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:
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)