Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Where do enduring legends come from? Where do mythical heroes come from? Where do classic works of popular art come from...
Kate Simon's travel books and her autobiographical portraits, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World, are admired for their good sense, wit and pithy grace. These qualities serve her well as a popular historian of a period that has set the Western world's standards for art, culture, cynical statecraft and consumer spending. The legacy of the Italian Renaissance is never far from contemporary tastes; its style and egocentricities survive wherever easy money, ambition and ideas flourish. Lofty mindedness and low animal cunning rarely had a better stage on which to interact. As Simon puts it, "The susurrus of silks...
Simon concentrates on the less-known but equally compelling Gonzaga of Mantua, a city, she notes with subdued irony, that was dismissed in the 1923 edition of Cook's Guide as "of no interest except for art and history." The distinction between the two was not always apparent during the Renaissance. Like other leading families of the time, the Gonzaga schemed, fought and intermarried for almost three centuries to secure power and wealth, which they used to glorify their names with masterpieces. It was a good time for architects, painters, goldsmiths, furniture makers, costume designers and jewelers. According...
That is not to say that Mallon's novel lacks pretension--it doesn't Mallon is an academic by profession and it shows. Few pages are without allusions. Art's love for Keats has earned him the nickname "Urn Man," and Mallon peppers his novel with frequent allusions to the romantic poet. The book starts with a description of Artie's Greek homework, later quoted, and the text has the requisite invocations of Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare and Joyce. Moreover, Mallon throws in details about contemporary political events, such as Pattie Hearst's kidnapping...
Mallon not only learned about writing with this project; he learned about being read. "I am very distrustful of authorial intention," he says, adding that one reviewer of Arts and Sciences wrote that he probably meant the protagonist's name to be a pun on the word art in the title. "But I named him for my father," he says...