Oskar Bätschmann - Böcker

In this highly original and innovative study of Nicolas Poussin, one of seventeenth-century Europe's greatest artists, Oskar Bätschmann presents a series of connected studies that offer new ways of interpreting the work and ideas of this brilliant and complex figure. This superbly illustrated book is a polemical challenge in a field of art-historical research that has often lost its way in insoluble disputes and erudite details.

Although the idea of a collective audience for art – an ‘art public’ – is highly significant in the art world, this is the first book to enquire into the actual history of the art public. The book explores both written and pictorial evidence of its behaviour, and disentangles the connections between art production, the expectations of the audience and a work’s reception.Two aspects shape the narrative: first, the transformation of the audience from passive recipient to active agent; and second, the mockery of the audience by satirists such as George Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson, Honoré Daumier and many others. This sweeping account moves from the Greek artist Apelles to Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, and from Oscar Wilde to film stars, art tourists and leading art museums and galleries worldwide.

Hailed as the ‘saviour’ of Venetian painting by Jacob Burckhardt and declared by Albrecht Dürer to be the foremost painter of the city, Giovanni Bellini is a pivotal figure in the development of Italian Renaissance art. With Giovanni Bellini, renowned art historian Oskar Bätschmann charts the fraught trajectory of Bellini’s career, highlighting the crucial works that established his far-reaching influence in the Renaissance.The artist struggled to break out of the long shadow cast by his accomplished father Jacopo and father-in-law Andrea Mantegna, and Bätschmann chronicles Bellini’s development of distinct aesthetic and painting techniques that enabled him to set himself apart. Bellini also insisted on choosing his own subjects and themes, independent of the preferences of his patron Isabella d’Este, and thus set new standards for the role of the artist.Anchoring the analysis are a wealth of vibrant colour reproductions that include such famous works as The Feast of the Gods and Madonna and Child, as well as photographs of Bellini’s lauded altar-pieces at the churches of San Giobbe, Murano and San Zaccania. Drawing on these masterpieces, Bätschmann argues that Bellini’s artistry and skillful blending of colours created a new aesthetic more akin to music than to previous approaches to painting. And by leading viewers to understand this subtle, refined sensibility, Bellini transformed them into knowledgeable admirers of art. A beautifully illustrated and expansive study, Giovanni Bellini is essential for all historians and admirers of Renaissance art.