Venice: the Enchanted Mirror: A Bedside Companion - Couverture souple

Buisine, Alain

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0285637177 ISBN 13 : 9780285637177

Editeur : Souvenir Press Ltd, 2005

Synopsis

This rich and fascinating celebration of Venice presents a series of unconventional impressions of the heart of Venice and its dazzling spectrum of people. With a wealth of eyewitness accounts and comments by its famous visitors, including Joseph Brodsky, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Twain, and Orson Welles, this book is a thrilling evocation of Europe's capital of color. It examines the dark byways of the city's brutal history, the brilliance of Venetian painting, sumptuous architecture and embellishments, many arts-from glass blowing and boatbuilding to velvet-courtesans, fashions, food, music, politics, crumbling ruins and abandoned gardens, the ghetto, eccentrics, and working people.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

For centuries Venice s only ambition has been to surround itself with colour, to express the sensuality, hedonism and ethereal beauty of the a city built on artifice, a city that has willed itself into being despite the constant encroachments of nature. The use of colour dominates artist s view of Venice, from Titian and Canaletto to Turner yet it is the writers who have travelled through Venice that have been most attracted to the shifting colours of the Lagoon and the qualities of light that make Venice seem a spiritual sphere outside the physical world. Alain Buisine defines Venice through colour and gleefully finds that the first treatise on the colours of the rainbow was written in Venice. Quoting extensively from the vast literature Venice has inspired he rediscovers one of the most visited cities in the world, a city that may be in decline, but then it has been in decline for centuries and has the magical power to return to the splendour of its youth nightly. Venetian intellectuals have always been fascinated by colour, and its relationship to love. Over the centuries Venice has created a unique language of colour that artists and writers have come to view as an alternative to reality. Cultured and refined, erudite and startlingly perceptive Alain Buisine is the ideal guide to Venice s alleyways and cemeteries, palaces and churches, but most of all the shade of every writer who has captured Venice s changing atmosphere: Venice is one of those privileged places that prove that life and literature are a single entity.

Biographie de l'auteur

Alain Buisine is a professor at the University of Lille. He is the author of almost twenty books, including titles on Venetian painters, St Francis of Assisi, Verlaine, Proust and Sartre.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Souvenir Press Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2005
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0285637177
• ISBN 13: 9780285637177
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 192
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible