Artist and musicians

Daniel Heartz's all-new, richly documented case studies bridge generations, nationalities, genders, musical styles, and artistic schools. The soprano castrato Farinelli and the Venetian Rococo painter Jacopo Amigoni formed a friendship that lasted for many years. A generation later, in Paris, the pastellist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour expressed his love for the greatest French soprano of her age, Marie Fel, in an intimate portrait. The other studies provide glimpses into the lives of the artists Antoine Watteau, Rosalba Carriera, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Antoine Vestier, and François-André Vincent, the opera singers Faustina Bordoni and Rosalie Duplant; composers Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, Antonio Sacchini, and Francois-Joseph Gossec, the gamba virtuoso Karl Abel, the music historian Charles Burney, and the Riccoboni troupe of comédiens italiennes. Besides Heartz's several pairings of artists and musicians, the collection contains ground-breaking studies by John A. Rice on the royal painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the opera composer Giovanni Paisiello, and by Paul Corneilson on Thomas Gainsborough's little-known portrait of the Mannheim soprano Franziska Danzi-Lebrun.--