visual narration of literary tales. In addition to these renowned artists, the book reveals the extraordinary achievements of many lesser-known painters, among them Giambattista Zelorri, Giovanni Antonio Fasolo, and Ludovico Pozzoserrato in the sixteenth century; Luca Ferrari da Reggio, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, and Nicolo Bambini in the seventeenth; and ]acopo Guarana, Antonio Balestra, and Giambattista Crosato in the eighteenth." "Distinguished Venetian art historians Filippo Pedrocco, Massimo Favilla, and Ruggero Rugolo skillfully interweave the explanation of the frescoes' iconography with a lively account of the families who commissioned these monumental art works. The Venetian nobility was inordinately proud of its distinguished lineage and frequently directed the artists to paint subject matter that exalted the family name, such as key episodes from Roman mythology, or alternatively incorporate sly visual digs at particular members of the family. Memorably, the patrons --

The Renaissance architect and builder Andrea Palladio is arguable the most influential architect in Western history, and certainly the most beloved. His sixteenth-century villas in the Italian Veneto revolutionized the course of architecture, and the principles on which he based his work are still felt today. For the past several years, Italian watercolorist Giovanni Giaconi has devoted his talents to creating exquisite large-format pen-and-ink watercolor renderings of all thirty-two of Palladio's villas. Each drawing captures the timeless beauty of Palladian architecture and provides a detailed record of these masterpieces. Together with brief descriptions of each villa, samples of Giaconi's preparatory sketches, and where available, Palladio's own woodcuts, these works of art leave a deep impression of Palladio's oeuvre and give the reader an opportunity to compare the original designs with the actual buildings and their present state of conservation. This beautiful book is a must-have and the perfect gift for architects, travelers, and lovers of Italy and Palladio's architecture.

The full-length treatment in English of Tiepolo's life and career. Examining in detail the genesis and the achievement of Tiepolo's major accomplishments, and presenting a rich array of illustrations-some never before reproduced - Michael Levey presents the evidence for a deeper understanding and enjoyment of the great Italian artist.

Volume Five: This catalogue of a private collection includes works by such artists as Vermeer, Rubens, Renoir, La Tour, the Tiepolos, El Greco, Canaletto, and Van Dyck. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

"Here for the first time in a complete English translation is the now classic study of 1970 by Bentmann and Muller, which was one of the earliest and is still one of the most innovative examples of New Left art history. Because of its deft use of critical theory, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture is one of the best examples of how the thought of the Frankfurt School and the New Left relates to art history as a whole." "Bentmann and Muller mount a sustained but supple ideological critique of the values leading to the construction of the sixteenth-century Venetian villa. They are able to explicate how the villa's structural logic and overall configuration embodied resolutely patriarchal values and also how it was a formative force in the consolidation of incipient Venetian capitalism." "By locating the "villa ideology" in relation to the larger "city vs. country" conflict about which Marx, Raymond Williams, and others have written, Bentmann and Muller also perceptively address the Western concept of nature, with its attendant ecological consequences. In one of their most brilliant formulations, the authors compellingly show how all of the above factors led to the actual function of the Venetian villa as a "negative utopia," that is, as the ruling-class alternative to the more egalitarian "positive utopias" then being envisioned by Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella." "Illustrated with 24 full-page photographs and line drawings, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture will be of particular interest to those engaged in the study of art historical methods and of architectural history, especially of the Renaissance period."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The first English-language overview of the contributions to Renaissance architectural culture of northern Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548-1616), this book introduces Anglophone architects and historians to a little-known figure from a period that is recognized as one of the most productive and influential in the Western architectural tradition. Ann Marie Borys presents Vincenzo Scamozzi as a traveler and an observer, the first Western architect to respond to the changing shape of the world in the Age of Discovery. Pointing out his familiarity with the expansion of knowledge in both natural history and geography, she highlights that his truly unique contribution was to make geography and cartography central to the knowledge of the architect. In so doing, she argues that he articulated the first fully realized theory of place. Showing how geographic thinking influences his output, Borys demonstrates that although Scamozzi's work was conceived within an established tradition, it was also influenced by major cultural changes occurring in the late 16th century.