Grey cloth w/ gilt spine printing. grey illustrated dustjacket. xviii, 366

Grey cloth w/ gilt spine printing. grey illustrated dustjacket. xviii, 366 pp., many black and white illustrations. Issued in conjunction with a series of 1981-1982 exhibitions of drawings rendered by Italian artist and architect Gian Lorzeno Bernini (1598-1680), and from a group that "most likely came from the artist's own collection and represent some of the most important of his sculptural projects. [Bernini] dominated the artistic scene of seventeenth-century Rome. He was a brilliant sculptor and architect, as well as a painter and dramatist. His long career and the wide range of his draftsmanship, from preparatory sketches to finished studies and presentation drawings, are fully discussed in this volume. The 79 drawings from the Leipzig collection are illustrated, many of them actual size, and there are over 100 comparative illustrations. In the course of recent restoration, the Leipzig drawings were removed from a bound volume, revealing a number of studies on the versos of the sheets, most of whcih are illustrated here. Several drawings are published for the first time, and many are re-evaluated in terms of Bernini's working methods and in relation to the specific projects." (dj) With three essays by Irving Lavin, Pamela Gordon, Steven Ostrow, Sharon Cather, Linda Klinger, Nicola Courtright and Ilana Dreyer. Includes as appendices a statistical survey of Bernini's drawings and photomontage reconstructions of divided drawings in the exhibition.