Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the "Natural History" - Tapa dura

Winner of the 2014 Roland H. Bainton Prize in Art History, given by the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference. -- Roland H. Bainton Prize * Sixteenth-Cenutry Society and Conference * Shortlisted for the 2014 Phi Beta Kappa Award in the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Short Listed * Phi Beta Kappa Award * "The most useful and ambitious book I have read is Sarah Blake McHam's Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance. As much a work of reference as of narrative history, McHam's book spells out more comprehensively than ever before the afterlife of Pliny's histories of art."-James Hall, Times Literary Supplement -- James Hall * Times Literary Supplement * ". . .[I]t is the most extensive account in print of a relationship that is fundamental to the whole nexus of artists, patrons and public from the 14th century to the High Renaissance and beyond."-Leonard Barkan. The Art Newspaper -- Leonard Barkan * The Art Newspaper *

Pliny's Natural History (A.D. 77-79) served as an indispensable guide to and exemplar of the ideals of art for Renaissance artists, patrons, and theorists. Bearing the imprimatur of antiquity, the Natural History gave permission to do art on a grand scale, to value it, and to see it as an incomparable source of prestige and pleasure. In this magisterial book Sarah Blake McHam surveys Pliny's influence, from Petrarch, the first figure to recognize Pliny's relevance to understanding the history of Greek art and its reception by the Romans, to Vasari and late 16th-century theorists. McHam charts the historiography of Latin and Italian manuscripts and early printed copies of the Natural History to trace the dissemination of its contents to artists from Donatello and Ghiberti to Michelangelo and Titian. Meanwhile, benefactors commissioned works intended to emulate the prototypes Pliny described, aligning themselves with the great patrons of antiquity. This is a richly illustrated, comprehensive reference work of social history, myth making, iconography, theory, and criticism.