Bravura: Virtuosity and Ambition in Early Modern European Painting

(Hardback)

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The first major history of the bravura movement in European painting The painterly style known as bravura emerged in sixteenth-century Venice and spread throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. While earlier artistic movements presented a polished image of the artist by downplaying the creative process, bravura celebrated a painter's di

Reviews

"Suthor invigorates this subject in myriad ways, not least by the sheer verve of her writing and the ambition of her project. The book is itself a bravura performance, galloping through several centuries of European art history with considerable wit and erudition."---Alexander Marr, Apollo Magazine
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[A] pioneering book. . . . this brilliant and well-illustrated book confirms that bravura was one of the most cognitively demanding techniques of Renaissance painting. The brilliance of Suthors analysis lies in her fresh terminology and perceptive language of description of even the smallest and most easily overlooked details of composition, and in her critical ability to relate such intricacies to larger issues taken up in paintings and in criticism. She writes in engaging, precise language, and makes persuasive connections with contemporary art criticism and modern aesthetics and cultural theory.

"---Goran Stanivukovic, Renaissance and Reformation
"Bravura surveys the breadth of meaning that bravura conveys, probing the subtleties of the concept from multiple viewpoints. . . . This breadth, which makes it possible to see patterns and similarities over centuries and national boundaries, is refreshing in our age of narrowly defined specialist studies and helps us see the consistency over longer periods in European art, something that is often lost in our focus on differences. . . . [Suthors] skill at integrating theory and practice is commendable and provides a service to the theorists and biographers who were artists themselves, reminding those who would study paintings in isolation from the ideas valued by their makers that they do so at serious peril."---Janis Bell, Renaissance Quarterly

Author Bio

Nicola Suthor is professor of art history at Yale University. She is the author of Rembrandts Roughness (Princeton).