I wanted an experience where my eyes were opened to the beauty of new art but instead, I found myself drawn into a world of horrible people who had no reason to be. Tiepolo favored unhurried, fluid, brushstrokes through which he applied his trademark pastel palette. In the words of famous art historian E. H. Gombrich, the artist's style lent itself perfectly to "the whole aristocratic dream-world" which he did so much to help create. To this end, Tiepolo's dramatic narratives were often tallied with a noticeable degree of sparseness. This was not a blemish on Tiepolo's talent so much as an attempt to let the spectator add details to the picture by using their own imagination. Cambridge, 1994. Professor Don Lamb is a revered art historian at the height of his powers, consumed by the book he is writing about the skies of the Venetian master Tiepolo. However, his academic brilliance belies a deep inexperience of life and love. The subject for this magnificent fresco, originally painted on a wall in the ballroom of the Palazzo Labia, Venice, is drawn from Pliny the Elder's Natural History which tells of a wager between Mark Antony, the Roman Consul in Egypt and Cleopatra: who could put on the more extravagant feast? Cleopatra outwits Anthony and thus wins the wager by dissolving a precious pearl worth 10, 000 sesterces into a cup of vinegar which she then drinks. The names of Hollinghurst, St. Aubyn and Forster have all been utilized to extol the virtues (and perhaps deficiencies) of Cahill's debut - and one can readily see why (Cahill even cheekily includes a minor character named Maurice Forster, a senile former museum director). As I adore all three of these predecessors, perhaps I am Cahill's ideal audience, so let me just say I was enchanted throughout.

The Institution of the Rosary has a grandeur of conception which seems to recall the pomp of the Venetian High Renaissance, of which Tiepolo is perhaps its last representative. Yet, despite the scale of the piece and its extreme foreshortening, Tiepolo never loses control. He painted swiftly, and his bravura brushwork never falters. The eye rises in zig-zag fashion, first encountering one group of figures and then another, before arriving at the central figure of St. Dominic and so to the Madonna and the Christ Child above him on the cloud. The upshot is high drama tempered by a light-hearted Rococo charm and grace of form for which Tiepolo is famous. There is piety here, to be sure, but there is a certain levity too, in all senses of the word: a lightness of body, a lightness of touch and indeed a lightness of being. A sad novel and a poignant one too. A professor in his forties lives a secluded life so living in the city of Cambridge and working ina college seems apt. He is persuaded to move to London and escape the safety of that world and get a job in an art museum in London. This novel showcases how a place can transform you and give you a new outlook on life but also damage you.

Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ The novel starts out in Cambridge, at Peterhouse College where we meet Don, a don, professor, whose speciality is art history and who is currently involved in studying the skies in Tiepolo’s paintings. He lives a fairly secluded life, it’s very safe, sheltered from the exigencies of the world and he likes his routines. He has a room and study, he eats regularly in the refectory with other highfalutin minds from the world of academia and life is acceptable and certainly not challenging in a worldly way.

How to rate an unfinished novel? I recognized good penmanship and the narration was great. But the story is so depressing I dislike it. The foreboding feeling when following Don's lonely life, manipulated by a villainous character, was too strong for me. Don is a naive idiot and I don't want to know more about his life after listening 50%. I was waiting for the love interest but am afraid that will end depressing, too. Basically, it's a whole book of meandering plots and plot holes. No answers are ever given to the questions raised and to be honest no thought to the context of them. Changes made to the monetization of users’ creations and the ability to opt out from your account settings.This is in fact one of those novels where, despite some really strong writing, I felt like the author let the pace slow down a bit too much and often in favour of some really heavy descriptions of places, artists and works of art. Edit: I'm a few months wiser now and I think I understand this book better as well because of it. It's about how life is too short and unpredictable to be so anal about what and how art should be. Art, something so human and sincere, shouldn't just hold grounds on what's beautiful and not. It's about what makes us feel, think and what inspires us. His departure from academia was not entirely by choice but at the times when it seems that someone is pulling the strings that guide him through his new life, there is doubt caused by some event or other. Maybe things aren't orchestrated, it could just be other peoples' ignorance or folly that sets up some of the situations Don finds himself in. The sympathetic descriptions of the people he meets in his new role as a gallery director in London seem always to redeem them. They are as unworldly, in their ways, as Don was himself when he was cocooned by the traditions he has left behind.