Ross King Books In Order

Novels

  1. Domino (1995)
  2. Ex Libris (1998)

Non fiction

  1. Brunelleschi’s Dome (2000)
  2. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (2002)
  3. The Judgement of Paris (2006)
  4. Machiavelli (2007)
  5. Leonardo and the Last Supper (2012)
  6. Mad Enchantment (2016)
  7. The Bookseller of Florence (2021)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Ross King Books Overview

Domino

By the author of The New York Times’s bestsellers Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, Brunelleschi’s Dome, and the award winning novel, Ex Libris.A New York Times ‘Notable Book’, The New York Times Book Review, Holiday Books Issue, Christmas 2003 Ross King’s Domino is a Rabelaisian journey into the hurly burly world of 1770s London. From the drawing rooms of the city s finest to their country manors, from the garret room of George Cautley, a hapless young artist adrift in the gilded world he wants to conquer, to the magnificent opera houses of Milan with their dark secrets, Ross King does more than paint a portrait of a time long gone, but brings it to life with an immediacy that only the finest historical writers can achieve. Domino is the story of the mysterious and beautiful Lady Beauclair, the castrato singer Tristano, the naive Cautley, and Eleanora, mistress and muse. Suspenseful, menacing and laced with black humor, this picaresque tale of art, artists, patrons, and ne er do wells is filled with surprises, victories, and tragedies, told with the pace of a thriller and the richness of a restored old painting.

Ex Libris

The second novel, by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome, and Michelangelo and the Pope s Ceiling is an elaborate historical mystery. Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries. As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. Inchbold s hunt for one of these stolen volumes a lost Hermetic text soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue. His fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

Brunelleschi’s Dome

Ross King has a knack for explaining complicated processes in a manner that is not only lucid but downright intriguing…
. Fascinating.’ Los Angeles Times By all accounts, Filippo Brunelleschi, goldsmith and clockmaker, was an unkempt, cantankerous, and suspicious man even by the generous standards according to which artists were judged in fifteenth century Florence. He also designed and erected a dome over the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore a feat of architectural daring that we continue to marvel at today thus securing himself a place among the most formidable geniuses of the Renaissance. At first denounced as a madman, Brunelleschi literally reinvented the field of architecture amid plagues, wars, and political feuds to raise seventy million pounds of metal, wood, and marble hundreds of feet in the air. Ross King’s captivating narrative brings to life the personalities and intrigue surrounding the twenty eight year long construction of the dome, opening a window onto Florentine life during one of history’s most fascinating eras.

Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling

In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. Four years earlier, at the age of twenty nine, Michelangelo had unveiled his masterful statue of David in Florence; however, he had little experience as a painter, even less working in the delicate medium of fresco, and none with the curved surface of vaults, which dominated the chapel’s ceiling. The temperamental Michelangelo was himself reluctant, and he stormed away from Rome, risking Julius s wrath, only to be persuaded to eventually begin. Michelangelo would spend the next four years laboring over the vast ceiling. He executed hundreds of drawings, many of which are masterpieces in their own right. Contrary to legend, he and his assistants worked standing rather than on their backs, and after his years on the scaffold, Michelangelo suffered a bizarre form of eyestrain that made it impossible for him to read letters unless he held them at arm s length. Nonetheless, he produced one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, about which Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists, wrote, There is no other work to compare with this for excellence, nor could there be. Ross King s fascinating new book tells the story of those four extraordinary years. Battling against ill health, financial difficulties, domestic problems, inadequate knowledge of the art of fresco, and the pope s impatience, Michelangelo created figures depicting the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood so beautiful that, when they were unveiled in 1512, they stunned his onlookers. Modern anatomy has yet to find names for some of the muscles on his nudes, they are painted in such detail. While he worked, Rome teemed around him, its politics and rivalries with other city states and with France at fever pitch, often intruding on his work. From Michelangelo s experiments with the composition of pigment and plaster to his bitter competition with the famed painter Raphael, who was working on the neighboring Papal Apartments, Ross King presents a magnificent tapestry of day to day life on the ingenious Sistine scaffolding and outside in the upheaval of early sixteenth century Rome.

The Judgement of Paris

The fascinating new book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism. If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the Father of Impressionism and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all important annual Paris Salon. Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change: on the streets of Paris, at the new seaside resorts of Boulogne and Trouville, and at the race courses and picnic spots where the new bourgeoisie relaxed. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes described by some as applied by a floor mop but with his subject matter: top hatted white collar workers and their mistresses were not considered suitable subjects for Art . Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world. Full of fantastic tidbits of information such as the use of carrier pigeons and hot air balloons during the siege of Paris, and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet, and Zola, with walk on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged. From the Hardcover edition.

Machiavelli

An elegant new biography in which Ross King re examines Machiavelli‘s legacy. ‘The Prince’, Niccolo Machiavelli‘s handbook on power how to get it and how to keep it has been enormously influential in the centuries since it was written, garnering a heady mixture of admiration, fear and contempt. Its author, born to an established middle class family, was no prince himself. Machiavelli worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence, and enjoyed some small fame in his time as the author of bawdy plays and poems. Upon the Medici’s return to power, however, he found himself summarily dismissed from the government he had served for decades and exiled from the city where he was born. In this discerning new biography, Ross King rescues Machiavelli‘s legacy from caricature, detailing the vibrant political and social context that influenced his thought and underscoring the humanity of one of history’s finest political thinkers. Ross King’s Machiavelli visits fortune tellers, produces wine on his Tuscan estate, travels Europe tirelessly on horseback as a diplomatic envoy, and is a passionate scholar of antiquity but above all, a keen observer of human nature.

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