Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects
A New Translation and Critical Edition

This is the first complete translation of the biographies of fifteen artists, including Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Poussin, written by the seventeenth-century antiquarian Giovan Pietro Bellori.

Hellmut Wohl (Edited by), Alice Wohl (Edited and translated by), Tommaso Montanari (Edited by)

9780521139540, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 16 November 2009

516 pages, 42 b/w illus.
27.6 x 21.5 x 2.9 cm, 1.17 kg

'Giovan Pietro Bellori's language has found its match in Wohl's translation… We shall all learn from reading this intelligent and skilful translation.' Burlington Magazine

This is the first complete translation of the biographies of fifteen artists, including Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Poussin, written by the seventeenth-century antiquarian Giovan Pietro Bellori. Originally conceived as a continuation of Vasari's famous Lives, it is a fundamental source for seventeenth-century Italian art and artistic theory, providing detailed descriptions of extant and lost works of art, while casting light on the cultural politics of contemporary Rome and the relations between Rome and France. The importance of Bellori's Lives lies in the scrupulous documentation of artists, many of whom he knew personally; the author's detailed descriptions of their works; and his exposition of the classicist theory of art in the introductory lecture, the Idea. This volume contains the twelve Lives published in the original edition of 1672 and three Lives (Guido Reni, Andrea Sacchi, and Carlo Maratti) that survive in manuscript form and that were published for the first time in 1942.

Foreword
Introduction
Note on the illustrations
1. Dedication
2. To the reader
3. Philostratus the Younger
4. The idea of the painter, the sculptor and the architect
5. Life of Annibale Carracci
6. Life of Agostino Carracci
7. Life of Domenico Fontana
8. Life of Federico Barocci
9. Life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
10. Life of Peter Paul Rubens
11. Life of Anthony van Dyck
12. Life of Francois Du Quesnoy
13. Life of Domenico Zampieri, il Domenichino
14. Life of Giovanni Lanfranco
15. Life of Alessandro Algardi
16. Life of Nicolas Poussin
17. Life of Guido Reni
18. Life of Andrea Sacchi
19. Life of Carlo Maratti.

Subject Areas: Painting & art manuals [WFA], Biography: arts & entertainment [BGF], Art forms [AF], The arts: general issues [AB], The arts [A]