California Literary Review

Web Site:

http://judith-harris.com/index.shtml

Books on Amazon:

Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Michelangelo: A Tormented Life by Antonio Forcellino
  Posted on 28 Jan 2010 in Art, Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Before dawn on the morning of February 18 a group of Florentines entered the church stealthily and stole Michelangelo’s body, which they concealed on a farm cart. Upon arrival of the corpse three days later in Florence, thousands of citizens turned out spontaneously, dressed in workmen’s and artists’ smocks like those Michelangelo himself wore. Many wept as they accompanied the bier in an improvised procession through the dark streets. No such a procession, as if for a saint, had ever been seen there before.

• Paul Bril’s Restored Paintings in the San Silvestro Chapel at Rome’s Sancta Sanctorum
  Posted on 30 Nov 2009 in Architecture, Art, Art & Design, Italy
  

  Born in Antwerp in 1554, Bril was working in Italy at the end of the century, where his landscapes marked the transition between what Paolucci called the “autumn of Mannerism” of the Renaissance and the birth of the Baroque style. The change was enormous, and Bril is acknowledged as among its authors.

• The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
  Posted on 01 Oct 2009 in Architecture, Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction
  

  Mawer’s The Glass Room is a genuine intellectual achievement—a breath-taking story of love and its loss, of art and lost art, of wars lost and then won and lost again, of rich gentleman Jews and Jews lost to Nazi madness. His broad canvas covers the decades of Mittel-European horrors that began in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The themes are familiar, but treated in a fresh and stimulating, not to say disturbing, way.

• A New Look at Rome’s Rousing Middle Ages
  Posted on 06 Aug 2009 in Archeology, Art & Design, History, Italy
  

  When its doors first opened in 1734, the Capitoline Museum, which stands upon the hilltop that is the very heart of Rome, was one of the first European public museums and a favorite haunt of the wealthy Grand Tourists from all over Europe. As of July 30 this venerable museum offers something novel to all tourists—a chance for a fresh look at a relatively neglected period of Roman history and the arts, the Middle Ages.

• Celebrating Galileo in Florence
  Posted on 22 Mar 2009 in Art, Art & Design, History, Italy, Science
  

  2009 is officially “The Year of Astronomy,” commemorating Galilei’s first observation of the Moon through his telescope in November of 1609. Born in Pisa, Galileo Galilei worked in Florence, where the fourth centennial of his discovery is being celebrated with a stunning and sophisticated exhibition which took four years to prepare.

• The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard
  Posted on 03 Mar 2009 in Archeology, Art, History, Italy, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Nevertheless, in my personal library there are 130 books on Pompeii. Of all these, this is the one I would choose to read first.

• The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art by Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser
  Posted on 04 Feb 2009 in Art, Economics, History, Italy, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  No less than the American financier who donates a museum wing on condition it bears his name, or the merchandiser who endows a university institute named for him, the results of Renaissance patronage had to be, first of all, highly visible.

• Kentucky Clay, Eleven Generations of a Southern Dynasty by Katherine Bateman
  Posted on 29 Jan 2009 in Biography, History, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  “In the South, stories are the effervescence of conversation, and no stories are more gripping to an audience—relatives and stranger alike—than those about family.”

• Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England by Bruce Redford
  Posted on 30 Nov 2008 in Archeology, Art, Great Britain, History, Italy, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  A famous double portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds shows members of the Dilettanti Society sipping away while making rude gestures about vaginas while holding up gemstones from classical antiquity and admiring painted Greco-Roman vases.

• Imag(in)ing America
  Posted on 01 Jul 2008 in Germany, History, Italy, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics
  

  The confrontation between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was to the Italians the “political, intellectual, and moral equivalent of the first U.S. moon landing; and as a European I am stuck down here on earth watching the Yankee space ship make its landing way up there,” Valli wrote.