Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bernini Details
Review “In Rudolf Preimesberger’s Paragons and Paragone, we have a book to celebrate. . . . Just as Preimesberger shows how artists signal their competition with the ancients, their peers, and other media, he likewise reveals his own agonistic ends, as seemingly unyielding visual mysteries give way to the subtleties of his mind and pen.”―Renaissance Quarterly Read more About the Author Rudolf Preimesberger is professor emeritus at the Freie Universität Berlin. Read more
Reviews
The Getty Research Institute has published a set of five essays by Rudolf Preimesberger in Paragons and Paragone. The essays explore the artistic rivalry promoted by writers that weighed heavily on the minds of artists in the early modern era. Emerging from this discourse was the breeding ground for some of the most enigmatic pieces of the Renaissance. Preimesberger approaches the issue through an internal reading of the puzzling achievements of Raphael, Jan van Eyck, Bernini, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. The essays were published over the course of twenty-five years with the most recent essay on Caravaggio originally presented at the Getty Research Institute in the 2002-2003 academic year. The compilation of these translated texts in their sequential order offers an illuminating look at the visual and often silent polemics of this debate. The brilliancy of Preimesberger's deep engagement with works that continue to test the established notions of virtuosity is itself a break from the existing early modern scholarship. Paragons and Paragone is a gift to non-German and Italian readers. The ideas presented in his book are complex and multifaceted; the excellent translations are testimony to the exquisite level of scholarship provided by Rudolf Preimesberger.
