CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/24/2021

Happy Holidays from Artbook | D.A.P.!

Painted circa 1490, "Virgin and Child (Madonna dei Cherubini Rossi)" is reproduced from Giovanni Bellini: An Introduction, authored by noted scholar of Venetian Renaissance painting Peter Humfrey and published by Marsilio Editori. One of our Staff Pick Holiday Gift Books for Art Historians, this beautifully-illustrated, 288-page hardcover traces Bellini’s personal artistic development among a family of painters within the historical context of the Italian Renaissance and western European painting. "Bellini’s feeling for the expressive power of light and color, and for the poetry of landscape, established these as central characteristics of the Venetian school of painting for another three centuries," Humfrey writes. "His constantly evolving style was matched by constant technical innovation, and his gradual abandonment of the traditional pictorial technique of egg tempera on panel for oil on canvas was crucial for the history of all of western European painting. His compositions show an unerring sense of balance between form and interval, and between generalization and the most exquisite detail. At the same time, he communicates his predominantly religious subject matter with exceptional spiritual depth. Several of Bellini’s paintings count, in fact, among the greatest works in all of Christian art."