ART HISTORY IN THE AGE OF BELLORI: SCHOLARSHIP AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ROME, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2002, 396 pp.

Giovan Pietro Bellori is a name familiar to all who have studied seventeenth-century Italian art. His magisterial book, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni), published in Rome in 1672, continued in the grand tradition of artists' biographies established by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century, while at the same time espousing a classical theory of artistic creation that has often been seen as the foundation of academic classicism, popular well into the nineteenth century. He is, in other words, an immensely significant figure, as a source of information on artists' lives, and, more importantly, as a cogent, early spokesperson for one of the dominant aesthetic modes of Western European culture.

Giles Knox
History of Art Department
Indiana University, Bloomington