“This lavishly illustrated and comprehensive guide celebrates the close relationship between the visual and literary arts in Proust’s masterpiece. With over two hundred beautifully reproduced paintings, drawings and engravings, and accompanying texts drawn from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of Proustians worldwide and a handsome volume in its own right. _
Eric Karpeles has identified and located all of the paintings to which the book makes exact reference. Where only a painter’s name is mentioned, he has chosen a representative work to illustrate the impression that Proust sought to evoke. Botticelli’s angels, Manet’s courtesans, Mantegna’s warriors, and Carpaccio’s saints are here, as well as Monet’s water lilies and Piranesi’s engravings of Rome, while Karpeles’s insightful essay and contextual commentary explain their significance to Proust.
Extensive notes and a comprehensive index of all painters and paintings mentioned in the novel provide an invaluable resource for the reader navigating In Search of Lost Time for the first time or the fifth.” (from the publisher)
Difficult to find right now for less than a hundred dollars or more, but the publisher, Thames and Hudson, has promised delivery of a reprint soon. Should have bought one when I had the chance. She who hesitates...
One excerpt from the book:
"One Sunday, while I was reading in the garden, I was interrupted by Swann, who had come to call upon my parents.
“What are you reading? May I look? Why, it’s Bergotte! Who has been telling you about him?”
I said it was Bloch.
“Oh, yes, that boy I saw here once, who looks so like the Bellini portrait of Mahomet II. It’s an astonishing likeness; he has the same arched eyebrows and hooked nose and prominent cheekbones. When he has a little beard he’ll be Mahomet himself.”
...Swann felt a very cordial sympathy with the sultan Mahomet II whose portrait by Bellini he admired, who, on finding he had fallen madly in love with one of his wives, stabbed her to death in order, as his Venetian biographer artlessly relates, to recover his peace of mind." - Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way)