Botticelli - Life and Work / Ronald Lightbown / Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1989 / Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9780500092064 / 978-0500092064 

ISBN-10: 0500092060

Printed in England

Pages 340 

The paintings of Sandro Botticelli (21445-1510) are some of the most deeply-loved works ever created. But the direct and immediate beauty of such paintings as the Armavera, the Birth of lens, and Pallas and the Centeur, with their lyrical forms and luminous colour, belie a comples and sophisti cated iconography the product of an artist and a time of highly-refined sensibilities.

Ronald Lightbown's first monograph on Botticelli. published in 1978, was immediately recognized as the definitive work on the subject, one that thoroughly deline- ated his life and work and disentangled many of the enigmas associated with his remarkable body of painting. The cleaning and restoration of many of the master's most famous works, which began in 1978, has necessitated a reassessment of his remarkable technique and dazzling use of colour, and has provided a splendid opportunity for Lightbown to revise his landmark study.

While this new edition performs the important task of analyzing recent scholarly advances, it also presents for the first time a full complement of colour reproductions of every one of Botticelli's autograph painting - over 200 illustrations in all. Ronald Lightbown begins by describ ing Botticelli's family, early life and apprenticeship to Fra Filippo Lippi, and then goes on to discuss the develop- ment of the painter's career, his emergence as an indepen- dent master and his stay in Rome (1481-2) to paint frescos in the newly completed Sistine Chapel. The author focuses particularly on the artist's relationship with the Medici as well as other prominent Florentine families, and concludes with a discussion of the intense, highly-wrought paintings of his last years. Every aspect of Botticelli's art is examined and illustrated: from devotional works such as frescos and altarpieces to portraits, from illustrations to Dante's Divine Comady to representations of classical myth. The author relates the works to the complex and contradictory culture
of fifteenth-century Florence, a society that combined worldly pageantry with piety, classical learning with vernacular vigour. Specially commissioned photographs of the Sistine frescos and other newly-cleaned masterpieces reveal Bot- ticelli's vibrant use of colour as never before. A selection of his drawings, workshop pictures, and paintings by such contemporaries as Fra Filippo Lippi complete this remarkable, definitive study.

With 225 illustrations, 217 in colour

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0500092060
• ISBN 13: 9780500092064
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 340