Rendez-Vous with Art (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780500239247)

Beginning with a fragment of yellow jasper--all that is left of the face of an Egyptian woman who lived 3,500 years ago--this book confronts the elusive questions: how, and why, do we look at art?

Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford talked in art galleries or churches or their own homes, and this book is structured around their journeys. But whether they were in the Louvre or the Prado, the Mauritshuis of the Palazzo Pitti, they reveal the pleasures of truly looking.

De Montebello shares the sense of excitement recorded by Goethe in his autobiography--"akin to the emotion experienced on entering a House of God"--but also reflects on why these secular temples might nevertheless be the "worst possible places to look at art." But in the end both men convey, with subtlety and brilliance, the delights and significance of their subject matter and some of the intense creations of human beings throughout our long history.

Author: Philippe de Montebello, Martin Gayford
ISBN-10: 050023924X
ISBN-13: 9780500239247
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Language: English
Published: 09/16/2014
Pages: 248
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/14/2014
Booklist 09/15/2014 pg. 23
Library Journal 10/01/2014 pg. 80
New York Times Book Review 12/14/2014 pg. 46
Choice 04/01/2015 pg. 1303
New York Review of Books 06/25/2015 pg. 46