The Brilliant History of Color in Art by Victoria Finlay
The Boston Raphael* by Belinda Rathbone
A few things were happening in my life that kept my nose out of books during this time, I was working about 60 hours a week and we’d moved cross country from Indiana to Boston for my husband’s career. Another factor is that I developed a severe case of tinnitus (ringing in my ears) due to a medication side effect. Never having true silence impacts my ability to concentrate, and I prefer having background noise to mask the screeching tinnitus which also distracts when reading.
The Brilliant History of Color in Art is brilliant. I picked it up on a whim at the library and didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. It’s one part travelog and one part natural history of pigments. I have recommended it to quite a few people when I see it in the books section of museum gift shops. I need to pick up another book on a similar subject by the same author, but I haven’t yet.
The Boston Raphael* by Belinda Rathbone is the story of how the Boston Museum of Fine Arts acquired a Raphael painting, but it’s written by the then-curator’s daughter and the first part is a bit of family history and navel-gazing about museum politics and Boston high society, so I never got through all of that chaff to get to the good parts where they talk about the Raphael.