FAH216 Art in the Age of Spectacle: Finding Reference Sources

From abstract art to woodcuts, and the Baroque Revival to ziggurats, this highly readable dictionary is the ideal reference source for students of Art and all related subjects, for gallery visitors, and for all people interested in the visual arts.

Boasting well over 6,000 contributors from 12 countries, the Dictionary offers its readers authoritative and comprehensive global coverage. A resource for both art and cultural studies, the Dictionary serves as a unique guide to all the visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, drawing, printmaking, as well as the decorative arts. The Dictionary ranges far both geographically and historically; it features unparalleled coverage of geographic areas. Providing depth as well as breadth, The Dictionary of Art examines important art forms and key issues of design, taste, function, and patronage, illuminating them in light of the cultural context in which they developed.

The Baroque period was crucial for the development of art theory and the advancement of the artistic academy. This collection of primary sources brings this important period to life with significant documents and texts. It conveniently assembles major texts, which are otherwise available only in scattered publications. The lives of leading artists--Caravaggio, El Greco, among others---are discussed by their contemporaries, while Bellori, Galileo, Pascoli, and others write on art theory and practice. The documents provide fascinating glimpses of the period's artistic self-image.

This is the first complete translation of the biographies of fifteen artists, including Annibale Carracci, Carvaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Poussin, written by the seventeenth-century antiquarian Giovan Pietro Bellori. Originally conceived as a continuation of Vasari's famous Lives, it is a fundamental source for seventeenth-century Italian art and artistic theory, providing detailed descriptions of extant and lost works of art, while casting light on the cultural politics of contemporary Rome and the relations between Rome and France. The importance of Bellori's Lives lies in the scrupulous documentation of artists, many of whom he knew personally; the author's detailed descriptions of their works; and his exposition of the classicist theory of art in the introductory lecture, the Idea. This volume contains the twelve Lives published in the original edition of 1672 and three Lives (Guido Reni, Andrea Sacchi, and Carlo Maratti) that survive in manuscript form and that were published for the first time in 1942.

The theory and practice of art underwent a number of fascinating changes between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, changes which are clearly revealed in this unique collection of letters, journals, essays, and other writings by the artists and their contemporaries. In the poems of Michelangelo, the Dialogues of Carducho, or the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, one discovers the stylistic and philosophical concerns of the artist, while the record of Veronese's trial before the Holy Tribunal, the diary of Bernini's journey in France, the letters of Rubens and Poussin or biographical sketches of Rembrandt and Watteau reveal not only the personalities but also the conditions of the times.