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.

This richly illustrated volume offers a new look at the exceptional collection of Italian drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum. An introductory essay by Laura M. Giles chronicles the history and significance of the collection, and nearly one hundred of the collection's masterworks are treated with essay-length entries and full-page images. The first scholarly examination of the collection since Felton Gibbons's comprehensive publication of 1977, the catalogue includes an appendix of more than 150 drawings that have entered the collection since--many previously unpublished, and all fully documented with short entries. Highlights include works by celebrated masters, including Carpaccio and Modigliani, from the early Renaissance through the early Modern periods, with an emphasis on the collection's renowned holdings of works by Luca Cambiaso, Guercino, and the two Tiepolos. With contributions by Alessandra Bigi Iotti, Jonathan Bober, Giada Damen, Diane de Grazia, Rhoda Eitel-Porter, Frederick Ilchman, Anne Varick Lauder, John Marciari, Elizabeth Pilliod, John Pinto, David Stone, Catherine Whistler, and Giulio Zavatta.

Offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian Old Master art by early nineteenth-century writers, McCue illuminates the important role these artworks played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism. She argues that they informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, from October 28, 2008 to January 18, 2009.

"Beginning with an examination of drawing as part of the creative process, and showing how it reveals the artist's mind at work, the author explains in detail the materials and techniques used in Renaissance drawings. It also considers how drawings were used, how they changed stylistically through the period and how they varied in different regions of Italy. It concludes with a brief look at connoisseurship and collecting."--Amazon.