The third in a series of scholarly catalogs on the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago, this volume focuses on the museum's important holdings of Italian drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The catalog contains comprehensive entries on over seven hundred drawings, including preliminary studies for major compositions, cartoons, modelli, independent drawings, and copies after Renaissance and Mannerist masters. Featured are major works by some of the most significant artists of the time: Baccio Bandinelli, Federico Barocci, Fra Bartolommeo, Jacopo Bassano, Vittore Carpaccio, Correggio, Parmigianino, Pisanello, Pontormo, Primaticcio, Raphael, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Taddeo Zuccaro. Each drawing in this handsomely produced catalog is accompanied by complete and up-to-date documentation, including a detailed description of the physical condition, a fully documented provenance, bibliography, and exhibition history, and a critical discussion of the attribution, date, subject, and function, as well as a summary of earlier scholarship. Many of these exquisite drawings are published here for the first time.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is fortunate to have a collection of Italian drawings that encompasses a broad sweep of Italy's art history, ranging from Renaissance and Baroque to Futurist and contemporary works by such famed artists as Parmigianino, Francesco Salviati, Guercino, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Pompeo Batoni, and Amedeo Modigliani. With this publication, eighty of these drawings are provided with commentary, complete scholarly analysis, and biographies of the artists by the renowned scholar Mimi Cazort. The volume opens with an illustrated essay by Ann Percy, the Museum's Curator of Drawings, who offers the first full account of the people and events that shaped the formation of this exceptional but little-published collection.