for the love of books karen joan watson
travel libraries research passion italy
Karen Watson
Italia I lay out favourite titles around me for research,
his new Venetian Ghetto history will be published, reminding me of the Venetian backstory of Daniel Silva’s Chiara, she of the riotous chestnut curls. The engaging book by art historian Caroline Murphy, The Murder of a Medici Princess , reveals newly-discovered missives from European ambassadors in the mid-1500s who gossied freely about the state of ducal marriages and their fecundity, relaying descriptions of intellectual and artistic pursuits in the Florentine court of Duke Cosimo I. She interleaves them with notes of court sycophants and scribes, and the personal letters of the extraordinary princess, Isabella de’ Medici, who lived her life in late-Renaissance Tuscany among allies and enemies. With these books spread out on my bed, I open my laptop to follow Michelangelo’s path through Florence on a historical map, remembering the smells and sounds of rising early in Florence in 1994, leading a group of American theatre students down these same roads to practise T’ai chi in the garden nearby. I can live inside the ancient city walls, in a time-layered world created through books, memories and imagination.
entertainment and enlightenment. Books from my shelves and library loans form a pyramid beside my bed. I may use the library’s three-week deadline to finish the latest art-spy thriller from Daniel Silva. Or I’ll re-read Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed , my own copy of Jesse McDonald’s Michelango , and a tourism book on Florence from my shelves, while I also read Alexander Lee’s The Ugly Renaissance – framed as a walk by Michelangelo through Florence. Starting from the San Marco area of wealth, beauty and comfort he passes the Palazzo Medici Riccardi by Michelozzo, home of his host and patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici ‘il Magnifico.’ He then crosses the Ponte Vecchio to the Oltrarno’s working class dwellings, churches and people. Lee paints all concerned with an ‘ugly’ palette to create a book of social and art history, fleshed out by in-depth research on the gritty reality of the Renaissance, its businesses, patrons, politics, the Church, its artists. I dive into virtual archives to check references in the text, aware of the parallels to greed in the present day. Like Alice, I fall down the internet rabbit hole, reading Lee’s academic bio and Twitter page, noting that
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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