Worth 1,000 Words?

By Richard Lacayo Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2004
    • Who says the book business doesn't care about art anymore? It's not the art of fiction we have in mind here. It's fiction that manages to work in a few Italian frescoes or a Dutch still life. Stirred by the success of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring , about a household servant who inspires Vermeer, publishers have rushed in with titles like Christopher Peachment's Caravaggio ; Will Davenport's The Painter , about Rembrandt; and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Way to Paradise , about Gauguin. As a rule, the books are intelligent, sometimes even ingenious, but in most, the underlying formula is plain: art plus sex. So Chevalier's new best seller, The Lady and the Unicorn , features Nicolas des Innocents, painter, tapestry designer and Renaissance stud — a guy who puts the pig in pigment.

    This new generation of art novels is different from Lust for Life (about Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (Michelangelo). Irving Stone's old blockbusters were the testosterone-laden version of art history. The central voice now is more likely to be a woman's. In Sarah Dunant's agile new novel, The Birth of Venus (Random House; 394 pages), the fictional narrator is Alessandra Cecchi, 14, the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant in the Florence of Michelangelo and Botticelli. Alessandra yearns to live with a brush in her hand. For that matter, she would be happy just to get out of the house. But it's the 1490s, so her best hope is an agreeable arranged marriage. Meanwhile, her closest girlfriend is her worldly-wise black slave. (Jada Pinkett Smith, call your agent.) And her instructor in the ways of the world is a morally ambiguous but ultimately sympathetic gay man.


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    That world is full of dangers. Charles VIII of France is preparing to march on the city. The fanatical monk Savonarola is raging from the pulpit against lust and luxury. His religious police, a kind of Christian Taliban, will soon be enforcing godliness with a cudgel, punishing sodomists and chasing women indoors. The turmoil outside interests Alessandra, but what really absorbs her is the young painter her father has brought from Northern Europe to decorate the family chapel. For a while you wonder if this mysterious stranger will somehow turn out to be Albrecht Durer, who ventured to Italy — though not to Florence — in 1494. He doesn't, though Dunant probably wouldn't mind if you pictured Durer's liquid eyes during the scenes when the discussion of single-point perspective dissolves into the sfumato of orgasm. But however strong the scent of commercial calculation in Dunant's book — there's nothing like the Renaissance to give tone to sex and bloodshed — it turns out to be a beguiling story.

    Too bad the Renaissance wasn't available to Susan Vreeland for her new book, The Forest Lover (Viking; 333 pages). Vreeland's previous novel was The Passion of Artemisia, about the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi. Vreeland's heroine this time is the Canadian painter Emily Carr, who died in 1945, after devoting her life to painting Canada's Pacific coastal woodlands and its native tribes in a swelling, Expressionist style. For much of that time, Carr was scorned not only as a woman determined to paint but also as one who ventured into the wilderness to do it. Worse, her most beloved motif was the totem pole, a subject that deeply offended the white folk of British Columbia, who were eager to forget whatever vestiges of native culture they could not obliterate.

    Carr's story has the stuff of drama; Vreeland's novel does not. She doesn't have the advantage in this book of Gentileschi's personal turmoil: her rape by one of her father's studio assistants, leading to a well-documented trial. Time and again, Carr encounters the same obstacles: hostile critics, philistine neighbors. Time and again, folks point out that she's a rebel. Eventually, she triumphs anyway. In the future, Vreeland might want to choose a more absorbing artist or give her a more complex internal life. Georgia O'Keeffe, call your agent.