picture in St Malo of the first US use of napalm. She took photographs in the newly liberated Dachau. She had her photograph taken in Hitler's bath on the day he committed suicide. After the war she reinvented herself as a cordon bleu chef and cookery correspondent, marrying the man who founded the Institute for Contemporary Arts.

The novel is written from Lee's perspective, in the third person and using the present tense. This gives us access to Lee's thoughts, while at the same time creating a distance between the reader and the narrator. The principal characters, Lee and Man Ray, are both given depth and nuanced complexity. For all his role as principal antagonist and de facto villain, he is shown to be deeply in love with Lee and he perhaps understands her (especially regarding her father's abusive behaviour) better than she understands herself. 

The final chapter suggests that the pair of them meet in 1974 "forty years since they last saw each other" which heightens the drama but is contradicted by other accounts.

The technique of focusing heavily on three years in a long life makes for an interesting novel but I wondered whether the flashbacks and flashforwards contributed much to the overall book.

Selected quotes:

• “She told him that until he puts a sidewalk on the downs and lines it with cafe bars, she's not going to be wasting her time tromping through the hillsides.” (Prologue)
• “She ... panicked, as if her life were a balloon and she had just let go of the string.” (Ch 1)
• “Her letters read like excerpts from an Anita Loos novel, full of non sequiturs and gossip.” (Ch 8)
• “The next day, Lee wakes up with a clear head, and it feels like a gift to have the energy for everyday tasks. Why doesn't she appreciate it more when she is healthy?” (Ch 9)
• “When I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn't the emotion what makes reality real?” (Ch 14)
• “The Illuminated moths wings of her lungs inside her chest, shot through with cancer.” (Sussex England)

September 2024; 367 pages

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

Click here for an article in the Guardian about Lee's war work (and the war photography of other women).

"The Glass Bathyscaphe" by Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin

Perhaps I missed it. I don't remember reading anything about a glass bathyscaphe (a power underwater craft made mainly of glass). I checked the index: no bathyscaphe is mentioned. The title seems to refer only to the illustration on the cover. The book is focused entirely on its subtitle: 'How Glass Changed the World'.

Glass-making has been around for a long time in Eurasia but its early use was almost entirely ornamental, using opaque, coloured glass. Thin transparent glass requires glass-blowing techniques, developed “somewhere in Syria or Iraq” in c100 BCE (Ch 2). The authors carefully distinguish various uses of glass as ornaments, vessels, windows and mirrors and suggest that it was the fact that glass windows were so useful in the cold climates of northern Europe (enabling people to work indoors; there were glass windows in Britain during the Roamn occupation)  that led to the emphasis on transparent glass which is so useful for the key scientific instruments that were essential for the scientific revolution (not just see-through (and heat-proof and inert) reaction vessels for chemistry but also thermometers, barometers, vacuum-pumps, telescopes and microscopes, not to mention lanterns, sextants and chronometers to assist sea travel and even light bulbs.

As well as science, the authors consider the effect of glass on art, particularly the development of perspective, which they suggest, with evidence from contemporary sources, was facilitated by the use of mirrors. They also suggest that windows encouraged paintings because both are framed and show how some early renaissance artists used panes of glass as drawing aids.

They further hypothesise that the western European cult of individuality was encouraged by glass mirrors; they suggest the rise of autobiographies correlates with the rise of glass mirrors.

They even suggest that the reason the scientific revolution did not take place in East Asia was because they never developed spectacles. The book theorises that this is because they have much higher rates of myopia than in western Europe. They hypothesise that this is because (a) the traditional rice and vegetable diet contains too little vitamin A and (b) they have a strong literary tradition, with young children forced to learn a large number of literary texts from a very early age; the resultant eye strain causes myopia. But myopia in young children is an eye defect among the relatively economically powerless so there was no need for spectacles (and a short-sighted person can still read by putting their face very close to the page); furthermore the gradual increase in long-sightedness as people age would mean that older people didn’t need spectacles. In contrast, the eye defect in the west was predominantly long-sightedness which makes it nearly impossible to read and this stimulated the demand for spectacles.

This is therefore an ambitious work! The arguments are persuasive although I was rarely convinced; perhaps a smaller focus and a greater depth of evidence would have sealed the deal. Nevertheless, it was an entertaining read. But where was the bathyscaphe?

Selected quotes:

• “Discovery sometimes comes after a first rough set of guesses has begun to seem plausible enough to justify detailed examination.” (Ch 1)
• “A world of continuous investigation and assessment of nature and social relations, has many enemies. Most human beings prefer certainty and order above all else. Most innovations and change threaten such orderliness. In particular, new ideas can be subversive and dangerous. Much of history shows the tendency of thought systems to close down, solidify, and put up increasing barriers to disturbance. ... One aspect of this is what might be termed roughly the tendency towards inquisitorial thought. ... ‘Heresies’ are now rooted out; challenges to the thought system are seen as threats to the social and political order. The thought police are active, but do not need to be called in because of self-emasculation by individuals under all sorts of pressures, including those of loved ones. ... Whether it is the Jesuits or the Mandarins or the Mullahs, a strict enforcement of the notion the certain ideas must not be challenged becomes widespread. It is more important to learn the old truths and reinterpret them than to learn new ones.” (Ch 3) 
• “This curiosity, the impetus to test and speculate, the sense that there were expanding horizons of knowledge, that not all was known and there were new worlds to be discovered, were boosted by the rapidly expanding wealth and technology of the period. The new burst of power through the intensive exploitation of wind, water and animals, the growth of trade and cities, and the expansion of Christianity ... encouraged experimentation.” (Ch 3)
• “Glass shifts authority from the word, from the ear and the mind and writing, to external visual evidence. The authority of elders is challenged; the test is the individual eye and the authority of the doubt-filled and sceptical individual.” (Ch 4)
• “At the two ends of Eurasia very different cosmologies and ideologies developed ... at one end of the continent a glass civilisation emerged, and at the other a pottery and paper one.” (Ch 6)
• “It is one of the ironies of life that just as they reach the peak of knowledge, in their late forties and fifties, many people find it impossible to continue reading without glasses.” (Ch 8)
• “The invention of spectacles in creased the intellectual life of professional workers by fifteen years or more. ... The revival of learning from the fourteenth century onwards may well be connected to this. ... The active life of skilled craftsmen, often engaged in very detailed close work, was also almost doubled.” (Ch 8)

July 2022; 213 pages

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

"Notes from an Exhibition" by Patrick Gale

As with a number of books I have reviewed recently (Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward, A Visit from the Goon Squad) by Jennifer Egan), this book is constructed from interlinked snapshots going backwards and forwards in time. I have suggested before that this has the advantage that you can 'head hop' and present multiple perspectives and that you can keep the reader's attention by manipulating the order in which you present information but the disadvantages of making the narrative a little more confusing and potentially multiplying characters. This book avoids the latter trap by restricting the main characters to the husband, the wife and the four children, although the sister creeps in towards the end. Thematically the book is brought together by prefacing each of the sections with notes for one of the artist's creations, as if the stories are triggered in a retrospective exhibition.

Rachel Kelly is a painter living in Newlyn, West Cornwall. Early in the book she dies. The stories then explore her fractured family: husband Anthony, a Quaker (as they all are; I don't think I've ever read fiction involving Quakers before), eldest son Garfield, a married ex-lawyer, gay son Hedley, estranged daughter Morwenna who has disappeared, and dead son Petroc. Infusing the whole book is Rachel's bipolar syndrome which means that she lurches from high creativity to desperate depression (especially post-natally); this has distorted family relationships. In addition, she has kept secrets from all of them and the reader learns about these as the book progresses.

The question that keeps the story captivating to the end is: why did Petroc die? But all of the characters are fascinating and beautifully drawn: they are utterly real and the depiction of family life is perfectly presented.

Some of my favourite moments: (page numbers refer to the Harper Perennial paperback)

• "She listened to his breathing and heard it still had the full depth of sleep upon it." (p 2)
• "The gallery owner ... had so many piercings one could hear them click on the receiver during her phone calls." (p 8)
• "It was one of the wonders of the beach ... Some intense heat, was it, or violent tumult within the earth there had brought forth stone of every shade? Garfield had once tried to catalogue them. Like some lost soul in the Greek underworld, he had felt compelled to sort them into black, white, white and black, grey and pink, grey with white streaks and bronzy yellow. The variety had defeated him as much as the lack of time between tides." (p 90)
• "She had three children by three different men and was a notorious slapper in both senses." (p 107)
• "He went to art school in Falmouth where he was quiet but fairly popular and continued to drift in the upper half of the underachievers." (p 157)
• "Perhaps it was that she was the best Quaker of them all, striving to create the fewest ripples as she moved through life." (p 161)
• "Garfield thought she was mad. A lot of people did. Largely this was because their idea of sanity was so enmeshed with property; economic and social stability with its mental equivalent." (p 259)
• "If a blade of grass was a tree to an ant, what must a tree be or a whole lawn? Perhaps, he thought, they simply blanked out such vastnesses and, having no conception of their own insignificance, could thus cope with life and even be happy? Perhaps the trick was to aspire backwards, to the blessed narrowness of a baby's pram-bound outlook and the more you saw, the less happy you could hope to be?" (p 307)
• "If you saved your anger rather than speaking it, it had a way of evaporating like smoke, leaving just a faint smell where before there had been flames." (p 313)
• "They hadn't kissed much earlier, which was a relief because ... it struck him as the most intimate thing ... The rest was intimate too, naturally, but it was limbs and body parts whereas mouths were sort of where your personality came out." (p 360)

A super book: engaging and absorbing but also wise.

January 2021; 374 pages

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

Other books in this blog about artists include:

My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok and its sequel The Gift of Asher Lev

Patrick Gale's novels:

• The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985)
• Ease (1985)
• Kansas in August (1987)
• Facing the Tank (1988)
• Little Bits of Baby (1989)
• The Cat Sanctuary (1990)
• The Facts of Life (1996)
• Tree Surgery for Beginners (1999)
• Rough Music (2000)
• A Sweet Obscurity (2003)
• Friendly Fire (2005)
• Notes from an Exhibition (2007)
• The Whole Day Through (2009)
• A Perfectly Good Man (2012)
• A Place Called Winter (2015)
• Take Nothing With You (2018)
• Mother’s Boy (2022)

"Caravaggio" by Andrew Graham-Dixon

This biography of the artist Michelangelo Merisi (1571 - 1610), known as Caravaggio from the town outside Milan where he was born, is subtitled 'A Life Sacred and Profane'. "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights" (p 3). As well as being a painter of startling originality and huge later influence he was repeatedly in trouble with the law for fighting in the streets; his murder of a man (probably during a duel) led to a capital conviction and his fleeing from Rome, eventually to Malta where he was soon again in trouble with the authorities requiring him to break out of jail in Valletta. So there was no shortage of incident during his 38 years and AGD tells a rattling good yarn. However, this is about a painter and the art was the most important thing in Caravaggio's life, and AGD describes and explains the masterpieces in a way that enhanced my appreciation of this fabulous artist. These masterpieces are illustrated by a surprisingly large number of high quality colour plates and it is not the fault of the book that Caravaggio's extremely tenebristic style makes it difficult to see many of the details described.

AGD attempts to explain C's style by describing the context of the world in which he grew up. Milan, a city notorious for pimps, prostitutes, thieves and violence, was in thrall to Archbishop Borromeo, a priest of a Savanorolan bent, who used the confessional to operate a hierocratic police state. He encouraged the practice of 'composition' recently made popular by Jesuit leader St Ignatius Loyola (revived from methods employed by St Francis of Assissi) which aimed to get believers to “visualize Christ's sufferings ... as if you were actually present at the very time ... you should regard yourself as if you had our Lord suffering before your very eyes, and that he was present to receive your prayers.” (p 32) Thus art was an aid to devotion. AGD suggests that these practices had led to the development of realism in early Renaissance art: "artists competed with each other to create convincing illusions of actual presence, developing new techniques such as mathematically calculated perspective to paint ever more convincing images of the life and sufferings of Christ. Painters made their pictures as realistic as they could in order to assist worshippers in their own acts of mental picture-building.” (33)

In particular Borromeo encouraged the practice of 'sacred mountains' which were places where pilgrims could go and encounter crib-like Biblical scenes in which usually terracotta figures were arranged in theatrically-set groupings. “The most skilfully carved and painted of the figures have a shocking actuality about them. This is not art that seeks to idealize nor generalize life; it is art that aspires to the condition of a simulacrum of life itself.” (p 39) “The way in which he [Caraviaggio] paints the wrinkled faces and bodies of his protagonists has its exact parallel in the wizened physiognomies conjured from clay by the masters of terracotta sculpture” (p 40)

Descriptions of Caravaggio's art include:

• "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights" (p 3)
• “His use of light and shade was so original that it gave painters nothing less than a new grammar and vocabulary.” (p 41)
• “The painter’s intense sensuality ... his feel for the flesh and blood of the human body and ... hius sensitivity to the suggestions implicit in the least exchange of glances.” (p 42)
• “an art of paroxysm and abandonment, filled with images of turmoil in dark places.” (p 52)
• “Tintoretto's brooding, monumental religious canvases, full of dramatic contrasts of light and dark - lightning strikes of supernatural illumination that shiver like spiritual electricity - are the only late sixteenth-century Italian paintings to prophesy elements of Caravaggio's own mature style.” (65)
• “Caravaggio is not merely the painter of rogues, crooks and the enchantresses of the street. He is the painter as vagabond.” (110)
• “Caravaggio seems to have had almost no interest in theories of art.” (118)
• “The transience of nature is linked to precariousness. Entropy and the fear of falling are connected in Caravaggio's mind.” (135)
• “Whomsoever the Medusa looks at, she freezes, preserving them forever in a single, charged instant of being. From the flux of life she takes a moment and makes it last for all time. That is what Caravaggio’s art does too.” (159)
• “In these later paintings he used a dark ground and worked from dark to light, a technique that he may have seen for the first time in the art of Tintoretto. It suited him in a number of ways. A dark ground enabled him to focus only on the essentials of the scene, as he imagined it. Dark paint creates an illusion of deep shadow around the principal forms and therefore also does away with the need to paint background detail.” (184)
• “Caravaggio’s habitual impatience is manifest too in his frequent practice of working wet-in-wet rather than waiting for each layer of oil paint to dry. He was unique among the painters of his time in making no preparatory drawing for his pictures, preferring to block out his compositions directly on the primed canvas. Having posed his models, he often marked the exact positions of heads and other contours by making light incisions in the base layer of paint ... No other artists of his time used such incisions.” (185)
• Bellori said: “he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark.” (186)
• “Caravaggio's dark and monumental oil paintings would certainly have looked extremely Venetian in the chapel of a Roman church in 1600, because only in Venice, where dampness and humidity discouraged fresco painting, was it common to see such large works of religious art carried out in oil on canvas.” (204)
• “God is light, so he announces his presence among men in the elusive forms of a shadowplay. The innkeeper cannot see it, it but by standing where he does he casts a shadow on the wall that gives Christ a dark but unmistakable halo.” (223)
• “Earlier artists had often envisaged the portrayal as a chaotic crowd scene, confusing the eye with a multitude of soldiers and panicking disciples. Caravaggio’s new technique of emphatic chiaroscuro was the perfect editing device for avoiding such unnecessary complications. He uses it here as a ruthless means of exclusion, spotlighting the figures at the very centre of the drama ... In his interpretation, the whole story becomes an elemental conflict between good and evil, innocence and malignity.” (229)
• “Michelangelo's prophets are nobly idealized figures, decorously draped, but Caravaggio’s Matthew is an ordinary, imperfect human being in working clothes that leave his arms and legs bare ... a simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation.” (236)
• “Many of the technical departures of the artist’s later work are related to his circumstances: he stops painting from models, in all but a few cases, because he has no time to find them or money to pay them, and he paints quickly because he has to move on.” (331)
• “Placing such emphasis on the proximity of one man's body to another is Caravaggio’s way of heightening the horror of the scene. Torture is a misbegotten form of physical intimacy.” (346)
• “The snapshot immediacy of the image, with its extremely innovative effects of cropping and occlusion, is suggestive of alienation and abandonment.” (538)
• “He painted as if the rich and the powerful were his enemies, as if he really did believe that the meek deserved to inherit the earth.” (438)
• “Pier Paolo Pasolini ... was profoundly influenced by Caravaggio’s sense of light, by his narrative directness, and by his casting of poor and ordinary working people in leading roles.” (441)

Other great moments:

• “Nowhere was the misogynistic cult of celibacy stronger than in Lombardy. It did not necessarily entail sexual abstinence, merely a refusal to be yoked to any single woman.” (p 16)
• “While Bacchus symbolises inspiration, he also stands for disorder, anarchy, an unruly surrender to the senses. He is passion, opposed to the reason embodied by Apollo.” (84)
• “Counter-Reformation Rome was a city in which all manner of thieves, rogues and scoundrels thronged. Their presence was a symptom of social crisis. Recurrent plague not only destroyed lives, but ravaged economies in the cities and states where it struck.” (100)
• “Aristotle's distinction between tragedy and comedy ... held that tragedy should focus on the actions of the elite - kings and princes - while comedy should concern itself with the behaviour of those at the very bottom of the social heap.” (107) This comes from Aristotle's Poetics.
• “The polyphonic and monodic modes are at opposite ends of music’s emotional spectrum. Polyphony subsumes the individual voice within a choral harmony, reflecting the desire to conjure up an essentially otherworldly sound, such as the singing of the angelic host. Words are hard to distinguish in the layers of polyphonic singing. Syntax dissolves and sense is sacrificed for an effect of transcendence. By contrast, monody puts precise meaning and specific human emotions at the heart of music. The single melodic line, the solo voice, is easily understood ... It might be said that while polyphony aspires to heaven, monody expresses man.” (128)
• “According to the Neoplatonic thought of the Renaissance, classical myth was alive with shadowy anticipations of Christian truth. The legend of Dionysus, who died to be reborn, was regarded as a pagan prophecy of the coming of Christ.” (155)
• “The centre of the city was dark. Overshadowed by unbroken lines of tall buildings, its congested lanes and alleys were rarely penetrated by direct sunlight. Despite the sunshine of southern Italy, most daily life took place in deep shadow, in a form of civic space not unlike the bottom of a well.” (338)

As I think you can see, I thoroughly enjoyed this brilliant book.

July 2020; 444 pages

"Religion for atheists" by Alain de Botton

This wonderful book ends with the statement that: “The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.” (10.iii.3) It proposes that the secular world learns how religions pass on their message, which is, after all, a message intended to support the fragile human psyche through its many times of troubles, in order to enable such support without the use of the supernatural. He asserts that religions are fundamentally false (“No one intent on starting a new religion from scratch in the modern era would dream of proposing anything as hoary and improbable as the rituals and precepts bequeathed to us by our ancestors.”; 10.ii.1), that they were invented, but he then suggests that: “We invented religions to serve two central needs ... first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and too our decay and demise.” (1.2) Given that these needs still exist, we need to develop secular systems which will promote social harmony and support vulnerable individuals without the mumbo-jumbo.

Then, in eloquent writing which sometimes reaches the heights of lyrical beauty, he proposes how this can be done.

Community
“One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighbourliness which has been replaced by ruthless anonymity.” (2.i.1) He recognises that this is partly due to overcrowding: “Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must - in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity - give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them all sides.” (2.i.2)  But churches are places where strangers from all walks of life meet. Often they are beautiful places. People are instructed to move together: when to kneel, when to stand or sit, when to sing together, when to listen. Importantly, the weakest are welcomed as well as the strongest. And he points out that the Christian mass began as a meal: “Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and off benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However the proximity required by a meal ... disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted.” (2.i.6) 

Apologies

AdB suggests that we institutionalize apologies, as with the Jewish Day of Atonement or the Catholic Confession. He suggests that we are all nasty in some ways to other people and this causes two lots of suffering:

• “As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appals our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we've given to the unkind remark.” (2.ii.2)
• If we have offended we may “feel intolerably guilty” so that we “run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them” so making them suffer twice. (2.ii.2)

One problem is that we don't like being told we are naughty by someone else. It provokes the 'who do you think you are' response and one of the flaws of religions is that often the priest is promoted as Mr Perfect Pants. “Among religions’ more unpalatable features is the tendency of their clergies to speak to people as if they, and they alone, were in possession of maturity and moral authority.” (3.i.7) AdB argues that the concept of Original Sin is that we are all flawed. “The doctrine of original sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about.”. (3.i.7)

He then proposes that in order to get the message across we need to institutionalize the secular church. He shows how institutions have vastly more wealth, and power, and influence than even the greatest individual thinker. He contrasts the cottage industry of wellness gurus with the brand recognition of the church. He suggests we advertise our secular beliefs by beautiful paintings, for example, and by beautiful architecture. (I take issue with his idea that beauty somehow equates with goodness: there is sufficient cult today of beautiful people and the downside of beauty = goodness is to suggest that the ugly should be shunned; besides, his two pictures contrasting a protestant chapel with a Roman Catholic chapel are presumably intended to suggested that the lush ornamentation of the RC ceiling is preferable whereas I personally prefer the elegance of the protestant building; beauty is even more individual perhaps than ethics.)

He considers the universities should have the duty to teach courses in eg How to have a successful marriage, and How to Die, and that these courses should be illustrated with extracts from great literature but he sees that the present universities have missed their way by considering literature as texts to be studied rather than improving moral works: “We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture ... as a source of guidance.” (4.i.4) “The redesigned universities of the future would draw upon the same rich catalogue of culture treated by their traditional counterparts ... but they would teach this material with a view to illuminating students lives ... Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary would that be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage ... Epicurus and Seneca would appear in a syllabus for a course about dying.” (4.i.7)

He also suggests that universities, by relying on a single method of transmission, the (often boring) lecture, have missed the goal. 

• “Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ ... the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greek sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (logos) and emotion (pathos)” (4.ii.1) 
• “Ever since Plato attacked the Greek sophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence.” (4.ii.2)
• “Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers.” (4.ii.3)

Finally he proposes that we lack perspective, being insufficiently pessimistic about our powerlessness in the face of the cosmos. This is interesting given that others suggest that it was the Coperbnican revolution that displaced mankind and the earth from its position of centrality in the Universe. But de Botton states:

•  “Our secular world ... surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history” (7.2)
• “Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.” (7.3) 

Other important ideas

• “In the past, we got to know others because we have no option but to ask them for help” because there were no social safety nets. “We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of that income for the common good” but this is through taxation which tends to leave us resentful imagining that “our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies” rather than considering “those less fortunate members of the policy for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin.” (2.i.2)
• We get our ideas of strangers from the media so we think “that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles” although when disasters strike and we are actually vulnerable “we tend to marvel that our fellow citizens have shown surprisingly little interest in slicing us in half or molesting our children and may even be surprisingly good-natured and ready to help.” (2.i.2)
• “The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert - all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.” (2.i.3)
• “It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realising that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.” (2.iii.3)
• “Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together.” 
• “Freedom has become our supreme political virtue ...the state should harbour no aspirations to tinker with the inner well-being or outward manners of its members.” (3.i.1)
• “ Heady romantic longings are fragile materials with which to construct a relationship. We grow thoughtless and mendacious towards each other. We surprise ourselves with our rudeness. We become deceitful and vindictive.” (3.i.5)
• “It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms ... But if we can now own up to spiritualising our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. ... We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves ... who want to live the sort of life which we want imagine supernatural beings demanded of us.” (3.i.6)
• “We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together.” (3.1.8)
• “We would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. ... Rudeness and emotional humiliation maybe just as corrosive to a well-functioning society as robbery and murder.” (3.1.8)
• “Consider ... how belatedly and how bluntly the modern state enters into our lives ... It intervenes when it is already far too late, after we have picked up the gun.” (3.i.8)
• “Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognised as a serious subject ... The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like the Gospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and therefore prompt affective identification and self-examination.” (4.i.4)
• “There is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a grown-up who does not regularly yearn to be comforted like a child.” (5.3)
• “If there is a problem with Christianity’s approach, it is that ... the need for comfort has come to be overly identified with a need for Mary herself, instead of being seen for what it really is: an eternal appetite which began long before the Gospels, originating at the very moment when the first child was picked up by his or her mother and soothed amid the darkness and cold of the first underground cave.” (5.4)
• “The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings ... are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality.” (7.2)
• “Tourists making their way around some of the world's great museums ... appear to want to be transformed by art, but the lightning bolts they are waiting for seem never to strike. They resemble the disappointed participants in a failed seance.” (8.2)
• “Art ...is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls.” (8.3)
• “The unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.” (8.5)
• “If our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.” (8.5)
• “There are places which by virtue of their remoteness, solitude, beauty or cultural richness retain an ability to salve the wounded parts of us.” (9.3)
• “Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and the tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, and cut off from practical affairs.” (10.i.1)
• “Why should only phones and shampoos benefit from coherent retail identities?” (10.i.3)
• “Because we are embodied creatures - sensory animals as well as rational beings - we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels ... in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.” (10.i.4)

An incredibly thought-provoking (and timely) book. Beautifully written, both easy to read and lyrical, and with many illustrations who, together with their captions, add a considerable amount to the text,

Alain de Botton has also written How Proust can change your life

August 2019; 312

"Umbrae Vergilianae" by Robert Bush

This delightful little book, published in a limited edition of just seventy copies, explores the use of the word umbra in the Aeneid. The introduction tells us that "The word umbra recurs throughout the Aeneid ... it appears seventy times, at least once in each of the twelve books ...Umbra has some of the range of meanings of our word 'shade'. ... most often it denotes forbidding gloom."

Each selected umbra appears with an illustration created by "soaking sheets of Khadi paper  ... in Chinese ink of various strength and working on them with water, ink, charcoal and white chalk."

The deep love of the author for this epic poem is embodied in the care and attention lavished on this extraordinary work. Only seventy copies have been published and a cheap paperback may sell millions and it may be that the cheap paperback is a work of art and of beauty but this is certainly a work of love, of art, and of beauty.

August 2019;

Another book about Virgil's Aenid is by David Ross

"Art Theory" by Cynthia Freeland

In this "Very Short Introduction" the author begins with a challenge by describing artworks which utilise bodily fluids and challenge the idea that beauty is necessarily pretty. Thus, the first chapter is entitled "Blood and beauty"; goriness is something shared by some very challenging modern art pieces but also by all those renaissance paintings of martyrdom. From this she extracts her first art theory: that art began as a component of a ritual (noting that the central Christian ritual of the Eucharist involves blood). However she dismisses this theory: “For participants in a ritual, clarity and agreement of purpose are central ... Most modern art .... lacks the background reinforcement of pervasive community belief that provides meaning in terms of catharsis, sacrifice, or initiation.” So she seeks alternative theories of art.

For Hume agreement on what is good art was a matter of intersubjectivity. He thought that "men of taste acquire certain abilities that lead to agreement about which authors and artworks are the best. ... in doing so, they set a ‘standard of taste’ which is universal." However she points out that this process seems akin to "cultural indoctrination".

Kant believed that Beauty was an objective quality residing in the art object. One of the criteria was that good art has “purposiveness without a purpose”. This implies that if I am sexually aroused by Botticelli’s Venus then, for me, it is not art but pornography. Kant thought that "a beautiful object feels ‘right’. “The beautiful object appeals to our senses, but in a cool and detached way ... Art should inspire a special and disinterested response of distance and neutrality.”

“One of the most persistent of all theories of art, the imitation theory: art is an imitation of nature or of human life and action.” Thus, the Gombrich theory of “the history of Western art ... as a search for progressively more vivid renderings of reality.” The imitation theory, inevitably, led to a disagreement between Plato and Aristotle: Plato disliked imitations because they could never match up to his "eternal ideal realities”; Aristotle (in the Poetics), on the other hand, “felt that tragedy could educate by appealing to people's minds, feelings, and senses.”

Christian art theory started with Aquinas. “Aquinas theorized that Beauty was an essential or ‘transcendental’ property of God, like Goodness and Unity. Human artworks should emulate and aspire to God’s marvellous properties.” This led to the three key principles governing art in the middle ages: "proportion, light, and allegory.” The influence of proportion “dates back to Plato's Timaeus, where the creative ‘Demi- Urge’ used geometry to plan an orderly material world. The Christian God too was seen as the master builder of the Cosmos.” “Aquinas also emphasized light, using the term claritas, which denotes internal brightness and design.” hence the use in cathedrals of clerestories (clearing away the previous balconies) and therefore the need for flying buttresses.

“Nietzsche ... describe the origins of tragedy from the worship of the God Dionysus. Tragic vision showed the very essence of life as violence and suffering, with no meaning or justification. The beauty of ‘Apollonian’ poetry in Tragedy provides a veil through which we tolerate the horrific get enticing Dionysian Vision.”

Modern art critic “Danto concludes that a work of art is an object that embodies a meaning.” This means that "what artists can make as art depends upon the context of intentions possible for a given era and culture.” Freeland accepts this to some extent: “I do not mean to say we cannot begin to appreciate the power of nail fetish sculptures without further facts; but information add considerably to our experience.” “Richard Anderson (an ... ethno-aesthetician) argues that we can find something akin to art in all cultures: certain things are appreciated for their beauty, sensuous form, and skill of creation ... Anderson proposes to define art as ‘culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium’.”

Freeland goes on to ask whether Art is about the emotions or about ideas. A bit of both, she suggests. “Expression Theory holds that art communicates something in the realm of feelings and emotions.” It was espoused by Leo Tolstoy. “Freud saw art as a form of ‘sublimation’, a gratification that substitutes for the actual satisfaction of our biologically given desires (such as the desire for oral or genital pleasure).” But “Artists are often admired because then can express ideas in ways that are original, apt, and unique to a particular medium.” "Artists share thematic concerns in a given episteme with other intellectuals, including philosophers and scientists.”

In the end, she sees all this disagreement as productive. “Critics help us see more in the artist’s work and understand it better. Interpretations are superior if they explain more aspects of the artist’s work.” “Experts notice many things that regular movie audiences might not, such as the intricate shot structure of the infamous shower scene in Psycho.”

An excellent brief introduction into 'What is Art?'

More great and thought-provoking quotes:

• “Blood ... has interesting similarities to paint. Fresh blood has an eye-catching hue with a glossy sheen. It will stick to a surface.” (C 1)
• “Blood is our human essence - Dracula sucks it up as he creates the undead. Blood can by holy or noble, the sacrificial blood of martyrs or soldiers. Spots of blood on sheets indicate the loss of virginity and passage to adulthood.” (C 1)
• “The cynical assessment is that blood in contemporary art does not forge meaningful associations, but promotes entertainment and profit. The art world is a competitive place, and artists need any edge they can get.” (C 1)
• “Wagner’s ...use of leitmotifs - phrases associated with particular themes or characters, as well as used for dramatic effect - recurs, for example, in John Williams's music for the Star Wars movies.” (C 2)
• “Cultures often come into contact through means that limit communication, such as imitation, shopping, and mass-market sales.” (C 3)
• “Despite gaps between cultures, intercultural contact is age-old. The art of ancient Greece was influenced by Egyptian sphinxes, Scythian goldsmithing, Syrian love goddesses, and Phoenician coin design.” (C 3)
• When the leader of an aboriginal dance troupe stepped forward at the end of a performance to tell the audience that there were CDs for sale, the author was shocked “as though he but not I had to remain trapped in the amber of the past.” (C 3)
• “Dictators and other political powers often suppress art because it provides a point of critical resistance.” (C 3)
• “Art and money interact in many institutions - in, particular museums. Museums preserve, collect, and educate the public and convey standards about art’s value and quality - but whose standards, and how?” (C 4)
• “As John Dewey commented in 1934, ‘Generally speaking, the typical collector is the typical capitalist.’ ... J Paul Getty’s ... tales of collecting are in each case accounts of how much he spent.” (C 4)
• "Dewey said that understanding art is like understanding another person. You may know how to interpret your beloved's smile, but can you summarize it in a sentence?” (C 6)
• “The elaborate three-minute videos broadcast worldwide on MTV specialize in rapid cuts and montage.” (C 7)

July 2019; 140 pages

"The Secret Lives of Colour" by Kassia St Clair

This is one of those books which are heaven for the determined trivia collector like myself. Seventy-five different colours from beige to acid yellow, from nude to shocking pink, from dragon's blood  to mauve to Prussian blue to celadon to khaki to pitch black, are included. You learn about their history, how they are made, and their properties such as how well the dye material and whether they are good in oil and if they fade. But best of all you learn the fascinating facts:

• Lead poisoning from cosmetics used to make skin whiter may have been in part responsible for the collapse of the Shogun regime in Japan in 1868. On the other hand the use of Kohl as an eye liner results in a 240% boost to the production of nitric oxide by the surrounding skin which might significantly reduce the risk of skin infections.
• Vermilion was once as costly as gold when it was used as the red in mediaeval illuminated manuscripts; "it was glazed with a revolting mixture of egg yolk and ear wax." Meanwhile the use of minium for red applied by miniators onto early mediaeval manuscripts led to our word miniature."
• Neanderthals have been found with ginger hair.
• No one really knows how Indian yellow used to be made; there is a tale that it comes from the urine of cows fed only on mango leaves and water in Mirzapur, Bengal.
• Beige "could be the concept-colour of the bourgeoisie: conventional, sanctimonious and materialistic." Khaki (from the Urdu word for dusty) was invented by Sir Harry Lumsden in Peshawar, Pakistan, for the uniform for a corps of guides to make them "invisible in a land of dust".
• Despite being up to 2,500 times cheaper than the real thing, artificial ultramarine was initially resisted by artists: "Because the particles were the same size and reflected light in the same way, it lacked the depth, variety and visual interest of the real thing."

This book works both as a reference work and as a dip-in-for-pleasure book. June 2019; 285 pages

"Enduring Creation" by Nigel Spivey

Spivey starts with a visit to Auschwitz. This leads to his reflecting on the maxim of Theodor Adorno that “All culture after Auschwitz is trash". This book is an attempt to suggest that even in these post-holocaust days it is important to continue to produce art. “We are compassionate by habit, not from birth. Pity is something that we learn to feel." he states. So we need art to visit the awful things that human does to human so that we can learn to feel pity. Therefore he has written "a book about horror, fear, death, ghastliness and grievous bodily harm ... about pain lodged at the core of human experience. Pain feared; pain avoided; pain inflicted; pain endured; pain savoured; and pain regarded"

It is a riveting read. And the illustrations, selected from the work of the greats and analysed brilliantly, are sometimes horrifying but always breathtaking. 

For example, one of his suggestions is that the classical statue group the Laocoon was used as a model in later forms so that he shows the same basic figure in, for example, Michelangelo's Haman on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (a ceiling which El Greco once offered to overpaint to remove the blasphemous mixture of classical/pagan images with Christian ones). He also adapts Alberti's On Painting to create a "pathos formula" 

Some great quotes:

• “Reporters, with notebooks and lenses, thrive in zones of human disaster - scouting and jabbing like crows over carrion. The compulsion to hurry to the view of a kill seems an Instinct in us all.”
• “The early Christians ... did not seek to diminish or deny the existence of human suffering. Quite the opposite, Christianity thrived because it mind for virtue in striations of distress.”
• “Why, when the literature of Christian martyrdom was so adoringly descriptive of fleshly pain and the Hell-quenching conduits of blood, images of martyrs so anodyne, so clean?”
• "The successful institutionalization of cruelty rests upon a rationale of just deserts; also upon the species classification of certain humans as sub-human.”
• “The Damned do not go gently to their fate. Their apprehension of imminent horror is made palpable and panicky. Eager blue-black beaky demons will hustle the process, clawng or shovelling their victims towards flames, or some mouthy tunnel: images of swallowing and regurgitation often prevail.”
• “A painter will gain honour by making pictures of figures which by their attitudes credibly represent extremes of human emotion.”
• “There is a period in the history of Catholic Europe when it seems that no painter’s career could move forward until some graphic scene of martyrdom has been proved as part of his repertoire.”
• “The legend of Caravaggio says he slept every night wearing his Dagger (credible of a artist once charged with using a plate of artichokes as an offensive weapon).”
• “Only in Giorgio Vasari’s bourgeois imagination does the great artist care nothing for cash."
• “The classical ideal of female beauty was firmly but generously fleshed, and Rubens had carried that generosity to new extremes of cellulite celebration: but neither Rubens not any classical artist ever showed a ‘model’ slumped in flabbiness such as Rembrandt drew.”
• “We live in bodies. Each of us is a carcass: made up, in Genet’s words, ‘of blood, tears, sweat, shit, intelligence and tenderness’.”
• Adam Smith argued: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers ... iI is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.”
• “Smith was never the champion of completely unfettered market forces, or laissez-faire. Beneath all measures of deregulation lay the groundwork of moral and legal codes that sympathy must construct.”
• “If photography compiles a visual list of everything in the world, it is always a passing permanence. When the lens falls shut the flux goes on. For seconds, or fractions of a second, we clutch at eternity.”
• “It may amount to a gesture of some pardon to remember that One hundred and twenty days of Sodom was composed by a man with no access to carnal extravagance beyond his own imaginary fantasies.”

A fascinating perspective on Art. May 2019; 249 pages

Also read other works by Nigel Spivey:

• The Ancient Olympics
• How Art Made the World

Also read these other books about art:

• 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
• The Judgement of Paris by Ross King which is about the rise of the Impressionists
• Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King which is particularly good about the techniques of oil painting
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art