US Edition announced: The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and the Making of Rome

Following the UK publication of An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, The Pope and The Making of the Eternal City (Pallas Athene, 30 July 2020), the book will now be available in the US from Pegasus Books, published as The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and the Making of Rome (3 August 2021). The new edition has already received praise from Kirkus Books and Library Journal. 

Full details below:

Today there are thirteen standing obelisks in Rome; more than any other city in the world, including Egypt. The strangest of these pillars is positioned next to the Pantheon, Rome’s most perfectly preserved ancient building. Yet it is not the obelisk itself that stands out, but that it sits on the back of a smiling marble elephant. It was during his first visit to The Eternal City that Loyd Grossman encountered his “Goethe moment”—this three-hundred-year-old elephant—propelling him on an exploration of the history, power, and art of Baroque Rome. 

In The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and The Making of Rome (Pegasus, August 3rd, 2021), Grossman guides readers through a brilliant vignette of seventeenth-century Rome, from its Baroque architecture to its relationship with the Catholic Church, and the divinely inspired artist and the imperious pope that clothed it in its well-known finery.  

By 1650, the spiritual and political power of the Catholic Church was shattered, and thanks to the twin blows of the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, Rome—celebrated as the Caput Mundi, “The Head of the World”—had lost its preeminent place in Europe. Then a new pope, Alexander VII, fired with religious zeal, political guile, and a mania for creating new architecture, set out to restore the prestige of his church by making Rome the key destination for Europe's intellectual, political, and cultural elite. To help him do so, he enlisted the talents of Gianlorenzo Bernini, already celebrated as the most important living artist in the age of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velazquez. 

To buy a copy of The Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and The Making of Rome, visit: http://pegasusbooks.com/books/the-artist-and-the-eternal-city-9781643137407-hardcover

To read praise about the UK edition from The Sunday Times, Financial Times, Literary Review and elsewhere, visit: https://www.loyd-grossman.com/blog/press-and-praise-for-an-elephant-in-rome