From Kirkus Reviews
The publishers are calling this a novel, but don't believe it. Rocquet is a professor of aesthetics and art history at L`Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, and if anything this book seems more like an Annales-school reconstruction of unrecorded cultural history than anything approaching fiction. Bruegel is a frustrating case for us, so great the master with nearly nothing solidly, writtenly remembered about him--and so Rocquet must fall back on re-creating the atmospheres of 16th- century Europe that the painter fed off, the historical contexts, and descriptions of the paintings themselves. All these fallbacks he utilizes, but in a pedantic, overblown manner (he quotes, at length, straight from one of the few contemporaneous accounts of the time we do have, Guicciardini's Description of All the Lowlands) that never for an instant belies an imaginative author. And the mass of visual descriptions of the paintings and drawings- -which certainly we'd rather see than hear about--doesn't at all satisfy in place of some attempt to dramatize the impulse, psyche, and porousness that would make up a great painter's life. Hypothetical, dry. As a painter-biography-treated-as-fiction, this by comparison makes someone like Irving Stone read like Dickens. --
Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Library Journal
The spiritually wracked and violence-tormented world of the mid-16th-century Lowlands is the locus of this loosely structured and meditative historical novel. Organized around the artistic activities of Peter Bruegel (d.1569), the book devolves into an often predictably poetic gathering of descriptive evocations of the master's work; images of places and scenes that he may have experienced; art, historical, and cultural trivia; and several vivid re-creations of the contemporary political world. In the knowingly anachronistic formulation of the author, Bruegel's art becomes a device for articulating a notion of creativity as personal expression while largely omitting the social context of patronage. The overarching attempt to transmute this material into a more profound metaphorical scheme is both unconvincing and unmoving.
- Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New YorkCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
