AP, V, IV, III, & II — RECOMMENDED READING FOR EXTRA CREDIT:
- Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier — Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings. Girl with a Pearl Earring is the story of 16-year-old Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius, even as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil.
- The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier — Paris, 1490. A shrewd French nobleman commissions six lavish tapestries celebrating his rising status at Court. He hires the charismatic, arrogant, sublimely talented Nicolas des Innocents to design them. Nicolas creates havoc among the women in the house — mother and daughter, servant, and lady-in-waiting — before taking his designs north to the Brussels workshop where the tapestries are to be woven. There, master weaver Georges de la Chapelle risks everything he has to finish the tapestries — his finest, most intricate work — on time for his exacting French client. The results change all their lives — lives that have been captured in the tapestries, for those who know where to look. In The Lady and the Unicorn, Tracy Chevalier weaves fact and fiction into a beautiful, timeless, and intriguing literary tapestry — an extraordinary story exquisitely told.
- Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland — A Dutch painting of a young girl, possibly a Vermeer, survives three and a half centuries through loss, flood, anonymity, secrecy, theft, even the Holocaust. This is the story of its sometimes desperate owners whose lives are influenced by its seductive beauty and mystery, and whose defining moments take place in its presence. Despite their unsatisfied longings, their own and others' flaws, the girl in hyacinth blue has the power to generate love in all its human variety. The German-American son of the Nazi who looted it from a Jewish home in Amsterdam in 1942, hides it out of shame for his father's atrocities, loves it with awe and passion, wrestles with moral questions of unlawful ownership and his own responsibilities of penance and restitution, and, like his father, ultimately fails as a human being. The rest of the eight stories which make up this composite novel move back in time to the Renaissance. In each episode, the painting figures in casual affairs, natural catastrophe, flawed marriages, domestic violence, a murder, a hanging, yet in spite of these dreary circumstances, the power of beauty and art elevates the characters in individual, subtle ways.
- Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, Ross King — A national bestseller, "Brunelleschi's Dome" recounts how one genius bent men, materials, and the very forces of nature to engineer the impossible--the construction of a dome over the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in 1418. An ALA Notable Book of the Year. Illustrations & halftones throughout.
- The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism, Ross King — The acclaimed author of "Michaelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" chronicles the decade between two famous exhibitions: the scandalous Salon des Refuss in 1863, and the first Impressionist showing in 1874, set against the dramatic rise and fall of Napoleon III and the Second Empire.
- The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece, Jonathan Harr — Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on a spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as "The Taking of Christ." The fascinating details of the artist Caravaggio's strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages.
- Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, Ross King — Against the warnings of his advisors, in 1508 Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel. This is the story of the ensuing four years - a chronicle of day-to-day life on the scaffolding set against the backdrop of 16th-century Rome. Faced with an array of obstacles including ill health, financial difficulties, domestic problems, limited previous knowledge of the art of fresco, and a bitter rivalry with Raphael, Michelangelo also endured the anxiety of the Pope as he waited impatiently for the project's completion. The astonishing masterpiece that stunned viewers at its unveiling in 1512 was the climactic result.
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