To mark the tercentenary of the birth of the eighteenth-century Venetian painter and draughtsman, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has mounted an exhibition of his most outstanding drawings. Well over a hundred drawings and engravings have been brought together from collections around the world. Piazzetta has enjoyed a resurgence of interest among art historians in this century, but most studies have dwelt on his paintings. Professor Knox has provided a model for methods of dealing with Piazzetta problems: his stylistic development, his mannerisms, his working methods, commercial practices of the day and the dating of the drawings. Features that make the catalogue a truly valuable research tool include: the notes on Venetian money, the checklist of paintings and exhibitions discussed, and the essay on Piazzetta's drawings in the Hermitage for Albrizzi's Gerusalemme Liberata.

Giambattista Piazzetta, together with Giambattista Tiepolo, dominates history painting in eighteenth-century Venice. The greatest religious painter of his time, he was also widely known for his delightful small secular illustrations for printed books, when Venice was an important and influential center of book production. His drawings, especially the characteristic studies of heads of ordinary men and women, were popular with collectors and widely engraved, and became a familiar element on the walls of many a Venetian house. This is the first study in English of a very talented and much-loved painter, who was a key figure in the last great flowering of Venetian painting.

""Rick Barton should have been a San Francisco legend," wrote author and artist Etel Adnan in a 1998 essay. Barton (American, 1928-1992) was born and raised in New York and settled in the Bay Area in the 1950s. Working primarily in pen or brush and ink, in a kaleidoscopic linear style, Barton ceaselessly recorded the world around him. His intricate sheets capture the intimate interiors and social spaces, lovers and friends, and architectural and botanical subjects that fascinated him. Bringing together more than sixty drawings, two accordion-folded sketchbooks, and printed books and portfolios, this catalogue presents the work of a significant and, until now, unheralded figure of the Beat era. Complementing the images are a deeply researched essay by Rachel Federman, curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, and an excerpt of Adnan's essay, the first and previously the only published account of Barton"--

This catalogue features etchings, engravings, and woodcuts in the Metropolitan Museum's collection. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

The Royal Collection has one of the largest and finest collections of Venetian art from the first half of the eighteenth century. It includes paintings, prints and drawings by Canaletto himself, as well as those of his contemporaries, such as Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Antonio Visentini, Francesco Zuccarelli and Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. These artists were patronised by Consul Smith and their works were later purchased by George III. This lavishly illustrated catalogue marks the first time that the rich holdings of eighteenth-century Venetian art in the Royal Collection will have been brought together, and focuses on presenting these extraordinary works against the background of the social and artistic networks of the period. Whilst displaying and analysing the brilliant works of Canaletto himself, including his cityscapes, capriccios and paintings of architecture, this catalogue also discusses the intimate interior of Venetian life, explores the links between artists and the theatre in Venice at this time and looks at Venice as a centre for printmaking and book production.

"Kaufmann situates Maulbertsch as a fresco painter at a time of transition to easel painting, a colorist at a time when color was not fully appreciated by contemporary observers, and an interpreter of religious themes at a time when secular subjects were becoming more popular. Although he has been dismissed as an eccentric by previous scholars, Kaufmann's analysis shows Maulbertsch involved in the intellectual and aesthetic issues of his day."--BOOK JACKET.

In Ancient Marbles in Naples in the Eighteenth Century Eloisa Dodero aims at documenting the history of numerous private collections formed in Naples during the 18th century, with particular concern for the “Neapolitan marbles” and the circumstances of their dispersal. Research has thus made it possible to formulate a synthesis of the collecting dynamics of Naples in the 18th century, to define the interest of the great European collectors, especially British, in the antiquities of the city and its territory and to draw up a catalogue which for the first time brings together the nucleus of sculptures reported in the Neapolitan collections or coming from irregular excavations, most of which shared the destiny of dispersal, in some cases here traced in definitive fashion.