From Publishers Weekly
Pioneer of the early Renaissance style in 15th-century Venice, Bellini worked with a fervor and immediacy never before seen in northern Italian art. His surviving paintings--deeply expressive Madonnas, murals, altarpieces--balance the physical and metaphysical and fuse Gothic, Byzantine and Renaissance elements in strikingly personal ways. A magnificent visual feast and a monumental feat of scholarship, this study by New York University art professor Eisler brings together for the first time all of Bellini's known paintings and some 300 drawings, newly photographed for this volume. Bellini's noble lions and cheetahs glow in the new light of humanism; his nudes are frank affirmations of being; his story-telling pictures are cinematic; and his wide-angled panoramas of cityscapes, funerals, chivalrous adventure and everyday activities capture Venetian life in its astonishing diversity.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Eisler (NYU Institute of Fine Arts) brings the connoisseurship of a lifetime to the study of the 15th-century Venetian Bellini. He reproduces the 40 extant paintings by this luminous artist, but the bulk of the book is a detailed examination of his two famous sketchbooks, one in the Louvre (reproduced in color) and the other in the British Museum (reproduced in infrared black and white). The sketchbooks are treated thematically and are fully illustrated in excellent plates. Because Eisler is completely at home in Renaissance Venice, readers will find themselves at home there, too. There is an extensive scholarly apparatus and an excellent index that makes navigation through the extremely heavy and unwieldy volume straightforward. Excellent, but at the price, for scholarly collections.
- Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson & Burnham Libs., Art Inst. of Chicago
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson & Burnham Libs., Art Inst. of Chicago
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
