Milan: Bompiani, 703 pp., L100,000 (An English translation, Renaissance Venice and the North, will be published by Rizzoli in December.
The idea of dividing art into distinct 'schools,' usually centered on a single city, such as Venice or Florence, or on a restricted geographical area, such as Flanders or Lombardy, goes back to the early seventeenth century and still survives to the present day. This approach has an obvious validity in that it is normally easy enough to recognize where a particular work was produced, but often much more difficult to decide who made it, because artists in each city or region tended to acquire stylistic characteristics from their teachers and then worked for patrons who often had rather fixed ideas about what they wanted. But even if not to the extent that this happens today, artists, patrons, and works of art themselves have often traveled, so no artistic school is ever entirely isolated.
Review, 4214 words
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