Leonard Barkan

This book is beautifully put together and well-printed. It looks at loose drawings of Michaelangelo -- really sheets of sketches, not generally finished work -- and theorizes on the relationship between these sketches and the marginal notes written on the same pieces of paper. In general, it is an interesting idea, and well-researched and presented, but it seems a little thin to hold one's interest over the length of an entire book. More for specialists and academics, I think. It does provide a look at work that you wouldn't see otherwise.… (meer)

"Poets' voices. I had come to feel, were too easy to hear, which, oddly enough, meant that their voices were being drowned out by too many professors -- my colleagues -- speaking on their behalf. I came to Rome to hear voices hoarse from much longer silence, the voices of material objects, statues of marble and bronze that had lived the public and private life of ancient Rome," (pp 35-36)

This is a memoir of voices, both that of the author and that of the antiquities and that of the Renaissance as well as writers and poets, like Shakespeare. All the voices come together to form the story of a year spent in Rome. But there are also the tastes, for this is as much a culinary journey as an aesthetic travelogue. The combination may prove too much for some readers, but I was at home with the lonely man, Leonard Barkan, at the center and his voices and tastes and experiences were seldom less than interesting. His passions suggested new ideas and thinkers to me and presented his take on those with whom I was already acquainted. All of this within a travelogue with fragments of Italy presented -- fragments and images of places that I enjoyed having shared the author's erudite and humorous views from his year in Rome.… (meer)