City Travel Guides > Books > Painting

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.Art in Renaissance Italy, 1350-1500 (Oxford History of Art)
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by: Evelyn Welch

September 14, 2000
This book is a well researched and a thorough introduction to the art of renaissance Italy. It contains lots of full-page colour illustrations and has a nifty timeline at the back of the book. The author talks about how the art was created and its purpose.
I was expecting a headache after the second chapter but I was surprised to find it lucid and not migraine inducing at all.
It would provide anyone with a reliable introduction to this subject.
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.Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford Paperbacks)
City Travel Guides > Books > Painting
by: Michael Baxandall

May 19, 1988
This is the kind of book that History of Art departments throw at you early on in their courses to instil the right respect and awe for the whole academic ritual.

When I first saw this book at Birkbeck College (2003 History of Art MA) I was duly impressed and intimidated into thinking this was somehow a classic. In this work Baxandall is the exemplary academic, slowly building up a case from painstaking research and cleverly interpreted trivia.

This approach is fine and dandy until you reflect that at the end of it the conclusions Baxandall has laboured so hard to arrive at are perhaps a little banal -- i.e. Renaissance painting was influenced by such contemporary phenomenon as religious practices, dancing, and the ... Read More:
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.Leonardo's Machines: Da Vinci's Inventions Revealed
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by: Domenico Laurenza

April 28, 2006
This is the kind of book that History of Art departments throw at you early on in their courses to instil the right respect and awe for the whole academic ritual.

When I first saw this book at Birkbeck College (2003 History of Art MA) I was duly impressed and intimidated into thinking this was somehow a classic. In this work Baxandall is the exemplary academic, slowly building up a case from painstaking research and cleverly interpreted trivia.

This approach is fine and dandy until you reflect that at the end of it the conclusions Baxandall has laboured so hard to arrive at are perhaps a little banal -- i.e. Renaissance painting was influenced by such contemporary phenomenon as religious practices, dancing, and the ... Read More:
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.Leonardo da Vinci: the Complete Works: The Complete Works
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by: Leonardo da Vinci

April 28, 2006
It was the da Vinci code that got me interested in Leonardos work. This book is superb, the pictures are of an excellent quality, the literature is very interesting and the book is a cute little size (can easily fit in your bag). It is a bargain price and a great book to have in anyones collection! Highly recommended to any da Vinci code lovers!! The picture of the Last super spreads over 9 pages and the explanations are riveting!
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.On Painting (Classics)
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by: Leon Battista Alberti

February 28, 1991
This is effectively a textbook for Renaissance artists. It is split into three sections, the first dealing predominantly with issues of composition and perspective, the second with light and shade, colour and the artist's duty to his art and his public, and the third predominantly with what qualities one must bring to the job of being an artist.

If you are only loosely interested in art as a pragmatic practice, and you don't have some mathematical knowledge which will steer you through the first section it may be rather impenetrable in places. I am one of these people and found myself really struggling with the first section.

It is however fascinating as a glimpse into the mindset of a humanist scholar and as someone ... Read More:
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.Lives of the Artists: A selection v. 1: A Selection v. 1 (Classics)
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by: Giorgio Vasari

August 27, 1987
This is a long, long book with a great deal of information. Clocking in at over five hundred pages and covering about thirty artists of the Italian Renaissance, it is fairly comprehensive and detailed.

Some of Vasari's 'facts' have been discredited over the years and so the reader should not take everything here as gospel and indeed should be using this as a supplementary text with other material to get the best use out of it. Nevertheless it remains an important contemporary text and one of the first books on 'art history' ever produced.

I have to admit that I found it extremely hard going. There are great long lists of works and their subjects and the patrons of artists which it is easy to get bored or confused by but ... Read More:
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.Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces
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by: Philip Steadman

April 04, 2002
This book is a must for anyone interested in art - or even who just wants a good read. It's rather like a detective story. What is the evidence that Vermeer used a camera obscura to help create his paintings? The colour plates are rather good, too. A bargain.
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.Palladio and Palladianism (World of Art)
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by: Robert Tavernor

April 02, 1991
Andrea Palladio, probably the most famous architect in the western world, stands at the beginning of the movement called Palladianism. So successful was the Palladian formula that it was consciously revived outside of Italy and in other times, first by Inigo Jones at the court of Charles I in the early 17th century, by Colen Campbell and Lord Burlington in the early 18th century, and by Thomas Jefferson and others in the New World. In each case, what was appealing about Palladianism was more than a matter of style: it was the fact that it expressed a way of life and a humanist philosophy, deriving ultimately from ancient Rome but enriched by the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Augustan Age.

Sir John Summerson, reviewing the book ... Read More:
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.Giotto to Durer: Early Renaissance Painting in The National Gallery: Early European Painting in the National Gallery (National Gallery of London (Paperback))
City Travel Guides > Books > Painting
by: J Dunkerton

July 01, 1991
This is a beautiful, sumptuous book, crammed with detail and excellent colour reproductions. Other readers mightn't go for all the technical information but I can't get enough of it. I also prefer the discussions of individual works which occupy a large part of this volume -- its companion, 'Dürer to Veronese', takes a more synoptic view, which tends to obscure the fact that these are surveys of a collection.

That's my only quibble, and it isn't really with the book, which is about as accomplished at it could be -- so good, in fact, that it's tempting to read it as a textbook of the whole period. Much of the material is of general relevance, of course; but don't forget that many of the major works from this period aren't in galleries at all: ... Read More:
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.The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)
City Travel Guides > Books > Painting
by: Giorgio Vasari

August 14, 2008
This is a beautiful, sumptuous book, crammed with detail and excellent colour reproductions. Other readers mightn't go for all the technical information but I can't get enough of it. I also prefer the discussions of individual works which occupy a large part of this volume -- its companion, 'Dürer to Veronese', takes a more synoptic view, which tends to obscure the fact that these are surveys of a collection.

That's my only quibble, and it isn't really with the book, which is about as accomplished at it could be -- so good, in fact, that it's tempting to read it as a textbook of the whole period. Much of the material is of general relevance, of course; but don't forget that many of the major works from this period aren't in galleries at all: ... Read More:
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