My Life With Berti Spranger

Pieter Van de Graeff had no idea that his life as an affluent bachelor and art dealer would change overnight with the discovery of a memoir by Bartholomaeus Spranger (1546-1611), a gifted Flemish-born artist known for centuries for his erotic paintings. Pieter's chance encounter with Karolina Sv?tla, a history student in Prague, gradually blends their lives with Spranger's as she translates the manuscript. While meeting in New York for the first major exhibition of his art, Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague (Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 2014-January 2015), two people from dissimilar walks of life strive to understand each other. Spranger's vibrant vignettes from the imperial court of Rudolf II Habsburg, a melancholy ruler isolated in a dazzling world of art, color Pieter and Karo's relationship four hundred years later. The plot explores human passions in which lust, man's oldest obsession, often reigns over affairs of heart and reason. Eva Jana Siroka, an art historian and artist born in Bratislava, Slovakia, received her doctorate at Princeton University. A Renaissance scholar with interest in princely patronage, especially Rudolfine Prague, she has been drawn to Spranger's art for decades. In 2005, she published her novel Maddalena with the artist as a central character. Since 1971 (B.F.A, Hunter College, CUNY), her training in art history and fine arts has merged together with her academic and creative writing, and her art. A professional artist with works in North America and Europe, the author is currently preparing exhibitions in Princeton and Toronto. Inspired by Spranger's original drawings and period prints, she has illustrated the current book and designed its cover. Midwest Book Review Erudite, deftly crafted, and an inherently fascinating read from first page to last, "My Life with Berti Spranger" is one of those novels that will linger in the mind and memory long after it is finished and set back upon the shelf. Certain to be an enduringly popular addition to personal, community and academic library Literary Fiction collections, "My Life with Berti Spranger" is enthusiastically recommended reading. Margaret Lane Reviewer".

By the time David Hanna Shaw is shuttled off to an Ivy League school by his preoccupied mother, the brilliant young linguist is already fluent in a half dozen languages. He's also a quick study in international swindling, deceit, drug smuggling, and currency profiteering. That's what comes from having been dragged across every European capital by a mendacious diplomat father. Then, one day, innately unsettled and anxious, David suddenly disappears from campus. Finally on his own and living only for himself, David heads back to Europe, where he becomes a professional drifter, taking on odd jobs as everything from a brothel handyman in Paris to an occasional courier for a cadre of smugglers in Amsterdam. Swayed by the cash, and a beautiful new lover, David has found his niche – only to be betrayed by his syndicate bosses and left for dead. Now, David's only thoughts are of revenge. But for a smart man like David, murder is too common. The payback he has planned is an intricate game of deception, multiple identities, and psychological torture as ingenious as it is devious. And it should be. After all, David has been taught by a master..

An exciting array of artistic styles awaits the reader in this impressive catalog of 86 selections from the Smith College collection. Smith curators Sievers, Muehlig (who edited the related catalog Masterworks of American Painting and Sculpture from the Smith College Museum of Art, LJ 2/15/00), and Rich have produced an extremely well-researched and illustrated publication. Numerous European and American artists and subjects are represented, arranged chronologically from a late 15th-century Netherlandish silverpoint portrait attributed to Dieric Bouts to the mid-20th-century abstract watercolor "Echo" by American Mark Tobey. Media and degree of finish vary greatly, from the cursory graphite sketch of Jacques-Louis David's dramatic "The Sabine Women" (c.1795-96) to the exquisite contrast between colors and textures seen in James Jacques Joseph Tissot's highly finished gouache and watercolor "Young Woman in a Rocking Chair" (1873). 80 colour & 109 b/w illustrations.

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