David Alan Brown

Venitian society and culture - Venitian painting and the invention of art - Masters and pupils - Colleagues and rivals - Sacred images and stories - Allegories and mythologies - Pictures of women - Pictures of love - Portraits of men - Technical studies of painting methods - Venetian "colore."

"The National Gallery's collection of Italian fifteenth-century paintings, the finest in any American museum, has not been published in its entirety since the 1979 Catalogue of Italian Paintings by Fern Rusk Shapley." "Among the altarpieces, devotional works, portraits, and allegorical scenes are many world-famous masterpieces. In addition to Leonardo's Ginevra de'Benci and the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, paintings by Domenico Veneziano, Castagno, Sassetta, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio make this a book of major masters of the Renaissance."--BOOK JACKET

"This beautifully illustrated and exquisitely designed volume of paintings, sculpture, medals, and drawings celebrates the extraordinary flowering of female portraiture, mainly in Florence, beginning in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Included are many of the finest portraits of women (and a few of men) by Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Leonardo da Vinci - whose remarkable double-sided portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, which departs notably from tradition, is the focus of special attention."--BOOK JACKET.

Surveying the scene from the Dogana, Canaletto seems to have stumbled upon a murder taking place before him and put it in his painting. To decipher the episode depicted in the Bacino, Jeremy exploited several functions of his smartphone. The informational apps provided the context for the murder, while the camera captured its image in the painting. Jeremy wondered whether Canaletto had not also viewed the event through the portable camera of his day--the camera obscura, used as an aid to drawing outdoors. ... Jeremy could just imagine how Canaletto, breathless with excitement, had quickly sketched the momentary image projected on the screen.

Giovanni Bellini (d. 1516) boasts a long career that left an indelible mark on Venetian painting. Vasari and other early writers failed to distinguish Bellini's late works from the rest of his output. Focused on Titian as the quintessential "old age" artist, subsequent writers have also paid little attention to Bellini's late work as a separate phase of his career. Bellini did not choose the subjects of his last pictures, which were stipulated by his patrons, but instead relied more and more on assistants; his decision to undertake and personally conceive and execute them points to a special commitment on his part to their creation. The Feast of the Gods (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), dated 1514, and other works that follow it, display a much expanded range of subject matter and a new degree of inventiveness. New technical investigations have played a key role in grasping the novelty of Bellini's last works. The artist's great mythological canvas in Washington, in particular, has been the subject of a recent scientific investigation using the latest multi-spectral scanning technology. This study, undertaken by the scientific lab at the National Gallery of Art, marks a major advance in the technical analysis of works of art.