The highs and lows of human behavior
Bill Ruehlmann
This week both bad news and good revealed in riveting books on the arts:
The bad is provided brilliantly by Kirk Wallace Johnson with his gripping true account “The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century” (Penguin Books, 303 pp., $17).
Wallace on a theft by light-fingered Edwin Rist, in the wee hours at London’s Natural History Museum, having cut through the glass at a window:
“He entered the vault, its hundreds of large white steel cabinets standing in rows like sentries, and got to work. … Quivering beneath his fingertips were a dozen Red-ruffed Fruitcrows, gathered by naturalists and biologists over hundreds of years from the forests and jungles of South America and fastidiously preserved by generations of curators for the benefit of future research. … He unzipped the suitcase and began filling it with the birds, emptying one drawer after another. … He didn’t know exactly how many he’d be able to fit into his suitcase, but he managed 47 of the museum’s 48 male specimens before wheeling his bag on to the next cabinet.
“Down in the security office, the guard was fixated on a small television screen. Engrossed in a soccer match, he hadn’t yet noticed the alarm indicator blinking on a nearby panel.”
But the good is also at close hand with “What Great Paintings Say: 100 Masterpieces in Detail” by Rose-Marie Hagen and Rainer Hagen (Taschen Bibliotheca Universalis, 785 pp., $20). The Hagens on “an early feminist at the end of the Middle Ages”:
“The first woman who was able to support herself and her family as a writer was called Christine de Pizan. She lived in France in an age of transition: the Middle Ages were drawing to a close and the Renaissance was already dawning. Around 1405, Christine was portrayed twice by a miniaturist in one of the illustrations to her Book of the City of Ladies. Christine is seen standing in her study as if in cross-section of a doll’s house, wearing a blue dress and with one hand laid on a manuscript in front of her. She is receiving important guests: three crowned ladies.
“They would have been easy to identify in those days from the items they are carrying: Lady Reason holds a mirror, Lady Rectitude a rule and Lady Justice a measuring cup. The visitors command the authoress to fight discrimination against women. She is to write a book, as a stronghold for her sex: ‘Take the spade of your intelligence and dig deep… Mix the mortar well in your inkpot and set to on the masonry work with great strokes of your pen.’”
These marvelous books capture the good, the bad and the ugly doings of their eras with entertaining, un-put-downable, edge-of-the-chair panache.