imaginative, rich in insights and exceptionally stimulating ... an admirable monograph which should invigorate Bellini studies ... an elegant volume which makes the products of many university presses look like desktop efforts The Art Newspaper offers a virtuosic analysis of the methods of one of the quattrocento's painterly superstars - Giovanni Bellini - but the general reader will perhaps gain most pleasure from Batschmann's insights into the fierce rivalries between artists, the chaos and clutter of the era's studios and workshops, and the hard-fought battles to secure patronage ... Oskar Batschmann is to be applauded for producing a scholarly yet passionate book and his publishers share their share of the plaudits for allowing it so many wonderful illustrations. The Tablet This splendid monograph is a thoughtful and carefully reasoned presentation of Bellini's career as an artist, with ancillary discussions of contemporary Venetian painting. Batschmann has amassed an extraordinary amount of information - historical, stylistic, bibliographical - in a generally chronological presentation of Bellini's career that covers not only the artist's life and production, but also reconstructions of some of his lost works and references to others that were critical in establishing the artist's reputation ... This book will interest not only students of Bellini, but also those who wish to understand the motivating factors in the history of Venetian Renaissance painting. Recommended. Choice A heavyweight and intellectually solid examination of the way in which architecture, once inseparable from sculpture and painting, was slowly divorced from art. Financial Times A strident mix of academic insight, wit and polemic, Rykwert's latest book, The Judicious Eye, makes a graceful contribution to his life's work. Architects' Journal ... a challenging work, gripping, yet sad and justly angry, on an important and little explored topic. Art Newspaper Are Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind architects, or sculptors on a colossal scale? That is a new version of a venerable question: is architecture art? Joseph Rykwert, one of the most distinguished architectural historians, starts his answer to this long-running controversy in the Enlightenment and carries it through with great erudition to the mid-twentieth century. RA Magazine Over seven dense and erudite chapters, Rykwert provides an account, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and ending in the 1950s, of the gradual loss of a world in which the arts achieved the kind of meaningful integration that properly dignified the public sphere. Despite the invocation of that 'public sphere' in the preface and conclusion, this is far from a sociological study. Rykwert gives the reader a fairly straightforward art historical overview, focusing on specific examples of individual architects, artists, movements, and the occasional theorist or figure from outside the visual arts, wide ranging, but all securely within the canon of 'advanced' European and North American art and architecture ... Oxford Art Journal The culminating work of one of our most distinguished architectural historians, The Judicious Eye represents a lifetime of contemplation and wise insight. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and profound book. Anthony Alofsin, author of When Buildings Speak
