Full Description
Paris Bordon: Not Without Honour is the first comprehensive book on the artist to be published in English and is thus an invaluable resource for Bordon scholarship worldwide. This lavishly illustrated study charts contemporary Venetian stimuli on Paris Bordon's art, commencing with his training in Titian's workshop. He drew upon Venetian, Central Italian, French, Netherlandish and Mantuan art and yet retained a style that was uniquely his. In turn, it assesses his own part in influencing painters further afield. It examines his eclectic genres and styles, from the sacre conversazioni to his ground-breaking architectural perspectives, and it thus seeks to pluck Bordon from the shadows where he has languished unjustifiably and to elevate him to the first tier of Venetian artists. During his lifetime, he spent more time in Venice than in his native Treviso, but, following the execution of his Fisherman Presenting the Ring to the Doge for the Scuola Grande di San Marco in 1534, he received few major commissions from institutions in Venice itself, perhaps owing to the machinations of Titian who had wrested Bordon's first public commission in 1518. He was sought after by patrons in the terraferma, Italy, Germany and France, and he is revered in Treviso, the city of his birth.The significance of the book's sub-title is that Bordon was, and is, honoured elsewhere but not in the city where he had spent his childhood and much of his adult life.
The format of the book is eight chapters. The first chapter provides a historical and historiographical background. The remaining chapters explore his religious works, his portraiture - including his belle donne - his mythologies and architectural perspectives. The final chapter contains the results of research on works by Bordon which were looted or misappropriated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Napoleonic period until the Second World War. The appendices include a register of documents and comparative accounts of the Life of Paris Bordon by Giorgio Vasari (1568) and Carlo Ridolfi (1648), translated into English.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 THE HISTORICAL AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
1. The Historical Framework
2. Bordon's Historiography
2 THE EVOLUTION OF HIS RELIGIOUS WORKS: 1
1. His Stylistic Formation: Titian's Workshop
2. The Early Religious Works: The Sacre Conversazioni
3 THE EVOLUTION OF HIS RELIGIOUS WORKS: 2
1. The 1540s Onwards: Changes in Subject Matter and Style
2. The Glory and the Decline
4 THE ALTARPIECES
5 THE PORTRAITS
1. Portraits Until 1540
2. The 1540s Until the 1560s
3. The Erotic Portraits
6 THE MYTHOLOGIES
1. The Small Panel Paintings
2. The Early Mythologies
3. The 1550s
4. The 1560s
7 THE ARCHITECTURAL PERSPECTIVES
8 SUSPECT PROVENANCE AND LOOTED ART
CONCLUSION
APPENDICES:
1) List of Bordon works, copies and attributions
2) Register of documents
3) Comparison of Giorgio Vasari and Carlo Ridolfi's accounts
Archives
Primary sources
Secondary sources
List of images and copyrights
Bibliography
INDEX
