Giorgio Vasari, friend of Michelangelo and the art historian, in the second edition of his Lives of the Artists mentioned almost 500 different prints from the 15th and 16th centuries, from both Italy and the North. Even with a number of editions of Vasari's Lives now in print, this section of his text on prints is not readily available.

Giorgio Vasari, friend of Michelangelo and the art historian, in the second edition of his Lives of the Artists mentioned almost 500 different prints from the 15th and 16th centuries, from both Italy and the North. Even with a number of editions of Vasari's Lives now in print, this section of his text on prints is not readily available.

In both Vasari's life and in his Lives, prints played important roles. This volume examines Giorgio Vasari's interest, as an art historian and as an artist, in engravings and woodblock prints, revealing how it sheds light on aspects of Vasari's career, and on aspects of sixteenth-century artistic culture and artistic practice. It is the first book to study his interest in prints from this dual perspective.

In seeing printed reproductions as a form of response to Michelangelo's work, Bernadine Barnes focuses on the choices that printmakers and publishers made as they selected which works would be reproduced and how they would be presented to various audiences. Six essays set the reproductions in historical context, and consider the challenges presented by works in various media and with varying degrees of accessibility, while a seventh considers how published verbal descriptions competed with visual reproductions. Rather than concentrating on the intentions of the artist, Barnes treats the prints as important indicators of the use of, and public reaction to, Michelangelo's works. Emphasizing reception and the construction of history, her approach adds to the growing body of scholarship on print culture in the Renaissance. The volume includes a comprehensive checklist organized by the work reproduced.

An authoritative introduction to Raphael, one of the most influential painters in the history of art, written by the preeminent authority on the subject and informed by the latest research. For centuries, Raphael has been recognized as the supreme High Renaissance painter, with many considering him more versatile than Michelangelo and more prolific than his older contemporary Leonardo da Vinci. Though he died young at thirty-seven, Raphael’s example as a paragon of classicism dominated the academic tradition of European painting until the mid-nineteenth century. This comprehensive survey looks at the different social and regional contexts of Raphael’s work and all aspects of his artistic production. From early training in Urbino to travels across central Italy, particularly Florence, where he became a noted portraitist and painter of Madonnas, to engagement by the papal court, this volume covers all areas of the artist’s practice. Focus is also devoted to the second half of Raphael’s career, when he became the dominant artist in Rome—even ahead of Michelangelo—and as a sophisticate entrepreneur, was able to extend the range of his activities to that of architect, designer, pioneer archaeologist, and theoretician. A beautifully illustrated study with over 150 full-color reproductions of Raphael’s work, ranging from major masterpieces to lesser-known paintings and drawings from all periods; art historian Paul Joannides, one of the world’s leading experts on Raphael’s drawings, sheds new light on this seminal artist.

When did drawing become an integral part of architecture? Among several architects and artists who brought about this change during the Renaissance, Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s ideas on drawing recorded in his Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (1475-1490) are significant. Francesco suggests that drawing is linked to the architect’s imagination and central in conveying images and ideas to others. Starting with the broader edges of Francesco’s written work and steadily penetrating into the fantastic world of his drawings, the book examines his singular formulation of the act of drawing and its significance in the context of the Renaissance. The book concludes with speculations on how Francesco’s work is relevant to us at the onset of another major shift in architecture caused by the proliferation of digital media.