Leonardo's Nephew: Essays in the History of Art and Artists [Hardcover]

James Fenton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1999

Absorbing new perspectives on some of the great characters and neglected corners of art history

Over the past few years, James Fenton has published a series of long essays on art history in The New York Review of Books. This book brings the pieces together along with numerous black-and-white illustrations, providing a fascinating sideways look at painting and sculpture. Displaying an enviable depth of interest and knowledge, Fenton's pieces range from a controversial essay on Egyptian funerary portraits--he questions whether in fact they were death portraits at all--and an intriguing piece on Leonardo's virtually unknown but extremely talented nephew Pierino da Vinci, to essays on Degas, Picasso, and the American painter Thomas Jones, among others. An unexpected reference or forgotten bit of history is often Fenton's entre into his subject: he approaches Jasper Johns via the patriotic sculptors of the turn of the century; Joseph Cornell through the history of the European Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities; and the nature of the statue through an examination of Freud's attachment to his startlingly large collection of antique statuettes. Endlessly illuminating and packed with suggestive detail, Leonardo's Nephew opens doors on the back rooms and shadowy passageways of art history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This savory, erudite collection of essays makes a reader feel incomparably lucky, as if he or she is seated next to a learned, original, decently friendly fellow traveler on an intercontinental flight. Author James Fenton has a style that is both intimate and scholarly. It is always amusing and illuminating; it never cloys. The subjects of the 15 essays--all but two originally published in the New York Review of Books--include Freud's collection of statuary; the remarks of Renoir and Degas made at two parties in the same home (the artists, not on speaking terms, were invited on different nights); Jasper Johns's early life and his later use of the American flag in his paintings; a talented nephew of Leonardo da Vinci whose work was oddly described by both Vasari and Picasso; and more.

Fenton's writing is most moving in those essays that take off from a chance thought or a bit of accidentally discovered history, like the one on Freud. And those that began as book reviews are in a class by themselves. Fenton generally shreds or praises his subjects according to his own meticulous research, which refreshingly tends toward primary sources, but occasionally he simply takes the reader aside. Quoting one critic, he groans, "If this sort of writing makes you want to throw up, I quite agree." His, on the other hand, makes one want to turn back to the beginning of the book and start all over again. --Peggy Moorman

From Publishers Weekly

A poet and Oxford don, Fenton claims to have made "no attempt... to impose any overall thesis" onto the 15 ingenious pieces gathered here on such topics as canon formation, patronage and the peculiarities of collecting (all but two written for the New York Review of Books). Intentionally or not, the essays overlap in subtle, mercurial ways, doubling back time and again onto the same conceptual territory. Fenton is our cicerone?the grand tour guide he invokes in his essay on Verrocchio?for an idiosyncratic roundup of artworks from ancient Egypt through the late 20th century. Intrigued by emerging and unstable reputations, he introduces us to Leonardo da Vinci's half-brother's son Pierino, a precocious sculptor celebrated by Vasari but virtually forgotten since; to the impoverished Welsh painter Thomas Jones, whose striking oil sketches from the late 1700s are only now making a splash; to Maillol's patron Count Harry Graf Kessler, whose diaries, rich with information about the European avant-garde and political rear guard, are currently being transcribed onto CD-ROM; and to other figures and phenomena on the periphery of art history. It is up to the reader to discover the essays' less conspicuous parallels: "Everything is on the same plane of interest" in Pisanello's naturalistic drawings and frescoes, while half a millennium later Rauschenberg paints and assembles "as if everything he sees appears equally important." Fenton's own eye is sometimes tweedily connoisseurial, yet he leavens his enormous erudition with a dash of colloquial, even ribald, irony. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st US ed edition (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374185050
• ISBN-13: 978-0374185053
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,449,880 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Erudition as entertainment, April 9, 2000

By 

Fernando Cidade Burjato - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leonardo's Nephew: Essays on Art and Artists (Paperback)

This is a collection of fifteen short essays, but we read them as if it were a book of short stories, or as if it were a novel. Fenton's prose is something we read at ease, it can amuse us as well as give us some important informations about diverse subjects - Freud's interest on statuary; Pierino da Vinci, a sculptor who had a legendary oncle; Degas'anti-semitism; the enigmas behind Jasper Johns's pictures of the american flag. The author shows the same eloquence writing about the late Renaissance as well as when he discourses about Rauschenberg and his contemporaries. "Leonardo's nephew" is not exactly a work of a critic - it's at the same time a book of a scholar and a collection of curious stories about art and the art scene, that you can read while waiting for your bus.