A suspenseful tale of Borgesian circularity, Shadowing Botticelli's Beauty features an unusual cast drawn from three distinct spheres: C.I.A. operatives running sensitive operations during the Cold War; players from the art world among them a painter-architect based in Buenos Aires, and from ages past, the Renaissance master, Sandro Botticelli; and colorful inhabitants of an elite, New England prep school. But throughout this sinuous tale of intrigue, there is the constancy of "Abel Baaker Charlie:" devoted husband; journeyman case officer; apprentice school master; autodidactic painter; and, last but not least, self-appointed art detective. While weathering the chaos of revolutions, personal tragedies, identity crises, a treacherous colleague, and radical career shifts, the novel's dauntless protagonist tenaciously stalks a lost masterpiece looted by a Nazi war criminal in the closing days of World War II. Baaker's story, which has a basis in fact, is told with the assuredness of a veteran insider privy to the clandestine realm of spies, the arcane province of art historians, and the twisted turf of private boarding schools. While making for a fine read, with its rewarding resolution, Shadowing Botticelli's Beauty ponders the opposing roles of chance and grand design in the destiny of its memorable characters.

During the Cold War, Abel Baaker, a CIA officer in Montevideo, Uruguay, finds a remarkable Renaissance painting in the possession of a Nazi war criminal who was relocated to Uruguay after World War II. When the painting disappears, Baaker uses his agency's resources to discover the provenance of the painting and information about the life of Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli to whom the painting is attributed.

The recent exhibitions dedicated to Botticelli around the world show, more than ever, the significant and continued debate about the artist. Botticelli Past and Present engages with this debate. The book comprises four thematic parts, spanning four centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception from the fifteenth century. Each part comprises a number of essays and includes a short introduction which positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The parts are organised chronologically beginning with discussion of the artist and his working practice in his own time, moving onto the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design. Expertly written by researchers and eminent art historians and richly illustrated throughout, the broad range of essays in this book make a valuable contribution to Botticelli studies.

Ever since the eighteenth century, when Kant opened the floodgates of subjectivism in aesthetics, common men and philosophers alike have despaired of finding a basis for judgments about beauty. This book provides a comprehensive theory that encompasses beauty in art and nature, as well as intellectual, utilitarian, and moral beauty. The author argues that the beauty of objects can be reduced to the beauty of properties of those objects, which in turn can be understood in terms of "properties of qualitative degree." The theory, developed first with respect to color, is then extended to include all sensory and non-sensory qualities. The author shows how the theory explicates and resolves disagreements about what is beautiful and discusses its relevance to the traditional notions of harmony and sublimity. His is an objectivist theory of beauty, and it enables him, in conclusion, to demonstrate why we enjoy perceiving beauty. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

He was the son of a citizen in comfortable circumstances, and had been, in Vasari’s words, “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” However, he refused to give his attention to reading, writing and accounts, continues Vasari, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello: whence came the name by which the world remembers him. However, Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair – he has left a portrait of himself on the right-hand side of his picture of the Adoration of the Magi – would also become a painter, and to that end was placed with the Carmelite monk Fra Filippo Lippi. But he was a realist, as the artists of his day had become, satisfied with the joy and skill of painting, and with the study of the beauty and character of the human subject instead of religious themes. Botticelli made rapid progress, loved his master, and later on extended his love to his master’s son, Filippino Lippi, and taught him to paint, but the master’s realism scarcely touched Lippi, for Botticelli was a dreamer and a poet. Botticelli is a painter not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his colouring rich and lifelike; it is subordinated to form, and often rather a tinting than actual colour. In fact, he was interested in the abstract possibilities of his art rather than in the concrete. For example, his compositions, as has just been said, are a pattern of forms; his figures do not actually occupy well-defined places in a well-defined area of space; they do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration. Accordingly, the lines which enclose the figures are chosen with the primary intention of being decorative. It has been said that Botticelli, “though one of the worst anatomists, was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance.” As an example of false anatomy we may notice the impossible way in which the Madonna’s head is attached to the neck, and other instances of faulty articulation and incorrect form of limbs may be found in Botticelli’s pictures. Yet he is recognised as one of the greatest draughtsmen: he gave to ‘line’ not only intrinsic beauty, but also significance. In mathematical language, he resolved the movement of the figure into its factors, its simplest forms of expression, and then combined these various forms into a pattern which, by its rhythmical and harmonious lines, produces an effect upon our imagination, corresponding to the sentiments of grave and tender poetry that filled the artist himself. This power of making every line count in both significance and beauty distinguishes the great master- draughtsmen from the vast majority of artists who used line mainly as a necessary means of representing concrete objects.