Description
A.S. Byatt on beauty, obsession, and two unlikely kindred spirits. In Peacock and Vine, the great novelist turns to nonfiction for a double portrait: William Morris — poet, craftsman, socialist, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement — and Mariano Fortuny — the Venetian magician of pleated silk and painted lampshades. What connects them? Byatt’s answer is a meditation on why beautiful things matter.
This is Byatt at her most sensuous and learned: part biography, part art history, part personal essay. She follows Morris’s wallpapers and Fortuny’s gowns through museums and memories, finding in both men the same defiant belief that everyday life deserves beauty — and the same melancholy knowledge that it rarely gets it.
For lovers of art, craft, and gorgeous prose. You do not need to know Morris or Fortuny to fall for this book — Byatt will make you care, the way only a great novelist can. Luminous.
From one of Britain’s most celebrated novelists comes a ravishing book about beauty, craft, and two masters of design. Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny is A. S. Byatt’s illuminating double portrait of two textile artists who changed how the world looks.
William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, filled Victorian England with his bold, intricate patterns — pomegranates, acanthus leaves, birds among vines. Decades later in Venice, Mariano Fortuny created luminous printed fabrics and the legendary Delphos gowns, their pleats falling like classical marble.
Byatt traces the threads between them: a shared love of natural motifs, a devotion to craft over mass production, and designs that still dazzle today. Generously illustrated with the artists’ own work, the book opens a window onto the peacock blues, deep greens, and golds that made both men icons of decorative art.
Elegant, personal, and deeply knowledgeable, Peacock & Vine is essential reading for design lovers — and a perfect gift for anyone enchanted by pattern, color, and the handmade.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet