Il piacere di scegliere

Clair, Canfora, Rosenberg: master thinkers face off on the question of fakes

This volume collects the masterful and memorable interventions of the workshops “The mirror of reality. Fakes and history of art”, organised by the Federico Zeri Foundation in Bologna in 2013.

The Rise and Fall of King Paintin

The astonishing adventures, rise and fall of King Paintin', a visual artist who combines Art with Ethics, at a time when such mix leaves people cold. This all happens behind the scenes of the Italian art system, a microcosm, an aristocratic circle in which one can find all one needs: social status, success, love and money.

The exciting re-apparition of a Piffetti

This unique, inlaid chest of drawers tells the story of a commission by the Piedmontese aristocracy and has recently been added to the list of workds by Pietro Piffetti (1701-1777), the eminent Italian cabinet-maker.

A fundamental reference work

This book is the “museum” of Piedmontese furniture from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th century, the apogee of Italian cabinet-making. More than one thousand colour images enable a close-up view each piece and its details. Baroque, Neo-classical, and 19th-century Piedmontese furniture is highly prized by scholars, museums and collectors.

The most original Lombard of the 16th century

Giulio Cesare Procaccini (Bologna 1574 - Milan 1625), son and pupil of Ercole Procaccini the Elder, is one of the most original personalities of Lombard painting of his time. Starting out as a sculptor and plasterer, he devoted himself to painting with highly successful results.

Renaissance majolica: a priceless collectionItalian maiolica is a uniquely vivid and intimate reflection of the world of the Renaissance. This book is the catalogue of the world's most substantial private collection of Renaissance maiolica. Starting with some fine pieces from the fifteenth century,...

The depravity of Nazi sculpture

In its public buildings, the Nazi party wanted to display both sculpture and architecture with imposing grandiosity.The works of the leading sculptors of the Third Reich...

The revised definitive work on the great Genoese painter Bernardo Strozzi

Bernardo Strozzi was known as one of the greatest painters of his time, not only in his native city but also, as a fugitive, in Venice, where he became the most widely esteemed artist of the lagoon territory.

A mysterious, fascinating, tough, and uncompromising sculptress

Following Soutine and Chagall, disseminators of the multilingualism typical of Jewish communities before the rise of Nazism, this extraordinary sculptress appeared in Italy...

The most successful painter of baroque Rome

This is the first complete monographic study of Giacinto Brandi, was born in 1620 in Rome, where he died in 1691. In both his life and his artistic career, Brandi seems to have embodied the image we have of 17th-century Rome, a period both luminous and shadowy, spectacular and contradictory.

The most artistic street in the world

Five centuries of history in which the protagonists are artists, painters, sculptors, photographers, fashion designers, poets, actors, directors, and architects coming from four continents to a single location: Rome, Via Margutta. On this magical street they have created masterpieces, living and working in the ateliers with their large windows.

Drawings by a master of the Late Baroque in Bologna and Italy

Of the vast body of graphic work by Donato Creti, one of the most talented and successful draughtsmen of 18th-century Europe, and of his drawings (of “such beauty, and perfection”) that were sought after and collected throughout Europe, his first biographer, Giampietro Zanotti, wrote with particular enthusiasm and admiration in History of the Accademia Clementina (Bologna, 1739)

An all-Venetian star of the 19th century

Son of painter Guglielmo Ciardi, Beppe Ciardi (born in Venice in 1875) received his education not just from his maternal grandfather, Gian Francesco Locatelli, who painted classical-style portraits: when he was still a young boy, he started working with his father in the studio in San Barnaba, before learning how to paint the human form with Ettore Tito at the Accademia di Belle Arti.

The magnificence of Palazzo Colonna photographed by Massimo Listri

“The superb gallery, perhaps even more beautiful than that of Versailles, and filled with delightful pictures, is supported by immense columns of ancient yellow marble, which divide the gallery into two at the ends; the king's gallery is longer and more ornate, but it is also more august.