Sandro Botticelli, Volume I: Life and Work and Volume II: Complete Catalogue

Lightbown, Ronald

ISBN 10: 0236309307 / ISBN 13: 9780236309306

Published by Paul Elek Limited, London, 1978

About this Item

English text.; 21 x 28.5 cm.; 2.8 kg.; Volume I: 231 pages with black and white illustrations. Volume II: 199 pages with black and white and colour illustrations.; Used with signs of wear on the exterior and interior. The dust jacket show wear marks, edge wear, scuffs and scratches on the front cover, spine and back cover. The interior shows some wear marks throughout.; Many of those Botticelli paintings which have for centuries possessed immediate popular appeal are of subjects whose precise meanings or origins have presented problems for the scholar. This definitive study of Botticelli's life and work is based on completely fresh research and direct appraisal of the artist's widely scattered works. In the first volume, a comprehensive monograph, Ronald Lightbown relates Botticelli's paintings to the complex and contradictory culture of fifteenth-century Florence, a society which combined worldly pageantry with piety, classical learning with vernacular vigour. Many of the most puzzling enigmas of Botticelli's work are disentangled and newly researched facts about his sources and patrons throw light on the symbolic images in the paintings. Every aspect of Botticelli's art is examined: his many devotional works- frescoes, altarpieces, tondi - his portraits, his illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, his secular paintings, his representations of classical myth. Scrupulous attention has been paid to detailed, accurate descriptions of all the major works, sweeping aside a long legacy of inaccurate commentary and subjective misinterpretation. The book begins by describing Botticelli's family, early life and apprenticeship to Fra Filippo Lippi. There follows a full discussion of the development of Botticelli's career: his emergence as an independent master; his stay in Rome to help fresco the newly completed Sistine Chapel at the Vatican; the commissions from the Medici and other prominent Florentine families for the mythological paintings that mark the climax of his achievement; and the intense, highly wrought paintings of his last years, which express Botticelli's reaction to the political upheavals of the 1490s and the apocalyptic prophesies of Savonarola. This authoritative reassessment of Botticelli's life and work concludes with a section of contemporary documents and records concerning the artist and his family. The Complete Catalogue complements and supports the monograph. It is the first full and detailed catalogue of the artist's autograph paintings and of the numerous pictures produced in his workshop and school and is based on much significant new research on the attributions of Botticelli's works. The chronology of Botticelli is notoriously one of the most difficult problems of art history; but new, firmly documented dates are supplied for a number of paintings and others are redated on the basis of style. The catalogue includes all his drawings and a new, corrected guide to his famous Dante illustrations. Works previously wrongly attributed to Botticelli and those that have been lost are listed, and there is a critical bibliography of the extensive literature on Botticelli.

Seller Inventory # 1887B

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sandro Botticelli, Volume I: Life and Work and Volume II: Complete Catalogue
• Publisher: Paul Elek Limited, London
• Publication Date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0236309307
• ISBN 13: 9780236309306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • European Paintings

About this title

Synopsis

. 2 volume set Paul Elek, bright clean copies, with dustjackets, no markings, Professional booksellers since 1981