A month in Siena

Title:

A month in Siena

Author:

Matar, Hisham, 1970- author.

Personal Author:

Matar, Hisham, 1970- author.

ISBN:

9780593129135

Edition:

First U.S. edition.

Physical Description:

130 pages : color illustrations ; 21 cm

Contents:

Duccio's door -- The shape of a room -- A landing place -- David and Goliath -- Armor, what armor? -- The bench -- Evidence -- The museum guards -- The blue ribbon -- Taking a seat -- The problem with faith -- The fire -- Il bagno turco -- The angel's predicament -- Paradise.

Abstract:

"After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists whom he had admired throughout his life, such as Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he has had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Complete with gorgeous full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in Matar's life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with the city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape--current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude--and shed further light on the present world around us"-- Provided by publisher.

Personal Subject:

Matar, Hisham, 1970-

Matar, Hisham, 1970--Travel-Italy-Siena.

Subject Term:

Art -- Psychology.

Authors, American -- Biography.

Painting, Italian -- Italy -- Siena.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Main Library	Book	823.92 M425 X	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	823.92 M425 X	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	823.92 M425 X	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	823.92 M425 X	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND EVENING STANDARD

After finishing his powerful memoir The Return , Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he'd had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.

Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer's life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape--current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude--and shed further light on the present world around us.

Praise for A Month in Siena

"As exquisitely structured as The Return , driven by desire, yearning, loss, illuminated by the kindness of strangers. A Month in Siena is a triumph." --Peter Carey

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

A quiet meditation on art and life.Matar's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, The Return (2016), was about his Libyan father who was kidnapped in Cairo and taken back, imprisoned, and "gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish." His father's presence reverberates throughout this thoughtful, sensitive extended essay about the author's visit to Siena, where he ruminates and reflects on paintings, faith, love, and his wife, Diana. Matar focuses on the 13th- to 15th-century Sienese School of paintings which "stood alone, neither Byzantine nor of the Renaissance, an anomaly between chapters, like the orchestra tuning its strings in the interval," but he discusses others as well. First, he explores the town, "as intimate as a locket you could wear around your neck and yet as complex as a maze." Day or night, the "city seemed to be the one determining the pace and direction of my walks." In the Palazzo Pubblico, Matar scrutinized a series of frescos the "size of a tennis court" painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. As the author writes, his Allegory of Good Government is a "hymn to justice." Matar astutely describes it in great detail, as he does with all the paintings he viewed. When one is in a despondent mood, paintings, Matar writes, seem to "articulate a feeling of hope." He also visited a vast cemetery, a "glimpse [of] death's endless appetite." Over the month, he talked with a variety of Sienese people, including a Jordanian man whom he befriended. One by one, paintings flow by: Caravaggio's "curiously tragic" David With the Head of Goliath, Duccio di Buoninsegna's "epic altarpiece," Maest. Mounted onto a cart in 1311, it was paraded through Siena. Along the way, Matar also ponders the metaphysics of rooms and offers a luminous, historical assessment of the Black Death.A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.