In the Communist world of my childhood, when dolls were expensive and television only a dream, books were cheap and plentiful. One after another, I read the great European authors from Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Alberto Moravia to Selma Lagerlof. My taste was broad. Fiction or non-fiction. If it was printed, I considered reading it. Because many of the books were illustrated, this format felt natural. That is how I created my illustrated novel Maddalena.
After I emigrated to the United States with my family, I began reading English-language authors, but not always did I return from the library with a novel. History was my beloved subject, because of the long, troubled past of my native country. Bratislava, where I was born and now the capital of Slovakia, was named only at the end of World War I. Having served as the capital of Hungary, when the Turkish forces pushed close to the border of the Habsburg empire for some 250 years, the city was known only by the German and Hungarian names Pressburg and Poszonyi. As far as I can remember, I was hungry for anything that I could learn about the family whose growing power shaped the lives of my ancestors for centuries.
After graduating from Hunter College with a B.F.A. and two majors, art and art history, I earned my first master’s degree in art history from Hunter, when I wrote my thesis on the drawings of an Italian Renaissance artist Perino del Vaga. That was when I began to mature as a serious artist, by studying the Old Masters and learning from them.
The rest is history. Well almost. My doctoral degree at Princeton became seriously threatened when my entire research material was stolen from our family car in Torino, Italy, and never recovered. I’d rather forget those years and the struggle to retrace the material collected when laptops and cell phones were things of the future.
Fast forward to late 2014 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague introduced a master who had been labeled for too long only as a painter of erotica. Spranger was also a love of my art historical life, since Prague, the brief capital of the Habsburg empire, was also the capital of my native country. At Princeton, I almost wrote my dissertation on his drawings and prints.
With this important exhibit, I knew it was time for the sequel to Maddalena. In two months, the first draft of My Life with Berti Spranger was born. The rest was hard work, and also some fun, producing copies after the great master’s authentic drawings. Enjoy the story of the rich art merchant who found Spranger’s memoir, and the women in their lives!
For anyone looking ahead, the plot of the next sequel has already congealed, forwarding the story to Baroque Rome and Queen Christina of Sweden, and back to Pieter and Karo. The art historian and author in me can’t stop thinking about it.