A deeply personal search for meaning in Michelangelo's frescoes-and an impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age.
What do we hope to get out of seeing a famous piece of art? Jeannie Marshall asked that question of herself when she started visiting the Sistine Chapel frescoes. She wanted to understand their meaning and context-but in the process, she also found what she didn't know she was looking for.
All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel tells the story of Marshall's relationship with one of our most cherished artworks. Interwoven with the history of its making and the Rome of today, it's an exploration of the past in the present, the street in the museum, and the way a work of art can both terrify and alchemize the soul. An impassioned defence of the role of art in a fractured age, All Things Move is a quietly sublime meditation on how our lives can be changed by art, if only we learn to look.
"A writer studies a famous work of art and finds herself and her own cultural moment revealed at its heart. Jeannie Marshall lived in Rome for ten years without visiting the Sistine Chapel: she didn't want to have a superficial experience of the frescos, but she wasn't sure how, amidst the crowds of tour groups and the noise of pop culture allusions, she could have anything but. What's more, she wondered what this very old, very Catholic art, created by a man who grew up under the warm Tuscan sun of the Renaissance, could possibly have to say to a modern woman raised in the New World by a family in retreat from Christianity--and what could it say to any of us living in the twenty-first century. All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel is Marshall's story of her intentional encounter with one of the world's most cherished artworks and an impassioned defence of the role of art in our lives. A personal account of finding meaning, and a model for how to engage deeply with the past, All Things Move is a quietly sublime meditation on how art, once invested with the power to save our souls, can enlarge our lives if only we learn how to look."--
