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Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)
Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, this book demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illusion in the development of Western painting from Hellenistic Greece to the present. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected, and refracted is evident in the works of artists such as Brunelleschi, van Eyck, Alberti, and Leonardo. The interplay between optics and painting that influenced the course of Western art, Summers says, persisted as a framework for the realism of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Goya and continues today in modern photography and film. With 12 color and 79 b&w illus..
Price: $32.50
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On the Art of Building in Ten Books
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Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance
A lucid biographical study of a key figure of European culture Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) was one of the most original, creative, and exciting figures of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote the first modern treatise on painting, the first modern manual of classical architecture, and a powerful set of "dialogues" about the princely families that dominated his home city of Florence. He rediscovered the forgotten aesthetics of classical architecture and described, in incomparably vivid terms, the artistic revolution in Florence that began what we now call the Renaissance. But Alberti was more than a mere chronicler--he practiced what he preached. He made spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and as an architect he was responsible for some of the most exciting buildings in Italy. Yet in spite of his central importance, work on Alberti has for the most part been confined to scholarly monographs. Here, one of our greatest Renaissance scholars offers the general book that Alberti has so long deserved. This is a compelling portrait of a mysterious, original, and highly unusual intellectual, and a colorful tableau of the cities and courts in which he lived and worked. .
Price: $19.95
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The Ten Books of Architecture: The 1755 Leoni Edition
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The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book Three/I Libri Della Famiglia
A classic of Italian literature! The chief merit of this work lies in its scope: it directly assays the personal value system of the Florentine bourgeois class, which did so much to foster the development of art, literature and science. It displays a variety of high styles--high rhetoric, systematic moral exposition, novelistic portrayal of character--in the typical Renaissance framework of the dialogue. The treatise, in its entirety, shows a Florentine paterfamilias and two uncles instructing some submissive nephews in the ethics of private life. Money and reputation are its primary themes. Book III, the most dramatic, far-ranging, and down-to-earth of the four books, does not present a single bourgeois outlook but, as a dialogue, expresses conflicting points of view, enabling readers to relive social and moral conflicts that troubled early capitalist society..
Price: $12.75
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Momus (The I Tatti Renaissance Library)
Momus is the most ambitious literary creation of Leon Battista Alberti, the famous humanist-scientist-artist and "universal man" of the Italian Renaissance. In this dark comedy, written around 1450, Alberti charts the lively fortunes of his anti-hero Momus, the unscrupulous and vitriolic god of criticism. Alberti deploys his singular erudition and wit to satirize subjects from court life and politics to philosophy and intellectuals, from grand architectural designs to human and divine folly. The possible contemporary resonance of Alberti's satire--read variously as a humanist roman-à-clef and as a veiled mockery of the mid-Quattrocento papacy--is among its most intriguing aspects. While his more famous books on architecture, painting, and family life have long been regarded as indispensable to a study of Renaissance culture, Momus has recently attracted increasing attention from scholars as a work anticipating the realism of Machiavelli and the satiric wit of Erasmus. This edition provides a new Latin text, the first to be based on the two earliest manuscripts, both corrected by Alberti himself, and includes the first full translation into English. (20031001).
Price: $28.45
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