The History of Venetian Renaissance Sculpture, Ca. 1400-1530: Text and comparative illustrations

Book excerpt: As the first comprehensive treatment of Venetian sculpture of the early Renaissance in nearly a century, this book examines the documents, literary sources, and oeuvre of all Venetian sculptors in stone, bronze, and wood between the decoration of the crowning of San Marco at the beginning of the fifteenth century and the artistic revolution wrought by Jacopo Sansovino from ca. 1530 on. Its text pays particular attention to the style of individual works, to their physical and artistic context, their sources and their influence, and synthesizes forty-five years of attentive looking, of research in archives and libraries of the Veneto, and hundreds of photographic campaigns throughout Italy and as far afield as Croatia and Poland - many from specially mounted scaffolds. The introduction treats general questions of material, purpose, patronage, the origin of sculptors, their workshop practices and the structure of guilds, while the conclusion considers ways in which Venetian sculpture was unique. There is no aspect of the subject to which the author has not contributed major discoveries and her book, with its 800 illustrations, should constitute a work of reference long into the future.