Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. Crease on cover corner. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Probably sometime in the 1470s Giovanni Santi a mediocre painter best known because he was Raphael’s father wrote a Rhymed Chronicle list- ing all the major painters of the time. He included the artists of the previous generation (Masaccio and Fra Angelico Filippo Lippi and Domenico Venezi- ano) the great patriarch Piero della Francesca and all the younger painters Leonardo and Perugino Sandro Botticelli Filippino Lippi and Luca Sig- norelli. Looking at the art world from the viewpoint of his home town Urbino one of the most flourish- ing and famous workshops of the Italian Renais- sance Santi attributed to Luca a place of consi- derable importance in the select group of the greatest painters of the late 15th century. Despite the work of modern critics (especially af- ter the 1953 show and Pietro Scarpellini’s 1964 monograph) who have tended to play down Sig- norelli’s importance his role as one of the major figures on the Quattrocento art scene has never really been disputed. We shall see later on how despite the fact that his work is frequently lacking in genuine poetic con- tent and in ethical or moral values and despite the occasional fairly disconcerting drop in pictorial quality Signorelli’s position of importance in the history of Italian art is entirely deserved. Here it will be enough to quote Giovanni Santi’s epigraph: ‘el cortonese Luca de ingegno et spirto pelegrino.’ In his graceless and laboured verse Santi had none- theless grasped the main features of Signorelli’s art and in a sense foreseen his future as a painter (LL)