Domenico Beccafumi

This is the first comprehensive monograph in the English language devoted to the Italian Renaissance master Domenico Beccafumi (1484-1551). The full range of this highly versatile artist's work -- paintings, sculptures and mosaics -- is examined in detail, and shown and discussed in the context of his life in sixteenth-century Siena.In his celebrated Lives, the historiographer Giorgio Vasari gives a valuable contemporary (1568) account of the Sienese master, depicting a fanciful, singular, yet level-headed painter who appears as the founder of Italian Mannerism, a model of balanced strangeness. The present book explains many of the incongruities scattered throughout Beccafumi's work: the curious details and anecdotes concealed in otherwise orthodox compositions, the bizarre landscapes and figures, the strange actions. It also provides a context for the distinctive qualities of traditional Sienese painting, which Beccafumi's work both revolutionized and, paradoxically, reinforced.