Literature
- In The Second Mrs. Giaconda, a novel by E. L. Konigsburg, her dull appearance is crucial. "She's small and dark and perfectly plain", the main character says when he first sees her; when they meet she is "trying to get the sun to make me blond and beautiful"; when she meets Leonardo da Vinci she laments her "plain brown wrapping"; and so on. She overcomes her looks and after death one of her insights becomes a cause of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
- In the novel "Duchess of Milan" author Michael Ennis explores Beatrice D'Este's tenure as Duchess of Bari and eventually as first lady of Milan as well as her friendship and rivalry with Isabella of Aragon.
Read more about this topic: Beatrice D'Este
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)
“In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)