From Publishers Weekly
The pageantry of Renaissance Venice unfolds in the luminous and meticulous paintings of Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1455-1525), a fur dealer's son who studied with Giovanni Bellini and became "the most cultured and intellectual painter of the Venetian fifteenth century," in Sgarbi's assessment. This Italian art historian sees Carpaccio as a deeply humanistic metaphysician, more learned and literate than his mentor, and "always engaged in a programmatic search for the archetype of a gesture." This ravishing monograph combines an erudite text with scores of full-page, color reproductions, a mini-essay on each painting, plus a black-and-white illustrated catalogue of the complete works. Beautiful reproductions of the Legend of St. Ursula cycle, as well as famous pictures like Agony in the Garden and Triumph of St. George, often accompanied by generous enlargements, take us inside Carpaccio's visual universe.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Best known for the large-scale narrative cycles he painted for the religious confraternities of Venice, Carpaccio (1460-c.1525) achieved a richly decorative yet uncanny poetic realism in his best works. An author and popular cultural commentator in Italy, Sgarbi has written an engaging introductory essay that neatly evokes the historical and art-historical milieu in which Carpaccio flourished and perceptively delineates the nature of his style and the likely formative forces that helped shape his distinctive vision. While appropriately concerned with the formal and iconographic aspects of the works, Sgarbi is perhaps insufficiently attentive to the more immediate aspects of Carpaccio's patronage and is less than convincing in his assertion of the artist's putative "humanistic culture." With few exceptions, the quality of the numerous color reproductions of the time-begrimed paintings is merely adequate. Nevertheless, the plates, the informed text, and a comprehensively illustrated catalog argue for the acquisition of this volume by subject collections.
Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
