Eisler (NYU Institute of Fine Arts) brings the connoisseurship of a lifetime to the study of the 15th-century Venetian Bellini. He reproduces the 40 extant paintings by this luminous artist, but the bulk of the book is a detailed examination of his two famous sketchbooks, one in the Louvre (reproduced in color) and the other in the British Museum (reproduced in infrared black and white). The sketchbooks are treated thematically and are fully illustrated in excellent plates. Because Eisler is completely at home in Renaissance Venice, readers will find themselves at home there, too. There is an extensive scholarly apparatus and an excellent index that makes navigation through the extremely heavy and unwieldy volume straightforward. Excellent, but at the price, for scholarly collections.-- Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson & Burnham Libs., Art Inst. of Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
Pioneer of the early Renaissance style in 15th-century Venice, Bellini worked with a fervor and immediacy never before seen in northern Italian art. His surviving paintings--deeply expressive Madonnas, murals, altarpieces--balance the physical and metaphysical and fuse Gothic, Byzantine and Renaissance elements in strikingly personal ways. A magnificent visual feast and a monumental feat of scholarship, this study by New York University art professor Eisler brings together for the first time all of Bellini's known paintings and some 300 drawings, newly photographed for this volume. Bellini's noble lions and cheetahs glow in the new light of humanism; his nudes are frank affirmations of being; his story-telling pictures are cinematic; and his wide-angled panoramas of cityscapes, funerals, chivalrous adventure and everyday activities capture Venetian life in its astonishing diversity. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
CHOICE Review
This luxuriously produced monograph will be out of financial reach of many libraries. This is unfortunate, given Bellini's critical position in Venetian art as a bridge between the late gothic and Renaissance styles. Eisler's style is a discursive one, not unlike Bellini's in the Louvre and London notebooks, which provide most of the material for Eisler's discussion of the artist's career. Yet, embedded in his text is a wealth of information about Venice and the history of Venetian painting during the early years of the 15th century. Eisler organizes his material topically with chapters on such issues as genre, the antique, and the Bible as a way of making sense of the disparate nature of Bellini's drawings and the paucity of other extant works. One appendix contains a catalogue raisonne of Bellini's work and another a list of documents and dates; it is here that scholars may wish to concentrate their attention. In a book as weighty as this one it is surprising to find that not all documents relating to Bellini's life were completely transcribed. Other appendixes contain technical information about the two drawing books, a brief essay about Bellini and manuscript illuminations and printmaking, and an extensive bibliography. There are 118 superb color plates as well as a large number of good black-and-white illustrations. -J. T. Paoletti, Wesleyan University
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BookPublisher: New York : Harry N. Abrams, 1989Description: 560 p. : ill. ; 34 cm. + hbk.ISBN: 0810907275.Subject(s): Bellini, Iacopo, approximately 1400-approximately 1470 -- Catalogues raisonnes | Artists -- Italy -- Biography | Painting, Italian