Brunelleschi: The Renaissance Architect Filippo Brunelleschi

University College, London Dept: Universally well-reviewed, Leonardo is King s third portrait of Renaissance genius, following books on Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. He won his first GG award for The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism , described by the New York Times in a now-typical commendation as a tour de force of complex narrative. Four years later King turned his attention to his native country with Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven , according to Globe and Mail. But to hear the author describe it, his ascent has been anything but smooth, more a series of accidents, one detour after another, than the deliberate master plan to dominate popular art history. He spent 14 years studying English literature, beginning at the University of Regina and ending with a postdoctoral fellowship at University College, London, preparing for an academic career that never happened. He then turned to novels, drawing on his expertise in 17th- and 18th-century literature. He married an Englishwoman, becoming an accidental immigrant to her country, where he still lives. But it was while planning a novel on the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi that King undertook what he calls my major career detour moving from fiction into non-fiction and becoming an art historian and no Canadian writer before him has so thoroughly mastered the business of selling high-toned non-fiction to a mass audience, but King makes it seem easy. His ascent appears to have been as smooth as his prose, beginning in a two-room schoolhouse in rural Saskatchewan and elevating him to the position he enjoys today as a world-leading explicator of art history. With every new book, King takes the same approach, sifting through familiar stories of great artists to find overlooked gems of information and context, polishing them to a fine lustre and stringing them into bright garlands as artful as the subjects he treats. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.