The "Academy" of Baccio Bandinelli

The Villa Belvedere, built for Pope Innocent VIII (1484-1492) on the summit of Monte Sant’Egidio north of St. Peter’s and the Vatican Palace (Fig. 39, p. 71), is the earliest building in Rome to present fully all the characteristics of the Renaissance villa. In terms of its function it is, of course, not the first Roman villa, for this...

Coursing throughout the bedrock of regionally oriented art literature are contesting veins of discourse. For Dolce and his Dialogo, varietà culled from various locales and artists can potentially be praiseworthy because it exhibits the painter’s knowledge of the foreign. Yet judgment and the sense of decorum which control varietà can easily falter, pushing an artist’s style into the domain of the ridiculous. And like Vasari, Dolce installs a steadfast surveillance of geographic borders, with …

King of Naples until he was ousted by Alfonso of Aragon in 1443, René d’Anjou held a high reputation as a painter. In his Cronaca rimata the Urbino court painter Giovanni Santi wrote that ‘in our time the aged King René / Painted better than many who are famous’, citing him as an example comparable with painters of high social status recorded in classical times. Another example is Baldassare d’Este, the Ferrarese painter and medallist, if he was indeed, like Duke Borso d’Este, an …

Max Lehrs, the scholar who brought order to the history of German and Netherlandish engraving, took it for granted that the earliest intaglio prints were thought of primarily as workshop models and patterns; he considered it unlikely that they could have been much esteemed as valuable objects in their own right. Much the same conclusion can be drawn for Italian prints of the fifteenth century. Lehrs’s view still seems well founded, in part because it establishes a convincing parity between …