Jacopo Bellini. The Louvre Album of Drawings. Introduction by Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt. Translated from the German by Frank Mecklenberg.

Umschlag leicht berieben, sonst gutes Exemplar. - The album of Jacopo Bellini, now located in the Louvre, is one of the outstanding legacies of the Venetian Renaissance to have survived to the modern day. The majestic drawings constitute a seminal collection of the artist's pivotal contributions to the formation of an indigenous Venetian Renaissance style in the mid-fifteenth century. The complete album is presented here for the first time, in full color, reproduced to scale and in the order the authors believe the artist himself determined. The pioneering study of Professors Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt finally allows us to appreciate the full meaning and enormous importance of Jacopo Bellini's disegno in the Renaissance. Dated to the 1430s-1450s, the album appears to be a series of studies in space and form, using religious, classical and secular themes. Bellini's interest in perspective and the portrayal of objective reality demonstrate his spectacular discoveries of new artistic possibilities. While he simultaneously relied on many of the conventions of Venetian medieval and Byzantine art, it is his awakening to the inventions of the early Renaissance Florentines that makes this collection of drawings an extraordinary art historical document and gives the artist his pride of place in Venetian fifteenth century art. Most of the drawings are in brown ink, but traces of other media, such as silverpoint and tempera, add to the elegance of the images. ISBN 0807610976