The Renaissance Cartoons of the Accademia Albertina

A sublime compendium of drawings from the school of Renaissance virtuoso Gaudenzio Ferrari

This book presents the 16th-century cartoons of Northern Italian Renaissance artist Gaudenzio Ferrari (c. 1471–1546) and his students, who largely practiced in a style that combined elements of Milanese realism and Venetian color palettes in painting and sculpture. Donated in 1832 to the Pinacoteca dell’Accademia Albertina in Turin by King Charles Albert of Savoy, this collection of drawings has been carefully preserved through several centuries to arrive, reproduced in high resolution for the first time, within the pages of this volume. Nearly 60 preparatory drawings of varying sizes provide insight into the processes behind paintings by Ferrari and many of his students, who would go on to become significant figures themselves, such as Bernadino Lanino, Gerolamo Giovenone and Giuseppe Giovenone the Younger. These documents give readers a glimpse into what art education looked like in the Renaissance era, long before the arrival of modern fine arts academies.