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Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling Ross King With little experience as a painter (though famed for his sculpture David), Michelangeo was reluctant to pain the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here, King recounts the four extraordinary years Michelangelo spent laboring over the work while the power politics and personal rivalries that abounded in Rome swirled around him. |
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Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture Ross King Proposed in 1296, the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence was deemed impossible to build. When finally complete in 1436, it was hailed as one of the wonders of the world. King tells the full story of the dome's brilliant and volatile designer, Filippo Brunelleschi, and sets his ambition, ingenuity, and rivalries in the context of the plagues, wars, and political feuds of Renaissance Florence. |
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Ex-Libris Ross King A cryptic summons to a remote country house launches Isaac Inchbold, a London bookseller and antiquarian, on an odyssey through 17th-century Europe, charged with the task of restoring a magnificent library destroyed by the war. Moving between Prague and the Tower Bridge, Inchbold must recover a missing manuscript. But the lost volume is not what it seems, and his search leads him to the underworld spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries. |
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Domino Ross King King's debut novel recounts the adventures of young George Cautley, an aspiring artist who finds that nothing is as it seems among London's high society circles. From masquerade balls in London to the opera houses of Venice, Cautley is drawn into a web of intrigue and murder spun by the seductive Lady Beauclair. Suspenseful, and laced with black humor, Domino is full of surprises, told at the pace of a thriller. |
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The Private Lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe Though the Impressionists were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for the works of these artists. Here, Roe offers an intimate, colorful, superbly researched account takes us into their homes and studios, and describes their unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories behind the paintings. |
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The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers T. J. Clark The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was supposedly a brand new city, equipped with boulevards, cafés, parks, and suburban pleasure grounds -- the birthplace of those habits of commerce and leisure that constitute "modern life." Here, Clark describes the work of Impressionists as an attempt to give form to that modernity and seek out its typical representatives -- be they prostitutes or bourgeois lunching on the grass. |
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The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles Martin Gayford On December 23, 1888, when Vincent van Gogh sliced off part of his left ear, he also severed his relationship with Paul Gauguin, the friend who had shared his home in Arles for nine tumultuous weeks. Gayford examines the dynamics of this failed friendship and analyzes some of the astonishing paintings it inspired. More than biography, this is a shrewd psychological study of two troubled artists whose symbiotic relationship produced some of the world's great masterpieces. |
