Francis Bass

Reading

Reading Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King whetted my appetite for books about renaissance Florence, so now I’m listening to another book by King and reading The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone.

The book by Ross King is The Bookseller of Florence, which is about the translation, transcription, and physical production of books in 15th-century Florence. Historical printing and bookmaking technologies have also been a fascination of mine recently, so these are two great tastes that etc. Nice listening so far, good narration by James Cameron Stewart.

The Agony and the Ecstasy is a hack job, and it is glorious. The book is intensely researched and over-detailed. It’s brimming with untranslated Italian, though it pauses and rotely translates each new Italian word the first time it appears. It feels like a biography got put through a novelizing machine, and all the footnotes got spliced into the body of the text. Hell yeah! Stone is just rendering, transposing, and he’s good at it, but there’s no point of view, no style, no artistic spirit to it. He is like David, an artist in the studio of Granacci: “David had been well trained in enlarging to scale the individual sections and transferring them to the cartoon itself, which was the dimension of the church panel. This was not creative work, but it took skill.” The book is delivering on exactly what I want: detailed descriptions of historical clothes, historical foods, historical buildings, of the processes and technologies employed for different forms of artwork in renaissance Florence, all mixed evenly with a satisfying dramatic patter. And the book is like 600 pages, so I’m gonna be working my way through this buffet for a while.