Peacock & Vine:
On William Morris
and Mariano Fortuny
by A.S. Byatt
“If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history.” ― A.S. Byatt, Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny
It would be wonderful to be an artist whose life and work flowed together seamlessly, like water in a river, because your existence would be so complete. Peacock and Vine is a brief but frequently engrossing meditation on the lives of William Morris (1834–1896) and Mariano Fortuny (1871–1949), two people who succeeded in achieving this goal.
I'm still waiting for my invitation to visit Venice, but in the meantime, I can luxuriate in the prose and illustrations of Ms. Byatt's fine art biography. With a mix of criticism and history, she takes the familiar, William Morris, and the less familiar, Mariano Fortuny, and highlights their lives and work with the interpolation of beautiful illustrations. This was a pleasingly informative short excursion into the world of art. The quotes from Ruskin and Proust were an added delight.
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