The Life of Titian

After Vasari's Lives of the Most Famous Artists,The Life of Titian by the seventeenth-century Venetian artist and writer Carlo Ridolfi is the most important contemporary documentary source for our understanding of the great Renaissance artist. This new critical edition, the first translation into English of Ridolfi's biography, illuminates his life, his artistic production, and his early critical reputation. The editors address art-historical questions of attribution, provenance, and documentation that Ridolfi's biography raises. Two introductory essays present the nature, scope, and importance of the biography for the study of Titian and Venetian Renaissance art and place Ridolfi in the tradition of Renaissance biography and artistic literature. The annotations provide a useful and current bibliography drawn from both art history and literature.

The Life of Titian will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students of the history of Renaissance art, literature, language, and culture.

Julia Conaway Bondanella is Associate Professor of Italian and Associate Director of the Honors Division at Indiana University. She has edited and translated many books, most recently (with Peter Bondanella) The Lives of the Most Famous Artists by Giorgio Vasari (1991).

Peter Bondanella is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. His books include The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World (1987).

Bruce Cole is Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University. His books include Piero della Francesca (1990).

Jody Robin Shiffman is Associate Instructor of Italian at Indiana University. She is Associate Editor of the Dictionary of Italian Literature (2d rev. ed., 1996).