Daisy Dunn
Better Than Staying at Home
The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations
By Martin Gayford
Thames & Hudson 192pp £16.95 order from our bookshop
The Venetian Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto never married. After decades of scrabbling for commissions in northern Italy, he died an oblate, reflecting mournfully in his will that he had earned less through his art than he had spent. His pictures are full of the things he was unable to enjoy for himself: jewels, silks, ermine, flesh. He painted them lovingly, as if he knew that this was the closest he would ever come to holding them in his own hands. Examine his portraits closely and you’ll appreciate beneath the finery what Martin Gayford calls ‘the carnal reality of the people they depict’. They may be enveloped in the thickest folds of velvet or hung with the heaviest strings of pearls, but Lotto’s sitters look as vital and sentient as you or me.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress