A Dream of Stone

A selection of texts on art and artists by the Belgian French novelist and essayist Marguerite Yourcenar

Best known for her seminal novel Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), an imagined autobiography of the Roman emperor, Yourcenar brings the same depth of inquiry and inventive speculation to her lyric prose on art and artists in this newest title in the ekphrasis series. In these five jewel-like essays, Yourcenar meditates on the decay of time, the desire both satiated and refused by art, and the imagery animating the lives, works, and dreams of Michelangelo, Dürer, and Piranesi. And in an intimate meditation on the historical novel, Yourcenar describes her own encounters with how language reveals the past. Together these exquisite essays explore that fundamental awe—perhaps even the terror—at the heart of an encounter with beauty.