Ejected from his safe yet stultifying academic life, the central character, Don, is an art historian who seems, like the stereotype of his scholarly kind, to be as stunningly naive about life as he is is brilliant in his subject area. This is in fact one of those novels where, despite some really strong writing, I felt like the author let the pace slow down a bit too much and often in favour of some really heavy descriptions of places, artists and works of art. There is some debate as to when this fresco was painted, but in all likelihood, it was undertaken between 1716-19. It adorns the ceiling of the Parish Church of Biadene, near Treviso, Italy and shows the Virgin bound for Heaven borne on a cloud, flanked by a number of angels and putti. Basically, it's a whole book of meandering plots and plot holes. No answers are ever given to the questions raised and to be honest no thought to the context of them.

A sad novel and a poignant one too. A professor in his forties lives a secluded life so living in the city of Cambridge and working ina college seems apt. He is persuaded to move to London and escape the safety of that world and get a job in an art museum in London. This novel showcases how a place can transform you and give you a new outlook on life but also damage you. slight digression but i would have loved if they'd pressed on don/val's dynamic as former prize student/grad advisor, it would have unmuddied some of the waters behind their dynamic in the present, and also consolidated val's controlling temperament more realistically) Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don’s turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life.The sex scenes were good and quite unforgettable, but all the twists and turns and the ending really didn’t work for me, I’m afraid. I found the characters unbelievable too, was Don that stupid that he couldn't see he was being played the whole time? Was he so wrapped up in Cambridge life that he had no idea what AIDS was? In this, the third of four paintings for a room in the Venetian residence of the Conaro family, we find Tiepolo at the height of his powers. Inspired by Toquato Tasso's masterpiece, La Gerusalemme Liberata, it shows a reluctant Rinaldo taking his leave of the Saracen sorceress, Armida, with whom he has been dallying in an enchanted garden. He is being cajoled by friends, and fellow Crusaders, Charles and Ubaldi. Charles rests one hand on Rinaldo's shoulder and with the other points east to the Holy Land. Ubaldi presents him with a shield to remind him of his responsibilities to the Crusade. A ship awaits them at the right centre of the frame, leaving one in little doubt as to how the story must end. Armida tries to change his mind, even going so far as to stretch her leg provocatively to him, but her enticements are in vain. The Glory of Spain is a brilliant fusion of elements drawn from his previous work including decorative features from his time in residence at the Würzburg and his frescoes at the spectacular Villa Pisani in Stra (situated on the canal linking Venice and Padua). Tiepolo had in fact completed the oil sketches for The Glory of Spain before leaving Venice. However, on arrival at the palace, Tiepolo was faced with the problem of decorating a throne room with inadequate natural light sources. His chromatic oil sketches could not therefore be fully realized. There is then a degree of imposed improvisation in the way Tiepolo, to compensate for the relatively subdued chromatic treatment, created his largest ever empty expanse of sky. Tiepolo left enough room in his painting to let the eye of the spectator fill in the blanks; allowing them in effect to bring their own interpretations to the scene. It is this aspect of his method perhaps that would exert such a profound influence on the likes of Fragonard, Delacroix and Goya all of whom sought to use art to invoke the imagination of the spectator through open space.

Don is writing a book about his abiding love, the 18th-century Rococo painter Giambattista Tiepolo. He spends his time mapping out the symmetry of the skies in Tiepolo’s frescoes, trying to explain that their ‘infinite blue space’ can be ‘dissected, triangulated’ to reveal a ‘precise and beautiful geometry’. Tiepolo has for too long been seen as a mystical painter of ‘sweetness and light’. ‘No more,’ Don imagines the artist saying to him at one point. ‘Show them how classical I am.’ As for setting, it’s a fascinating mix of worlds where you start in academia and end up in the art world and Soho. Don is an out of touch and rather pompous academic who hasn’t a clue about the real world. I read how he started in Cambridge and ended up in London and Soho at that. A story that was painfully fascinating in so many ways.

Don scans the faces that are turned in unison towards him […]. “I’m an art historian,” he says. “A professor." Meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge' Michael Donkor, Guardian There is something terrifying and lurking underneath this book, much like the art he spends all day observing. Apollo and the Continents (1752-53), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco at the Würzburg Residence in Bavaria, Germany. In James Cahill’s debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, art historian Don is captivated by the Venetian master’s skies, which have similarly fascinated the author—in particular, the artist’s use of a distinctive shade of blue It's the kind of "beautifully written" that inspires you to write your own things. You can definitely feel the academic sentence, which is not something I dislike.

Don sees the world through an art historian’s eyes, and at one point the enigmatic young artist, Ben, says to him: “It’s possible to be too discriminating… You stop seeing the thing for what it is.” In writing the book, did you have to consciously stop thinking as an academic and start thinking as a novelist?

Don Lamb, distinguished professor of art history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and the protagonist of Tiepolo Blue, is only forty-three, but while reading the novel I had to keep reminding myself of that fact. The professor is fusty beyond his years: he sees himself as a noble defender of the classical tradition, a crusader against those academics who concern themselves with the ‘fashionable irrelevances’ of ‘society, politics or psychology’ rather than ‘the fundamental things: proportion, light, balance’. There is no shortage of public figures expressing similar views nowadays, but James Cahill has chosen to set his arresting debut novel not in the midst of today’s so-called culture wars but in the 1990s, with the influence of ‘that dreadful man Jacques Derrida’ fresh in the memory and the term ‘political correctness’ newly in vogue.