Product Synopsis

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870. Excerpt: ... No. IX. LIFE OF RAPHAEL. For more than two centuries every account of the life and labours of Raphael may be said to have been derived, with little material alteration, from Vasari. It would be unjust to so pleasing a narrator to attribute this solely to the indolence of the writers who succeeded him; indeed modern critics, without excusing the occasional inaccuracies of the Florentine biographer, have acknowledged that his just and artist-like criticism, and the naivete and interest of his details, as far as they go, could scarcely be improved. It was, in short, chiefly owing to Vasari's well-earned reputation that the task of revising and, what was far more difficult, of completing the valuable outlines he had left, was so long--unfortunately too long--deferred. Of the more voluminous accounts of the Italian painters which have appeared within the present century, the greater part, however embellished by the de Review of J. D. Passavant's " Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi, in zwei Theilen mit Vierzehn Abbildungen. Leipzig, F. A. Brockhaus, 1839." Quarterly Reviewj No. cxxxi. June, 1840. scription of works of art, or enlivened by the connexion with general history, can scarcely be said to have contributed any additional facts. To this class belong the lives of Raphael by Duppa, Braun, and Quatremere de Quincy:--the Italian translation of the last, overwhelmed as it is with notes not always remarkable for their importance or correctness, may nevertheless be considered the fullest memoir that had appeared prior to the far superior work of Passavant. The credit of instituting a new kind of research in the history of art, as opposed to the habit of copying Vasari, is perhaps due in the first instance to Pungileoni. The first volume of his Li...