This is a new release of the original 1924 edition.

This is a rich exploration of the role the Baroque master played in the Counter-Reformation. The art of Rubens is rooted in an era darkened by the long shadow of devastating wars between Protestants and Catholics. In the wake of this profound schism, the Catholic Church decided to cease using force to propagate the faith. Like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) sought to persuade his spectators to return to the true faith through the beauty of his art. While Rubens is praised for the "baroque passion" in his depictions of cruelty and sensuous abandon, nowhere did he kindle such emotional fire as in his religious subjects. Their colour, warmth, and majesty - but also their turmoil and lamentation - were calculated to arouse devout and ethical emotions. This fresh consideration of the images of saints and martyrs Rubens created for the churches of Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire offers a masterly demonstration of Rubens' achievements, liberating their message from the secular misunderstandings of the post-religious age and showing them in their intended light.

In this collection of nine essays some of the preeminent art historians in the United States consider the relationship between art and craft, between the creative idea and its realization, in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The essays, all previously unpublished, are devoted to the pictorial arts and are accompanied by nearly 150 illustrations. Examining works by such artists as Michelangelo, Titian, Volterrano, Giovanni di Paolo, and Annibale Carracci (along with aspects of the artists' creative processes, work habits, and aesthetic convictions), the essayists explore the ways in which art was conceived and produced at a time when collaboration with pupils, assistants, or independent masters was an accepted part of the artistic process. The consensus of the contributors amounts to a revision, or at least a qualification, of Bernard Berenson's interpretation of the emergent Renaissance ideal of individual ""genius"" as a measure of original artistic achievement: we must accord greater influence to the collaborative, appropriative conventions and practices of the craft workshop, which persisted into and beyond the Renaissance from its origins in the Middle Ages. Consequently, we must acknowledge the sometimes rather ordinary beginnings of some of the world's great works of art--an admission, say the contributors, that will open new avenues of study and enhance our understanding of the complex connections between invention and execution. With one exception, these essays were delivered as lectures in conjunction with the exhibition The Artists and Artisans of Florence: Works from the Horne Museum hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art in the fall of 1992.

"Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections: The Age of Bernini, Rembrandt, and Poussin" brings together more than one hundred treasures of the Baroque age from museum collections throughout the Midwest. The volume presents a fascinating and representative selection of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French drawings in Midwestern repositories, offering new insights on many of these works of art. Many are relatively unknown, and some have never before been published.
Authored by major scholars in the field, the catalogue presents each drawing along with a concise description with full scholarly apparatus. Four essays, written by Babette Bohn, George S. Keyes, Kristi A. Nelson, and Alvin L. Clark, Jr., respectively, introduce the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French schools. The catalogue's introductory essay, by Shelley Perlove, places these works within the historical, iconographic, and stylistic currents of seventeenth-century art. The catalogue is designed to have widespread appeal for art historians, curators, artists, collectors, students, and general readers interested in art and cultural history. Moreover, "Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections "highlights the surprising number of institutions throughout the Midwest that have acquired distinguished European drawings from the seventeenth century worthy of full recognition by collectors and connoisseurs.