Volume 35, Number 20 · December 22, 1988
The Eyewitness Style
By Charles Hope
Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio
by Patricia Fortini Brown
Yale University Press, 310 pp., $45.00
Large numbers of pictures were produced in Italy from at least 1300, but Italians began to write extensively about art only in the sixteenth century. This development coincided with the growth of private collections, particularly the princely galleries of painting and ancient sculpture that were the predecessors of modern museums. The qualities that collectors and critics then admired in works of art are easy enough to discover, both because the criticism is so abundant and because it is relatively consistent in character. A much more difficult task is to establish what Italians thought and said about paintings in the fifteenth century. Certainly they expected pictures to be beautiful, and they admired artistic skill, but it is far from clear how they assessed such qualities.
Review, 3618 words
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