The best novel I have read for ages. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read . . . There is so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in’ Stephen Fry How to rate an unfinished novel? I recognized good penmanship and the narration was great. But the story is so depressing I dislike it. The foreboding feeling when following Don's lonely life, manipulated by a villainous character, was too strong for me. Don is a naive idiot and I don't want to know more about his life after listening 50%. I was waiting for the love interest but am afraid that will end depressing, too. His move to London yields even more of these scandals, alongside a slow-burning realisation about his sexuality and about what he has been too oblivious to see along. Don is consumed by the skies of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. What is your relationship with the Venetian master?

The novel starts out in Cambridge, at Peterhouse College where we meet Don, a don, professor, whose speciality is art history and who is currently involved in studying the skies in Tiepolo’s paintings. He lives a fairly secluded life, it’s very safe, sheltered from the exigencies of the world and he likes his routines. He has a room and study, he eats regularly in the refectory with other highfalutin minds from the world of academia and life is acceptable and certainly not challenging in a worldly way. also besides the book not being very fun (which is sad for me but fully understandable if that's not the book's aim) it is also not very sexy. bathhouse scene B+ but it comes too suddenly. it's not a 'simmering closet case sexual awakening' book, but if you're gonna do sad man sexual failure being dumped in it by his unrequited loves, it's weird to combine that with a few elements of simmering closet case sexual awakening that don’t fully come together. Don is writing a book about his abiding love, the 18th-century Rococo painter Giambattista Tiepolo. He spends his time mapping out the symmetry of the skies in Tiepolo’s frescoes, trying to explain that their ‘infinite blue space’ can be ‘dissected, triangulated’ to reveal a ‘precise and beautiful geometry’. Tiepolo has for too long been seen as a mystical painter of ‘sweetness and light’. ‘No more,’ Don imagines the artist saying to him at one point. ‘Show them how classical I am.’Cambridge, 1994. Professor Don Lamb is a revered art historian at the height of his powers, consumed by the book he is writing about the skies of the Venetian master Tiepolo. However, his academic brilliance belies a deep inexperience of life and love.

As it is though, the story was told by a third person omniscient narrator and, even for 1990s standards, I struggled to swallow such naivety. Even less so, when the guy was described as a handsome and intelligent lad. He might not have known who he was or what he really liked but that doesn’t mean people around him also didn’t, if you know what I mean. His departure from academia was not entirely by choice but at the times when it seems that someone is pulling the strings that guide him through his new life, there is doubt caused by some event or other. Maybe things aren't orchestrated, it could just be other peoples' ignorance or folly that sets up some of the situations Don finds himself in. The sympathetic descriptions of the people he meets in his new role as a gallery director in London seem always to redeem them. They are as unworldly, in their ways, as Don was himself when he was cocooned by the traditions he has left behind. This is an absolute masterpiece of a book that I'm not entirely sure I have the words to recommend enough. Tiepolo Blue tells the story of a naive, old-before-his-years Cambridge professor, Don Lamb, whose passion is the Italian artist, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Having lived and worked in a Cambridge college since he was a student Don is unaware of life outside academia and when he suddenly loses his job he gradually loses sight of reality.My deep thanks go to Hodder & Stoughton for an advanced digital copy through Netgalley in exchange for review. This books feels to me like a clever and thoughtful companion piece to Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty', a book I adore, with a similar sense of a sweltering summer, sexual energy, and lingering darkness, but it also takes a trip into unreliability and memory that I found riveting and the best kind of unsettling. slight digression but i would have loved if they'd pressed on don/val's dynamic as former prize student/grad advisor, it would have unmuddied some of the waters behind their dynamic in the present, and also consolidated val's controlling temperament more realistically) The Institution of the Rosary has a grandeur of conception which seems to recall the pomp of the Venetian High Renaissance, of which Tiepolo is perhaps its last representative. Yet, despite the scale of the piece and its extreme foreshortening, Tiepolo never loses control. He painted swiftly, and his bravura brushwork never falters. The eye rises in zig-zag fashion, first encountering one group of figures and then another, before arriving at the central figure of St. Dominic and so to the Madonna and the Christ Child above him on the cloud. The upshot is high drama tempered by a light-hearted Rococo charm and grace of form for which Tiepolo is famous. There is piety here, to be sure, but there is a certain levity too, in all senses of the word: a lightness of body, a lightness of touch and indeed a lightness of being.

James Cahill’s debut novel was a mixed bag for me. I’ve settled on a three-star rating as at times I felt I could’ve given it four, but then again at times perhaps even a two. It is likely that by the time he arrived in Madrid in June 1762 for his last major undertaking, Tiepolo (ably assisted by sons, Domenico and Lorenzo) had become aware that the appetite for panegyric paintings promoting the glorification of kings and nations (not to mention the ennobled more generally) was coming to an end. Tiepolo was nevertheless one of the few European painters still working on such an overpowering scale and Spain was at that time a leading European power. Little wonder, then, that King Charles III would commission him to adorn the throne room in the recently built palace with allegorical depictions of Spain's rule in the Americas and other far flung lands. At 66 years of age, Tiepolo was approaching the end of his life but he proved with his ceiling frescos that, even despite some serious architectural shortcomings, he was still able to produce work of an exceptionally fine quality. This is in fact one of those novels where, despite some really strong writing, I felt like the author let the pace slow down a bit too much and often in favour of some really heavy descriptions of places, artists and works of art. Apollo and the Continents (1752-53), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s ceiling fresco at the Würzburg Residence in Bavaria, Germany. In James Cahill’s debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, art historian Don is captivated by the Venetian master’s skies, which have similarly fascinated the author—in particular, the artist’s use of a distinctive shade of blue

Original: The writing was great, sometimes so good that I felt like I was wearing the skin of the protagonist which I disliked so much. Ejected from his safe yet stultifying academic life, the central character, Don, is an art historian who seems, like the stereotype of his scholarly kind, to be as stunningly naive about life as he is is brilliant in his subject area. There is a seamy and sordid side to Don's new life in the wide world, with descriptions that could have been crudely handled. No spoiler here, but hats off to the author for the way he deftly plumbed the depths of his character's latent sexuality without making me cringe. Changes made to the monetization of users’ creations and the ability to opt out from your account settings. The writing, when talking about Art History, Cahill’s area of expertise, is convincing, even beautiful at times. But when he talks about the London art scene and gay scene, in fact most things out of the realm of classical art, it came across as naive and cliché. Perhaps Cahill is almost as out of his own depth in these worlds as his protagonist?