Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)
by: Andrea Bayer and Mina Gregori

Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art , 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 272 pages. Painters of Reality, titled after an exhibition held in Milan more than fifty years ago, is the first study in English of this major aspect of Italian art. It builds on the work of the art historian Roberto Longhi. Reexamining the subject in light of copious subsequent scholarship, the authors of this volume contribute major essays that define and discuss naturalism as it appeared in both Lombard paintings and drawings. There is also a fresh consideration of the North Italian predecessors whose influence is apparent either directly or indirectly, in the paintings of Caravaggio. More detailed discussions of the subject center on the precise elements that constituted Leonardo's "hypernaturalism": the important schools of paintings that arose in Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona, and Milan; and Caravaggio's most notable successors in northern Italy, who kept Lombard realism alive into the eighteenth century.Among the 136 paintings and drawings, many never before seen outside of Italy, are influential drawings by Leonardo and major paintings by Caravaggio. Other acknowledged masters in the history of European art are represented, including Lorenzo Lotto, Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Giovanni Battista Moroni, and Giacomo Ceruti. Works also appear from significant but less widely known artists such as Sofonisba, Anguissola, Vincenzo Campi, Moretto da Brescia, and Fra' Galgario.