A Q & A With Art Historian and Historical Fiction Author Laura Morelli

Laura Morelli's assistant, Jacqueline M. Howard, suggested that I do a Q&A on Laura Morelli's two 2020 releases.  I have posted a review of  The Giant on this blog here .  This is a book dealing with Michelangelo's David. It's still the most viewed post of 2020 on this blog.  I also posted a review of  The Night Portrait on Flying High Reviews here .  This second 2020 novel focuses on the creation of Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady With An Ermine and its later history during WWII.  After posting these reviews, I sent questions to Laura Morelli relating to each of these books.  Today she responded.  Because one of these reviews appeared on each of my blogs, I decided that the Q&A should be posted on both of them.   

The Q&A With Laura Morelli

Questions Related to The Giant

 

Question 1) In The Giant Michelangelo tells Jacopo that the Signorina of Florence wanted him to build a bronze replica of the David.  I did a search for bronze replica of Michelangelo's David and found that the bronze replica standing in Florence was designed by the architect Guiseppe Poggi in the 1860's.  I discovered that it was part of a much larger project devoted to Michelangelo called the Piazzale Michelangelo.  Wikipedia says that Florence was doing urban renewal at the time.  Can you tell us something about the art history aspect of Piazzale Michelangelo?  

LAURA MORELLI : 

 

        In THE GIANT, the bronze replica of the DAVID refers to a sculpture—now lost—that Michelangelo made for Duke Pierre de Rohan, a French nobleman in the royal circle. De Rohan had been smitten by Donatello’s DAVID, which he had seen in Florence in 1494, and he wanted Michelangelo to make a copy of it for him. Michelangelo tried to wave off the commission; he probably thought it insulting to copy another man’s work, especially when he was on the verge of finishing his own DAVID which, in one fell swoop, would make Donatello’s version seem an antiquated oddity. But Gonfaloniere Soderini pressed Michelangelo to do it.  

 

 De Rohan was a favorite of the French king and an avid art collector; nobles around Europe showered de Rohan with artistic treasures to gain favor with the French court. The Florentines, eager to gain the French king’s support in the wake of their own political upheavals, had already secured seven marble and two bronze statues for de Rohan. Now he was keen to have a copy of Donatello’s DAVID with the head of Goliath at the youth’s feet. Soderini didn’t want to deny him, so he pressed Michelangelo to take on the job.

 

  Michelangelo reluctantly agreed, and made a drawing that still exists. One year later the bronze sculpture was cast.  Ironically, by the time the sculpture was completed, the duke de Rohan had already fallen from the French king’s favor, and the sculpture passed into the hands of Florimond Robertet, who displayed it in his chateau in Bury. Later it moved to the castle of Villeroy, then seems to have disappeared forever. We will never know if it bore any resemblance to the colossal DAVID that was about to take Florence by storm.

 

The bronze replica of Michelangelo’s DAVID you refer to in the Piazzale Michelangelo was part of a 19th-century urban renewal plan in Florence. 

 

 

Question 2)  Your Master Class on The Giant revealed that Michelangelo wanted to do another giant marble sculpture in which he got to select his own marble.   Are there varieties of marble that are considered more suitable for sculpture, or did Michelangelo just want more control of his material?

 

LAURA MORELLI:

 

Michelangelo was intimately familiar with the marble quarries near Carrara, in Tuscany, where he traveled to select raw materials for his famous Pietà and other sculptures. Every piece of Carrara marble was special and specific to each project. The block used for Michelangelo’s famous David had languished in the work yard of Florence cathedral for forty years before he tackled it. The master wrote that he dreamt of one day carving another colossus like the David—this time using an entire mountain of marble, a kind of Renaissance Mount Rushmore—that would overlook the sea.

Question 3) I read an article about the frequency of earthquakes in Italy during the 21st century and saw various items online about the vulnerability of Michelangelo's David to earthquakes due to weak ankles that could cause it to collapse.  Has a conservator ever been hired to repair those ankles?  There was also a 2014 proposal that the David be given an anti-seismic pedestal.  Has this ever happened?

 LAURA MORELLI:

 

You can read some of the efforts to make the DAVID earthquake-proof here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/florence-acts-to-ensure-michelangelos-david-remains-sure-footed-after-recent-earthquakes

Question 4) Will there be a sequel to The Giant devoted to the Sistine Chapel ceiling? 

 

LAURA MORELLI:

 

Not at the moment, but in the future… Who knows? :)

Questions Related to The Night Portrait

Question 1)  Did Italian Renaissance artists other than Leonardo Da Vinci use their fingers for painting?  Was Leonardo influenced by someone else who used this technique or was it a practice that was unique to him?

LAURA MORELLI:

 

I don’t believe this was unique to Leonardo da Vinci, though much has been made of Leonardo's fingerprints, which have been discovered on his paintings and drawings. For example: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/thumbprint-of-leonardo-da-vinci-discovered-on-drawing 

Question 2) The Night Portrait point of view character Dominic wonders how a solvent cleans a painting without damaging the paint.  That's a question that I'd like answered myself.

 

 LAURA MORELLI:

 

Professional conservators have many tools in their repertory to deal with things like this. However, cleaning an old master painting with solvent is extremely tricky! It's possible to remove overpainting from later centuries to reveal an artist’s original pigments underneath.

Question 3)  Why did you decide that Lucrezia Crivelli was the sitter for La Belle Ferroniere and that she resembled Cecilia very closely even though they were unrelated? There are those that argue that La Belle Ferroniere is a second portrait of Cecilia. Da Vinci could have created it from his sketches of Cecilia because she was no longer at Ludivico Sforza's court and was therefore unavailable.  Her unavailability could explain why the Cecilia in La Belle Ferroniere  isn't completely identical to the Cecilia depicted in Lady With An Ermine.  Do you think this is at all likely?

 

LAURA MORELLI:

The identity of the woman in this beautiful portrait--the so-called Belle Ferronnière--remains contested. We know Leonardo completed the picture during his tenure at the ducal court of Milan. This portrait bears some things in common with the Lady with the Ermine; that’s for certain. Many art historians believe the portrait represents Lucrezia Crivelli, who became Ludovico Sforza’s mistress after Cecilia Gallerani exited the ducal palace. Other scholars think it represents Beatrice d’Este, Ludovico’s bride who died in childbirth at 21.

Question 4)  In the Leonardo's Portraits class that you did for those of us who pre-ordered The Night Portrait, you said that Raffaelo Sanzie known as Raphael was influenced by Da Vinci.  What aspects of Raphael's painting style show this influence?

 LAURA MORELLI:

 

When young Raffaello Sanzio arrives in Florence for the first time around 1504, we see him immediately experimenting with the three-quarter pose familiar to us now in the Mona Lisa, as well as other stylistic features of Florentine painting.

At that time, Leonardo da Vinci was considered an accomplished older master who freely shared his ideas and work with younger painters. I have no doubt that Raphael studied Leonardo’s work.

Laura Morelli, Ph.D. Art Historian | Historical Novelist lauramorelli.com Thank you, Laura Morelli.  I appreciate your insights and your wonderful novels.

Vox: A Dystopia To Defend Men Against "Dangerous" Women

 If I hadn't won Vox by Christina Dalcher in a Goodreads giveaway, I probably wouldn't have read it at all. I really don't enjoy reading dystopias.  This is especially true during a pandemic when I'm already depressed enough, thank you. 

So why did I enter the giveaway?  I thought that it might deal with themes that are of interest to feminists, and honestly I didn't think I'd win a copy.  The odds for entering giveaways are never in your favor.  If I won, it might conceivably make for a provocative review, and if I didn't it wouldn't be a big loss for me. Believe me, if I am determined to read a book I wouldn't rely on a giveaway as my supplier.  In this case, I wasn't feeling that motivated. 

Once I read reviews from people I respect who weren't fans of Vox, I definitely wasn't in a hurry to read it.  So I waited until it reached the top of my giveaway pile.  This is a 2018 book that I won in 2019. I have five more books that I won from Goodreads in 2019 all of which I am looking forward to reading, as opposed to Vox which I am only reviewing out of a sense of obligation to Goodreads.

I'm blogging about this book because I have more to say about it than "Not my cup of tea."

                                   

       

In the Vox patriarchal dystopia women were limited to a hundred words a day.  This implied that these men thought that if women had complete freedom of expression, they would say all these dangerous feminist things.  Based on what I saw of the women in this novel, I sincerely doubt it.

 Jean, the protagonist, didn't think much of her husband because she didn't think he was capable of violence.  The premise is that a man should violently defend "his" woman.  There are two problems for feminists there.   A man who is capable of violence in defense of a woman, might very well be violent toward a woman.  This isn't necessarily true.  A man might be very controlled in his use of violence.  Yet my feeling is that a man who has shown himself capable of violence is like a loaded gun.  He isn't safe.  He might go off on you.   A woman is better off trusting a man who uses his wits rather than his fists.   The other problem is that the man who violently protects a woman probably believes that a woman is his property.  Jean had a friend who had been imprisoned by the dystopian authorities for being "recalcitrant".  This was presumably an even more dangerous feminist than most women.  Yet this friend also believed that a man should violently defend "his" woman.  I suspect that none of these women were ever what I would call a feminist.  What was the U.S. like before the dystopians took over?  Was it more similar to the 1950's that the dystopians preferred than most readers might imagine?

I agree with those reviewers who thought that the resolution was both too easy and too predictable.   I didn't agree with reviewers who argued that monogamy is so paramount that a husband that Jean didn't love was owed more than the man she always had loved.  This prioritizing of monogamy is equivalent to the belief that a woman is a man's property that I was disputing in the previous paragraph.   Yet it is a very prevalent idea.  Perhaps our world is closer to the dystopia described in Vox than most readers realize.

                                              

Censorettes: A Novel About Women Reading Mail During WWII on Bermuda

Although I have read so much fiction dealing with WWII, I can still encounter a WWII novel taking place in an unusual setting such as the island of Bermuda in Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank.  I received a digital review copy of Frank's book from publicist Wiley Saichek. 

 

                                   

  When you see the words "female spies", readers probably imagine activities that would be somewhat more glamorous than sitting in an office working their way through stacks of correspondence.  The Censorettes were women who actually were assigned by British Intelligence to read mail sent between European and North American residents during WWII.  I assumed that locating the operation in Bermuda was a convenient means of intercepting potentially dangerous letters before they reached their recipients.

Protagonist Lucy Barrett's knowledge of multiple European languages made her quite useful in her position, but much of this novel centers on relationships.  This is the dramatic heart of the book. We learn about Lucy's friendships with other Censorettes, her family history and her social interactions with men. 

One of the characters is murdered, but little space is devoted to this crime.   As a mystery fan, I would have liked to have seen some investigation, but there apparently wasn't any.  So I would categorize this book as non-genre historical fiction rather than a mystery or a crime thriller.

Censorettes is not for everyone.  I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in seeing WWII from an unusual angle, and who have some tolerance for novels whose pace is rather leisurely.   

I appreciated learning about the author's sources in the Notes and Acknowledgments.  I consider historical accuracy one of this book's strengths.

                                      

 

 

                                  

Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: An Anthology Edited by Jeffery Deaver

 I thought that I rarely posted about short story anthologies for this blog.  While it's true that this is the first one that I've reviewed here in 2020, I discovered that I'd posted a total of 13 fiction anthology reviews in this blog's history.  The last one was a review of an anthology whose authors were from nations that had been banned from the U.S. in 2017 called Banthology.  That post appeared in 2018 here.

Nothing Good Happens After Midnight is a more traditional type of anthology.  It's a collection of mystery stories edited by bestselling author, Jeffery Deaver.   I received a review copy from Suspense Magazine, the publisher of this anthology.  

                                     

 

I generally find that when I read an anthology my reactions to particular stories might be anywhere on the positive to negative scale regardless of the authors' reputations.  So it's not astonishing that  I didn't love all the stories in this one, but I did think that Deaver saved up the best tales for last.   

My personal favorite was the final story,  "ATM" by Jon Land.  It's  a heartwarming modern fairy tale in which a man who never had any luck learns that kindness and generosity pays with the help of a rather extraordinary ATM.

I also really enjoyed the second to last story,  "Tonight is the Night" by Shannon Kirk in which there are serial killers, but there is also a wonderful dog and true love.

To a lesser degree, I liked "The Sixth Decoy" by Paul Komprecos because it centrally involved bird carvings.  I also liked Heather Graham's "Midnight in the Garden of Death" which dealt with ghosts and the historical legacy of a murder as well as a modern serial killer.  There were other stories by authors I'd previously read in this anthology, but Heather Graham's contribution was the only one by a familiar author that I enjoyed.

"Cell Phone Intolerant" by Kevin O'Brien stood out as very unusual, but I also found it disturbing.  Some readers  may like that sort of story. I read mysteries to be intellectually challenged by the whodunit puzzle, not disturbed.

My next read will be a thriller, and I hope I will be less ambivalent about it than I've felt about this anthology.

                              

 

 

 

The Man in Milan: New York Murders Have Italian Connections

 When I read the description of The Man in Milan by Vito Racanelli, I thought that I'd be most interested in Hamilton P. Turner, the African American NYPD detective who's an opera buff.  I am an opera fan myself. In fact, I've previously blogged about Carmen: A Gypsy Geography, a book dealing with the background of the opera Carmen, here.  I also blogged about Killing in C Sharp in which a fictional opera plays a minor role here.  Unfortunately, the opera element in The Man in Milan was nearly non-existent, but I did learn a great deal about relatively recent Italian history as a result of reading this book.  So I'm glad I requested an ARC of this international thriller from publicist Wiley Saichek.

                              

 

I would never have suspected that 2020 killings taking place in New York could have potential links to a plane crash off the coast of Italy that took place in 1980, or to a shadowy 20th century Italian cabal that I'd never previously heard about called Gladio. I'm not providing any links because that would give away too much of the plot.  Though Italian readers may be familiar with these events.  The author makes it all seem very convincing, but The Man in Milan shouldn't be regarded as actual history.  Racanelli is engaging in fictional extrapolation that will delight conspiracy fans everywhere. 

As someone who is interested in women in aviation, I wanted to find out more about a female character's remark that Italian women weren't allowed to be pilots when she was choosing a vocation.  I discovered that  Rosina Ferrario was the first Italian woman to receive a pilot's license in 1913, but she didn't actually have a flying career.

The Italian American NYPD detective, Paul Rossi, who is the main point of view character in The Man in Milan, is fluent in Italian.  His knowledge of the language and Italian culture furnishes readers with more of an insider perspective.  Though I do believe that Rossi's  unpredictable health condition should have sidelined him.  If I had been in charge of the direction of Rossi's police career, I would have consigned him to a desk job. Yet it seems likely that Rossi will continue to play an active role in future investigations if Racanelli publishes any further novels dealing with these characters.

                            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Time Collector: The Past is Touchable

I am continuing to catch up on my Goodreads giveaway wins.  The Time Collector by Gwendolyn Womack was a 2019 win.  The last GR giveaway win that I blogged about was Josephine Baker's Last Dance by Sherry Jones. That post appeared last month on Flying High Reviews here.  Yet normally, I only review GR wins on Goodreads.  The ones that I review at length on one of my blogs are particularly noteworthy.

                                

 

The genre of  The Time Collector could be considered paranormal romance.  Most books in this genre are primarily romances written for romance readers.  This book is primarily paranormal.  It focuses on psychometry, the ability to read the history of an object by touching it.   I am fascinated by this paranormal gift.  A number of the characters in this book are psychometrists including the male protagonist, Roan West.  The female protagonist, Melicent Tilpin, is also a psychometrist, but she is less powerful and less experienced than Roan.  On the other hand, it isn't Melicent who needs to be rescued in this book.  She's entirely capable of rescuing herself.

It was important to me that Roan wasn't just collecting artifacts.  He was returning them to the families of the individuals that had owned them when he could find them.   He didn't believe that European Americans were somehow entitled to all the loot that they or their ancestors had taken.  

There is a spiritual dimension to The Time Collector, but it's not as well developed as the paranormal aspect.  Roan utilizes mudras which are gestures that can be used for a variety purposes in Hinduism and Buddhism.   In the acknowledgements, Womack tells us that her source for mudras was Mudras For Modern Life by Swami Saradananda, who is a female Swami.   I liked researching all the mudras that are mentioned, but Roan's spiritual practices felt like they lacked context.  In isolation they seemed less meaningful to me, but I was glad that they were there.

Gwendolyn Womack has said that she's considering a sequel to The Time Collector.  I hope that there is a sequel.  Psychometry has so much potential.  It opens doors into the individual experiences that are the basis of history.

                             

The Thirty Names of Night: Heartfelt Syrian American Trans Novel

When the publisher e-mailed me about The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar, the summary they provided indicated that there are several themes of interest to me. Prominent characters who are artists were an added inducement. So I accepted a free copy from the publisher via Net Galley and agreed to review it.  

                               

My research on Zeyn Joukhadar allowed me to establish that the story of  the Syrian American trans male protagonist in The Thirty Names of Night is an Own Voices narrative.  The previous novel that I read dealing with Syrian immigrant characters was The Beekeeper of Aleppo written by an author of  Greek Cypriot origin.  I discussed the appropriateness of her choice in my review here.  Yet I feel more certain of the authenticity of this book.

I was very moved by the journey of the protagonist to find his identity.  This seeking is echoed in the search of another trans male  that he discovered in the notebook of a woman artist who was important to his mother.  

At a more fundamental level, The Thirty Names of Night caused me to reflect on the nature of personal histories.  It isn't just about one individual.  It's the story of a family whether it be a genetic family or a chosen one, and the story of a community.  All these lives overlap and gain significance from their connections.  That's what I saw in this book.

I was delighted to see an acknowledgement of the Native peoples on whose land Zeyn Joukhadar wrote.   I've never seen any other U.S. author do that.  

In the end, The Thirty Names of Night is a unique paean to diversity--diversity of gender, diversity of culture and diversity of aspirations.