The Endless Periphery

With Lorenzo Lotto's quest for commissions outside the centres of Venice, Florence and Rome as his starting point, Campbell explores Renaissance painting and networks of patronage in the regions of Italy. --Rebecca Zorach, author of Gold: Nature and Culture Apollo In recent years no scholar has done more than Stephen Campbell to illuminate crucial aspects of Italian Renaissance art. Even so, his brilliant new book, The Endless Periphery, dramatically stakes out new territory, offering a detailed, comprehensive, culturally sensitive, and visually acute reading of Italian painting in the age of Lotto, Moretto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, and Titian (the order of names is significant)--one that overthrows prevailing ideas about the very nature of sixteenth-century Italian art as it has come down to us at the hands of a Vasari-influenced art history. --Michael Fried, J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities and the History of Art The Endless Periphery provides a startlingly new view of the central decades of the Italian Renaissance. With deep erudition and an acute eye for detail, Stephen Campbell pries the Renaissance out of the stranglehold of Giorgio Vasari's Florentine chauvinism, which has defined the hierarchies of traditional art history since he first published his Lives of the Artists in 1550. Setting aside old assumptions about where great art can be created, Campbell invites us to see a rich landscape of artistic production in which astute artists of tremendous talent forged complex dialogues and conceptual geographies, responding to one another across the peninsula, from Sicily to Rome to Rimini to Bergamo--and many stops in between. --Rebecca Zorach, author of Gold: Nature and Culture