Art and the cultured public - Documents on art and artists - Mid-century Venetian art criticism - Vasari - Art theory in the second half of the century - The Counter-Reformation - Artists, amateurs and collectors - On beauty.

'Art', declared Vasari in Lives of the Artists, has been reborn and reached perfection in our time'. Indeed the roster of great names in painting of the Cinquecento, which only begins with those of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, appears to justify this grand claim. Professor Freedberg here discusses the individual painters and analyses the hallmarks of their work. He traces the classical style of the High Renaissance, the Mannerism that succeeded it, and the events, in North Italy especially, that resist stylistic categories. He has given order to this diversity, but at the same time has preserved the intense individuality of the works of art.

Creighton E. Gilbert captures the spirit of the early Renaissance in this remarkable collection of primary texts by and about artists of the fifteenth century. Italian Art makes a valuable contribution not only to the field of art history, but also to social and intellectual history. Almost all aspects of the life of the period--war, fashion, travel, communication--are documented. Revealing significant aspects of the practice of art, the process of patronage, and the way of life and social position of early Renaissance artists, Italian Art brings this fascinating period to life for students and scholars.

This book is an account of painting in Italy during the period of the High and the Late Renaissance, the period which included the most remarkable concentration of accomplishments in the artistic history of Italy. No other time and place can offer a roster like the Cinquecento: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, and Correggio are the exalted luminaries in the constellation, and around them there is company of the magnitude of Sarto, Rosso, Pontormo, Bronzino, Parmigianino, Lotto, Tintoretto, and Veronese, to mention only some. The diversity of achievement of the painters is as remarkable as its quality; probably no earlier period offers so complex a picture of self-conscious differences of artistic style, in which an ethical attitude is often a major factor within an aesthetic one. The author delineates the painters' individualities and characterizes their important works. At the same time, however, he relates these individual events to categories and patterns that appear to a more general view of Cinquecento art. In ten carefully interwoven chapters he discusses the history of the classical style of the High Renaissance in the earlier decades of the century, the rise, spread, and eventual adulteration of the Mannerist style, and the events, in Venice and North Italy especially, that resist generalization and help make up the whole rich historical texture that is called the Late Renaissance. -- Inside jacket flap.

In 15th-century Florence, Brunelleschi's buildings and Alberti's treatise first established the principles of Italian Renaissance architecture in practice and theory. This survey ranges from Brunelleschi's dome for the Florence Cathedral to the works of Bramante and Leonardo in the Quattrocento.

. By way of introduction to the objects themselves are three essays. The first, by Laurence B. Kanter, presents an overview of Florentine illumination between 1300 and 1450 and thumbnail sketches of the artists featured in this volume. The second essay, by Barbara Drake Boehm, focuses on the types of books illuminators helped to create. As most of them were liturgical, her contribution limns for the modern reader the medieval religious ceremonies in which the manuscripts were utilized. Carl Brandon Strehlke here publishes important new material about Fra Angelico's early years and patrons - the result of the author's recent archival research in Florence.

This classic work presents a stimulating survey of the most exciting and innovative period in the history of architecture. Lotz also goes beyond the more familiar locations, architects and buildings to conquer less well-known territories, exploring Piedmont and Vitozzi and ending with a study of bizzarrie.