Focusing exclusively on examples from the 16th century, the great age of Italian drawing, this stunning volume, published to accompany an early-1994 exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes 124 prized works from The Metropolitan, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and some 20 private collections in New York. The catalogue is organized by school and, within each section, chronologically by artist. Each drawing is illustrated and presented with a discussion that places it in the context of the artist's career and explores the purpose for which it was made. Paper edition (unseen), $35. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
113 drawings from 12 Italian geographical areas included works by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Pontormo, Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Jacopo Tintoretto. The works were selected by Konrad Oberhuber in collaboration with the owner, the celebrated cellist and art patron.After giving a cello concert at the Pierpont Morgan Library before the private opening of the exhibition in New York on December 11, the Hungarian-born Scholz, who was also celebrating his 70th birthday and the 40th anniversary of his arrival and first performance in this country, announced he would donate his collection of 1,500 Italian drawings and his reference books on the subject to the Morgan Library.
Paintings, sculpture, and classical antiquities are the most valuable resources of any museum, and are the first objects to be published in each museum's own collection catalogue or online inventory. Collection catalogues, however, have customarily included only a small sample of the riches to be found in Midwestern collections of master drawings. This volume of sixteenth-century drawings has been largely the work of Burton L. Dunbar (University of Missouri-Kansas City), director of the project and a specialist in the arts of northern Europe, and Edward J. Olszewski (Case Western Reserve University), co-editor for the series, a well-known authority on drawings of the Italian Renaissance. This volume covers the sixteenth century, including artists born as a rule between 1480 and 1580, with the exception of Giovanni Baglione (ca. 1573-1644) and the Carracci. This study represents a gathering of drawings from forty institutions between Ohio and Oklahoma based on a census of seventy-five museums and art centers. Jacob Burckhardt's contention that the Renaissance was, in many respects, an age of paganism is readily belied here by the 471 Italian drawings, the great majority of which are religious subjects. Antiquity provided a veneer beneath which sixteenth century artists could cloak their Christianity to make it seem fresh, reminding believers of the origins of their faith, and reviving the purity of Christian doctrine in its early years. It is no surprise, then, to find numerous drawings of antiquities, and mythologies among the many subjects. A corpus this large can be representative in many ways, offering a cross-section of media, subjects, drawing types, and collectors. Of the 471 Italian drawings scattered across Midwestern America, here we reassemble many that were at one time in one or more prominent collections. Every drawing was examined for the following information: Artist, place of birth and death with dates, biography, title of drawing, date of drawing, dimensions in mm (and in inches), media, institutional credit line, accession number, technical condition, inscriptions, collectors' marks, watermark, provenance, exhibitions, bibliography, comments
Presents a survey of sixty Venetian Renaissance paintings of the calibre of Bellini and Titian's "Feast of the Gods" in Washington and Giorgione's "Laura and Three Philosophers" in Vienna.
Evelyn Karet's in-depth study of the Antonio II Badile Album - the earliest known example of an art collection pasted onto the pages of a book - is both focused and broad in its appeal to those interested in the early modern era. The provenance of the album is traced from its assemblage to the seventeenth-century collection of Conte Lodovico Moscardo to its dismantling by the dealer Francis Matthiesen in the 1950s, establishing that the volume conserved in the Frits Lugt Collection is not an original but a replica produced by Matthiesen. Although Antonio II must be celebrated as the collector of the drawings, new paleographic analysis has identified the actual compiler of the album after Antonio?s death providing a terminus post quem in the late 1530s or early 1540s. Karet enlarges the focus from the album itself to the historic tradition of collecting drawings in northern Italy in the early modern era before Vasari, for which the album provides a new point of reference. Throughout the book, Karet discusses the Badile family, examines the individual drawings in the book, investigates the contacts between artists and humanists, their rich, diverse collections and the humanist mind-set that fostered the appreciation of drawings. She explores notable early drawing collections in northern Italy and the role of northern Italy as a center of collection in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book concludes with two appendices: a reconstruction of the original album, including a discussion of the reconstruction process, suggestions about what the album originally looked like, and a page-by-page guide to its contents; and a detailed analysis of Francis Matthiesen's career. This book opens up new areas of inquiry into an overlooked subject.
This volume represents a long overdue reassessment of the Neapolitan painter Paolo de Matteis, an artist largely overlooked in English language scholarly publications, but one who merits our attention for the quality of his work and the originality of its iconography, as well as for his remarkable ability to respond creatively to his patrons? aesthetic ideals and agendas. Following a meticulous examination of the ways in which posterity?s impression of de Matteis has been conditioned by a biased biographical and literary tradition, Livio Pestilli devotes rich, detailed analyses to the artist?s most significant paintings and drawings. More than just a novel approach to de Matteis and the Neapolitan Baroque, however, the book makes a significant contribution to the study and understanding of early eighteenth-century European art and cultural history in general, not only in Naples but in other major European centers, including Paris, Vienna, Genoa, and Rome.
