EP 13: JOHN T. SPIKE’S volume, DISSIMILAR REVELATIONS: ESSAYS ON NEOLITHIC ART, FRA ANGELICO, VELÁZQUEZ, GOYA, AND CÉZANNE, addresses issues of connoisseurship, sources, influence, thematic sequencing, and attribution. But rather then reducing these activities to formal pursuits, in his hands they become instruments to examine the more profound issues of quality, aesthetics, and an abiding humanism that verges upon the spiritual in man. As we observe him bring a modern sensibility to the analysis of a stone carved more than eight thousand years ago, turn to St. Paul to explicate the Surrealistic implications of a fresco by Fra Angelico, reveal the Caravaggesque underpinnings of Velázquez’s art, and as we marvel at his understanding of Goya’s musical ordering principle in the Disasters of War cycle and watch our author turn a Mattia Preti into a Cézanne right before our eyes, it is not merely art history that we are witnessing but the revelatory power of the human heart.

JOHN T. SPIKE is a noted art historian who received his degrees from Wesleyan and Harvard Universities. Among his books are Fairfield Porter (Abrams, 1992), Masaccio (Abbeville, 1996), and Fra Angelico (Abbeville, 1997). His most recent book, Caravaggio (Abbeville, 2001), is both catalogue raisonné and a tour de force in creative scholarship. He has lived with his family in Florence since 1989.

First edition paperback, September 2003, 64 pp., sewn, bound, and printed in Italy, with a two-color cover, eight black and white illustrations printed on patinated paper, and a black and white photograph of the author on the frontispiece. With an introductory text by Richard Milazzo.

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