It is also in the subtlety of expression and gesture as well as in trompe l'oeil virtuosity that Tiepolo shows his hand. Probably wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't so vastly and clunkily overwritten, you can tell Cahill comes from the world of academia. I was gripped by the way this story unravels to show us the life of Don Lamb, a professor at Cambridge who is obsessed with the artwork of Tiepolo, and whose various disgraces and scandals seem to layer as he progresses through life. This, then, is an electric new novel written by an author skilled in the evocation of vertiginous, heightened emotion. James Cahill's first novel, drawn from close observation, tells a gripping tale of the worlds of traditional academia and art history pitted against those of contemporary art, each failing horribly to understand the other.

So, the novel talks about contemporary art, but it’s not art now—it belongs to a specific moment in time that I don’t think could be repeated.Don caught the eye of Valentine Black, two decades his senior, on his first day as an undergraduate. Tiepolo Blue tells the story of a naive, old-before-his-years Cambridge professor, Don Lamb, whose passion is the Italian artist, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

There is some debate as to when this fresco was painted, but in all likelihood, it was undertaken between 1716-19. The prose is fluid and precise but the tone equivocal, bathos merging into pathos, tragedy into farce and back again. 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.Until the appearance of a contemporary art installation on the lawns of Peterhouse offend him deeply and he becomes utterly lost. Mengs took an instant dislike to Tiepolo and became intensely jealous, fearing a loss of the King's favor. Our main character, Don, is truly just lamentable, he doesn't have a single positive aspect to his personality. It is not a masterpiece by any means, but it is an important painting, for it shows that Tiepolo did not, as it were, spring fully armed from the thigh of Zeus like Athena.

Also, we’re to believe that Dom, the protagonist, has led a life at Cambridge University completed sheltered from the outside world, but can it have really been be so sheltered that he’s not even heard about the AIDS pandemic by the mid 90s? Changes made to the monetization of users’ creations and the ability to opt out from your account settings. There’s a sadness about such narrow, unlived lives in which sexuality is barely acknowledged, kept under wraps or portrayed in an exaggerated self-hating manner, made all the more poignant by its comic depiction. I'm going to be lazy and just refer those interested to the incisive Guardian review below, but let me just end by saying this is one of the most beautifully bound volumes I've seen in recent years - not only the gorgeous gold embossed cover, but also full color endpapers of one of the titular artist's masterpieces.A collaboration between Tiepolo and that master of illusionistic architectural painting Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna (with whom Tiepolo worked for some forty years) The Banquet of Anthony and Cleopatra is a fine example of what happens when Baroque and Rococo merge. Occasionally, I wondered if Ben was rendered as sufficiently charismatic to justify Don’s attentions and ardour. James Cahill's Tiepolo Blue tells the tale of a fusty ferociously fusty art historian whose academic career is upended by a ferociously unbeautiful sculpture. Indeed, the history of Western art tends to present Tiepolo as the last of the truly great Italian masters. 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.

Historian Adriano Mariuz observes that "The Belle Époque rediscovered Tiepolo and made him its own, seeing him above all as a brilliant decorator and the creator of a kind of beauty suffused with sensuality. But his epiphany is also a moment of self-reckoning, as his oldest friendship – and his own unexamined past – are revealed to him in a devastating new light. Two putti draw back the gilded curtains as if opening a play or an opera with the resulting negative space serving as a proscenium through which to view the nuptials of the Emperor.The focus of Tiepolo Blue and the best part of it is the character of Don Lamb, a 43-year-old art historian at Peterhouse, Cambridge in the mid-1990s, who has a brilliant academic brain and a boarded-up heart; he’s obviously gay, but has long since locked himself up in a chastity belt and thrown away the key.