Botticelli: Life and Work
by Ronald Lightbown
from Abbeville Press
Every aspect of Botticelli's work--his devotional and secular art, portraits, illustrations, and depictions of classical myth--are examined with a text that is a perfect complement to the magnificent art. 350 illustrations, 250 in full color.
Vasari's Lives of the Artists: Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian
by Giorgio Vasari
from Dover Publications
Botticelli
by Frank Zollner
from Prestel Publishing
Featuring more than two hundred full-color illustrations, this opulent celebration of the life and art of the Renaissance genius covers Sandro BotticelliÂ’s complete paintings.
Botticelli is one of the most beloved figures of the Renaissance period and his seductive Venus and graceful Primavera are among the world’s most recognizable works of art. This large-format catalogue raisonné of Botticelli’s paintings by the distinguished Renaissance art historian Frank Zöllner is highlighted by meticulous scholarship and breathtaking illustrations. Presented in chronological order, the facts of Botticelli’s life and career are insightfully discussed against the background of the artistic upheaval that marked the Renaissance period. The artist’s reinterpretations of ancient myths as well as his religious paintings are thoughtfully explored in this sumptuously illustrated volume, which make this a comprehensive and thoroughly up-to-date study that will please scholars and delight lovers of fine books everywhere.
Sandro Botticelli 1444/45-1510 (Basic Art)
by Barbara Deimling
from Taschen
Forgotten immediately after his death, Sandro Botticelli (1444 - 45-1510) was rediscovered in the 19th century by the pre-Raphaelites and now ranks among the greatest Renaissance artists. This Spanish-language book pays tribute to his captivating figures of women, his intimate portrayals of the Madonna and Child, and the angelic beauty of his adolescents — famous the world over today.
Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy
by Hein-Thomas Altcappenberg
from Royal Academy Books
The Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli is probably best known for Birth of Venus and Primavera, two commissions for the young Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. The same delicate, rhythmic line and fanciful imagination can be found in another project for this patron: an unfinished set of drawings from the 1480s that illustrate The Divine Comedy, Dante's chronicle of his vividly imagined travels through the Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise.
For those familiar with the jewel-like colors of Botticelli's paintings, it may come as a shock that many of the 92 drawings that survive are very faint preliminary sketches. (They were made with a metal point on sheep parchment, sometimes touched up with pen and ink. A few have been colored in.) But just as the poet Virgil serves as the 35-year-old epic hero's indispensable guide, the astute running commentary in this book helps modern readers perceive how Botticelli subtly evokes the hero's feelings. "Botticelli's Dante is guided above all by his eyes," writes Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg, chief curator of Berlin's Kupferstichkabinett. "[They] are literally opened in proportion to his enlightenment, until his vision ultimately dissolves in an image of pure beauty, liberated from constraints of time and space."
By showing multiple views of the characters in a single drawing, Botticelli portrays Dante's successive reactions to what he sees and Virgil's responses to his charge's state of mind. And by giving every group of doomed souls a distinctive gesture or expression, he follows the poet's lead in illuminating both the individual and the universal. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same title that has been shown in Berlin and Rome and continues at the Royal Academy of Arts in London through June 2001, this book represents a triumph of accessible scholarship, intelligent design, and deeply rewarding content. --Cathy Curtis
A Royal Academy of Arts Publication
In the 1480s, the great Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli was commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici to make a series of drawings to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. Botticelli gave stunning visual form to the poet's epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but the project was never completed and the sheets were scattered.
Now, more than 500 years after their creation, all 91 existing-and very fragile-vellum sheets will be shown together for the first time, in Berlin, Rome, and London. This book, which accompanies the exhibition, illustrates each of Botticelli's canto sheets in superb color, faced by a commentary on Botticelli's pictorial response to Dante's poem by Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, where 84 of the sheets are permanently housed. Eight essays on Botticelli, the Medici, and the Divine Comedy complete this unprecedented volume.
Advertising: Art magazines, New York Times Book Review
HEIN-THOMAS SCHULZE ALTCAPPENBERG is chief curator at the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.
PETER KELLER and JULIA SCHEWSKI are curators at the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. HORST BREDEKAMP teaches at the Institut fr Kunstgeschichte, Humboldt-Universitt, Berlin. DAMIAN DOMBROWSKI teaches at the Institut fr Kunstgeschichte der Universitt, Wrzburg. ANDREAS KABLITZ is a professor at the Universitt, Kln. GIOVANNI MORELLO is a curator at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome. ROBERT FUCHS and DORIS OLTROGGE teach at the Fachhochschule, Kln.
270 illustrations in full color, 113/4 x 95/8"
Botticelli
by Susan Legouix
from Chaucer Press
Botticelli's art has proved more magnetic to historians and critics during the past hundred years than that of any other fifteenth century painter. His linear evocations of feminine grace and beauty, epitomized in his celebrated allegorical compositions 'Primavera' and 'The Birth of Venus', have entered the repertory of potent and immediately recognizable images, representing the classical ideal of the Italian Renaissance. His celestially serene Madonnas and sweet-tempered angels have become inseparable from the notion of religious sublimity and devotion in the quattrocento. Susan Legouix offers a fresh and stimulating account of the art and the world of Botticelli. She charts the development of Botticelli's style, his growing assurance and his ultimate adoption of an almost backward-looking, Gothic but deeply personal idiom. The demands of his public commissions for churches and their effect upon his style are measured and balanced against his private modes, especially his illustrations for Dante?s Divine Comedy, which confirm his genius as a draughtsman and an interpreter. Special attention is also paid to the shifting taste of succeeding centuries and the Victorian revival of interest in Botticelli's work which has raised him to the position of one of the supreme if also most enigmatic masters of western art.
Botticelli: 16 Art Stickers (Fine Art Stickers)
by Sandro Botticelli
from Dover Publications
Primavera: The Restoration of Botticelli's Masterpiece
Botticelli's Neoplatonic Images (Scripta Humanistica)
Botticelli: Rizzoli Art Classics
by Chiara Basta
from Rizzoli International Publications
Often regarded as the founder of traditional European painting, Giotto revolutionized the way artists interpreted the human condition at the turn of the fourteenth century. Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo each brought Renaissance notions of humanism to unparalleled heights. Botticelli's poetic delicacy created a magical world in which allegory and idealism are reflected. Vermeer's light-infused elegies on the everyday are some of the most exquisite paintings in the history of Western art.
Each book in this series features a literary introduction and thoroughly researched essay followed by a section devoted to a detailed description of a selection of the artist's masterpieces. An extensive chronology of the artist's life and important historical events of his era as well as a compilation of remarks by famous historians, modern and old, add cultural perspective and insight into each painter's stylistic development. A visual chart with captions as to the whereabouts of every painting and a concise bibliography with suggested further reading provide invaluable research tools.
With authoritative text by leading art historians from around the globe, these lavishly illustrated editions provide fresh insights into the art and lives of the most brilliant artists in the history of painting. No matter what your knowledge of art history, this series will compel you to explore a world of art beyond the canvas.
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