Giovanni Bellini

English edition, hard cover with dust jacket, kept in mylar cover. Book looks at great Venetian painter Bellini and his work with color plates, analysis and selected black and white illustrations. Over sized art book 311 pages.

The primacy of Giovanni Bellini in the history of Venetian Renaissance painting is indisputable. In an exquisite series of chronologically ordered thematic essays, Goffen scrutinizes Bellini's oeuvre in terms of private and public religious subjects, portraiture, and humanistic and allegorical content. Particularly impressive is the author's capacity to evoke the paintings' formal and emotive nuances along with convincing and complementary readings of their iconographic meaning. While making us acutely aware of the social context for which these works were created, it is nevertheless the masterful articulation of Bellini's chromatic explorations of nature and mood that is this volume's crowning contribution. This amply documented, handsomely produced, and sumptuously illustrated opus is now the essential scholarly meditation on the master.
- Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.