This up-to-date, well-illustrated, and thoughtful introduction to the life and works of one of the giants of Western Painting also surveys the golden age of Venetian Painting from Giovanni Bellini to Veronese and its place in the history of Western art. Bruce Cole, Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University and author of numerous books on Italian Renaissance art, begins with the life and work of Giovanni Bellini, the principal founder of Venetian Renaissance painting. He continues with the paintings of Giorgione and the young Titian whose work embodied the new Venetian style. Cole discusses and explains all of Titian's major works--portraits, religious paintings, and nudes--from various points of view and shows how Venetian painting of this period differed from painting in Florence and elsewhere in Italy and became a distinct and fully-developed style of its own.

In these essays, Ingrid Rowland explores topics in the art and culture of Renaissance Italy.

Argues that the Bard was actually Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, in a portrait that identifies the earl as a courtier, scholar, and prolific ghostwriter whose life events mirrored and inspired themes in Shakespeare's plays.

Organized chronologically from early Renaissance precursors to the Mannerist movement, from Giotto to Titian, Key Monuments of the Italian Renaissance describes and analyzes in depth from various points of view major works and major artists, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Artists included are Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, Lorenzetti, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Massaccio, Gentile da Fabriano, Uccello, Rossellino, Castagno, Piero della Francesca, Alberti, Botticelli, G. Bellini, Verrocchio, Mantegna, G. Sangallo, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Bramante, Raphael, Giorgione, and Titian. The Florentine Renaissance, the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome, and High Renaissance Painting in Venice are covered. Includes a glossary, a bibliography of works cited, and suggested readings.

Extends formalism to facture and situates the materiality of Titian's later works within the late sixteenth-century interest in embodiment and violence rather than within the Renaissance ideals of classicizing beauty and perfection.

This Companion volume brings together commissioned essays by an international team of scholars on Giovanni Bellini, the dominant painter of Early Renaissance Venice. Among the topics and themes to be discussed are Bellini's position in the social and professional life of early modern Venice; his artistic relationships with his brother-in-law Mantegna, with Flemish painting, and with the 'modern style' that emerged in Italy around 1500; and the connections between Bellini's paintings and the sister arts of architecture and sculpture. Further essays reassess the artist's approaches to landscape and color, elements that have always been recognized as central to his pictorial genius.