The Great Painters of the Italian Renaissance. Volume 1-2

The Italian Renaissance is one of the most stimulating periods in all cultural history. Yet the more that is written about it, the harder it gets to describe this exciting epoch adequately. Scholarship meanders into endless historical and aesthetic reflection, expertise gets bogged down in minute detail. Both these volumes are based on Giorgio Casari's celebrated distinction between “disegno” (underlying intellectual structure) and “colore” (the sensual qualities of color), as well as Heinrich Wolfflin's closely related concepts of the “linear” and the “painterly” contrasting Florance with central Italy. Venice with Upper Italy. Equally, though, these volumes show us time and again how porous the dividing lines are...