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Lippi's Passion/Botticelli's Dream/Da Vinci's Obsession
Publisher
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Gallimard
Parution date
:
EAN
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9782070398942
Description
***La passion Lippi: 25,000 copies sold***
***Le rêve Botticelli: 24,000 copies sold***
***L’obsession Vinci: 26,000 copies sold***
***180,000 trilogy boxed sets sold***
In an imagined but well-documented trilogy of portraits, Sophie Chauveau depicts the lives of three Renaissance painters: Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Lippi’s Passion: Florence, the heart of the Renaissance, 1414. In the back street of a seedy neighborhood, a scruffy boy with bare feet sketches furiously on the ground. The fresco is seen by art patron Cosimo de Medici, who is so impressed with the work that he takes the boy to be raised and educated by the Carmelites. There he falls under the influence of first Masaccio and later Fra Angelico. In his passion to paint, he steals precious pigments from the monastery, but theft is not his only sin. . . . Although he becomes a monk, at night he seeks comfort and inspiration in the brothels of Florence, becoming the secret darling of the whores. He becomes the darling too of the art buyers of Florence and beyond, who will buy his work at any cost. He remains within the walls of the monastery but not within its rules, and he commits the ultimate offense: while drawing a triptych panel of the Virgin Mary, he seduces his young model, by whom he fathers a child. The scandal forces him into exile and temporarily back into the obscurity of his childhood. On his return to Florence, he opens an atelier that is much admired and acquires a very talented student, a certain Sandro Botticelli . . .
In the second book of this trilogy, Boticelli’s Dream, Chauveau continues her depiction of fifteenth-century Florence, this time to follow the life of Botticelli and his introduction of melancholy in art. In the third of the series, Da Vinci’s Obsession, she explores the personality, the many talents, and the sources of Da Vinci’s artistic, philosophical, and scientific obsessions. In each of the fictional accounts, Chauveau illuminates and delights with her vivid descriptions of the painters, their lives, and their art.
Author
Sophie Chauveau : Sophie Chauveau is a novelist and author of essays and a monograph on art as the language of love. She spent four years doing research for this trilogy, which has received critical and public acclaim in France.
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