BIBLIOGRAPHY
It is an advantage to the student of Italian art to be able to read French, German, and Italian, for though translations appear of the most important works, there are many interesting articles and monographs of minor artists which are otherwise inaccessible.
Vasari, not always trustworthy, either in dates, facts, or opinions, yet delightfully human in his histories, is indispensable, and new editions and translations are constantly issued. Sansoni’s edition (Florence), with Milanesi’s notes, is the most authoritative; and for translations, those of Mrs. Foster (Messrs. Blashfield and Hopkins), and a new edition in the Temple classics (Dent, 8 vols., 2s. each vol.).
Ridolfi, the principal contemporary authority on Venetian artists, who published his Maraviglie dell’ arte nine years after Domenico Tintoretto’s death, is only to be read in Italian, though the anecdotes with which his work abounds are made use of by every writer.
Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s Painting in North Italy (Murray) is a storehouse of painstaking, minute, and, on the whole, marvellously correct information and sound opinion. It supplies a foundation, fills gaps, and supplements individual biographies as no other book does. For the early painters, down to the time of the Bellini, I Origini dei pittori veneziani, by Professor Leonello Venturi, Venice, 1907, is a large book, written with mastery and insight, and well illustrated; La Storia della pittura veneziana is another careful work, which deals very minutely with the early school of mosaics.
In studying the Bellini, the late Mr. S. A. Strong has The Brothers Bellini (Bell’s Great Masters), and the reader should not fail to read Mr. Roger Fry’s Bellini (Artist’s Library), a scholarly monograph, short but reliable, and full of suggestion and appreciation, though written in a cool, critical spirit. Dr. Hills has dealt ably with Pisanello (Duckworth).
Molmenti and Ludwig in their monumental work Vittore Carpaccio, translated by Mr. R. H. Cust (Murray, 1907), and Paul Kristeller in the equally important Mantegna, translated by Mr. S. A. Strong (Longmans, 1901), seem to have exhausted all that there is to be said for the moment concerning these two painters.
It is almost superfluous to mention Mr. Berenson’s two well-known volumes, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, and the North Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Putnam). They are brilliant essays which supplement every other work, overflowing with suggestive and critical matter, supplying original thoughts, and summing up in a few pregnant words the main features and the tendencies of the succeeding stages.