Italian Frescoes: The Baroque Era, 1600-1800

The fifth and final volume of the only comprehensive survey in modern times of the surviving Italian frescoes from the Baroque era, 1600 to 1800, this groundbreaking work is an achievement in scholarship and publishing of the same magnitude as Abbeville's Art of Florence and Art and Spirit of Paris.

Following the success of the previous volumes in this extraordinary Italian Frescoes series — The Age of Giotto; The Early Renaissance; The Flowering of the Renaissance; and The High Renaissance and Mannerism — this new publication features twenty–five fresco cycles, each representing a notable achievement in the history of art. The fresco cycles presented include brilliant works by Domenichino, Sebastiano Ricci, Guercino, and Tiepolo—all of them still visible on walls and ceilings of palaces and churches spanning Italy from Venice to Naples.

The authors present such celebrated sites as the Barberini Palace in Rome and the Pitti Palace in Florence, as well as lesser–known gems. Each of the chapters is concise and authoritative, offering a descriptive and interpretive essay on all aspects of the fresco cycle, covering the artists and their patrons in the context of their cultural and political history. Each essay concludes with a diagram of the site, followed by a series of full– and double–page color plates showing the entire cycle, many reproduced from new photographs of recently restored frescoes.

No publisher until now has attempted to gather together and document all the important fresco cycles of Italian art from the late thirteenth to the eighteenth century. While this volume is a continuation of the previous books, Italian Frescoes: The Baroque Era certainly stands alone as an incredible treasury of art and scholarship that will be eagerly collected by art historians and art lovers alike.