Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays by Leo Steinberg

"This is the third and final volume dedicated to Steinberg's writings about early modern art. (There will also be two centered on modern art.) This volume collects Steinberg's best essays and unpublished lectures about early modern artists and sites ranging from his superb, ground-shifting texts on the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez to an amusing essay on his visit to the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, which houses artistic treasures by such luminaries as Bramante, Sansovino, Raphael, Pinturicchio, Sebastiano del Piombo, Carracci, Caravaggio, and Bernini. The other essays are, with one or two exceptions, mainly about Italian masters. The content is quite diverse, and perhaps for this reason this volume is the most pleasurable so far. Steinberg exercises his wit to good effect, and these essays, though frequently dazzling with insight, read as rather more lightly composed than those surrounding Steinberg's grand obsession, Michelangelo"--