Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 184 pages, maroon cloth with a lightly worn dust jacket. Previous owner's signature, pencil notes on front end paper. Otherwise clean. These studies concern the development in the Renaissance of a new perspective on the past, a new method for interpreting the meaning of the documents of the past, and a reformulation of traditional doctrine that history was philosophy teaching by example.
Softcover. Torino IT, Claudiana, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, laminated wrappers, 526 pages, b&w illustrations. ITALIAN TEXT. Labels inside covers, from university library but like new, never checked out.
Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st US, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 440 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket and slipcase. Full color and black & white illustrations. Beautiful copy with light sunning to dust jacket spine, Clean, tight copy. The technical problems with the Last Supper began as soon as Leonardo started to paint it. He jettisoned the traditional fresco technique of applying paint to wet plaster, a method unsuited to Leonardo's slow and thorough execution, and created the work instead with an experimental technique that involved painting directly on the dry plaster. With this renegade method, Leonardo rendered one of the most enduring painting techniques volatile and unstable. Added to this initial complication have been centuries of pollution, tourists, candle smoke, and the ravages of age, not to mention food fights in the refectory staged by Napoleonic soldiers and Allied bombs in 1943. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Last Supper was in desperate need of a complete restoration. Pinin Brambilla Barcilon was chosen to head this twenty-year project, and Leonardo, The Last Supper is the official record of her remarkable effort. It first documents the cleaning and removal of the overpainting performed in the other attempts at restoration and then turns to Barcilon's meticulous additions in watercolor, which were based on Leonardo's preparatory drawings, early copies of the painting, and contemporary textual descriptions. This book presents full-scale reproductions of details from the fresco that clearly display and distinguish Leonardo's hand from that of the restorer. With nearly 400 sumptuous color reproductions, the most comprehensive technical documentation of the project by Barcilon, and an introductory essay by art historian and project codirector Pietro C. Marani that focuses on the history of the fresco,
Softcover. NY, W. W. Norton , reprint, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 339 pages. In Felix Gilbert's skilled analysis, the figures of Niccolo Machiavelli, whose writing changed the way people think about politics, and Francesco Guicciardini, whose History of Italy is one of the first classics of modern historical writing, provide important clues to interpreting the Renaissance. "Instead of treating these two great figures in isolation, Professor Gilbert puts them into the context of their times, into the stream of political thinking and historical writing of which they were a part. . . .His book is the fruit of years of writing of which they were a part. . . .His book is the fruit of years of original research among Florentine archives and of careful thought about the problems of Renaissance politics and historiography." Clean, bight copy.
Hardcover. NY, Viking , 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 282 pages. Black & white maps, plans and illustrations. Documents the experiences of late-Renaissance Venetian nuns, many of whom were upper-class women immured against their will, exploring how convents of the period were often political hotbeds and the sites of illicit love affairs in their resident's efforts to find fulfillment. Clean copy.
