Packed with facts, attributions, and entertaining anecdotes about his contemporaries, Vasari's collection of biographical accounts also presents a highly influential theory of the development of Renaissance art. Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, who represent the infancy of art, Vasari considers the period of youthful vigour, shaped by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, and Masaccio, before ...

Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth century, this work traces the development of Italian art across three centuries to the golden epoch of Leonardo and Michelangelo. It presents great men, and their immortal works. It depicts Michelangelo's painstaking work on the Sistine Chapel, harassed by the impatient Pope Julius II.

Through character sketches and anecdotes the author depicts Piero di Cosimo shut away in his derelict house, living only to paint, and Giulio Romano's startling painting of Jove striking down the giants.

This work seeks to broaden the comprehension of the student of Italian Renaissance painting by concentrating not on the works of art themselves, but on the various artistic theories which influenced them or were expressed by them. The text includes the writings of Michelangelo and Vasari.

Alberti`s Della Pittura was the first modern analytical study of painting. A systematic description of the one-point perspective construction, it was designed to persuade both patron and painter in the Renaissance to discard the old tastes in painting for the new.

A companion volume to Art in Modern Culture , this book introduces a selection of key texts from the Renaissance to the present day, exemplifying the wide variety of methods and approaches used by art historians. Included are texts by Gombrich, Vasari, Wolfflin and Pollack.

Subtitled 'The First Scientist', this new one-volume biography places science at the centre of Leonardo da Vinci's life and work