Aesthetes with even a smattering of knowledge of the visual arts will find much to enjoy and rediscover in The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450-1750, a collection of erudite pieces by historian and longtime New York Review of Books contributor Ingrid D. Rowland. The title is a sly reference to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550), "one of the most influential books ever written." The 15 early modern artists Rowland highlights weren't mendacious rascals but painters and sculptors devoted to demoting "the imitation of nature" in refutation of Aristotle and pursuing "the creation of true art" by "extrapolating their visions from the concrete reality of the materials they worked with and the things they saw."
Among the artists in this handsome work are Michelangelo, who worked on "a remarkable series of huge, daunting projects," including the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, which had so many structural flaws that he needed "to demolish the existing structure"; Artemisia Gentileschi, whose often violent works "throb with drama"; and El Greco, whose famously elongated figures, as in Disrobing of Christ, "have been perfectly calibrated to the monumental spaces around them." Rowland's volume is filled with learned analyses, color and black-and-white reproductions of the works discussed, and even accounts of petty jealousies, as with Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, who felt such "coruscating hatred" toward Raphael that he wrote a grumpy letter to "his irascible Florentine friend Michelangelo" oozing with contemptuous envy. Readers won't feel the slightest resentment toward this excellent book. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer