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A comprehensive re-assessment of Raphael's artistic achievement and the ways in which it transformed the idea of what art is.
List of contents
1. Universa pingendi ratio; 2. The systematicity of representation; 3. The rationalization of labor.
About the author
Robert Williams is Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton, under the supervision of John Shearman and is the author of Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge, 1997) and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction (2003) which has been translated into Chinese and Korean. Among his recent publications is Michael Baxandall, Vision, and the Work of Words (2015), co-edited with Peter Mack of the University of Warwick.
Summary
This book advances a set of hypotheses about the aims and aspirations of Italian Renaissance art in general and the nature of art-historical inquiry. It draws upon the history of literature, philosophy, religion and economic history, along with detailed and illuminating accounts of Raphael's major works.
Report
'... Williams's book is both monumental and important ... [his] account of Raphael is stimulating and challenging ... this is an important volume and one that will make Williams's voice heard for generations to come.' Christopher J. Nygren, Contemporaneity
