Ben Thomas, Reader in History of Art, has just published a new book on Raphael, co-edited with Catherine Whistler of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Raphael: Drawing and Eloquence presents a series of original insights from leading experts into the great Renaissance artist, that originate from the series of interdisciplinary research workshops that supported the Ashmolean’s award-winning exhibition Raphael: The Drawings in 2017. The essays in this volume, published by the Accademia Raffaello in Urbino, all develop in different ways the claim of that exhibition that a focus on Raphael’s drawings as material objects that are eloquent in themselves reveals a less classical, more approachable and emotional artist. For some authors the detailed technical analysis of the drawings has led to new discoveries about the layered approach to design that these fragile sheets of paper embody, while others have explored what the drawings signified in a culture saturated with rhetorical concepts.
The book contains contributions by: Ben Thomas, Marzia Faietti, Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro, Angelamaria Aceto, Catherine Whistler, David Love, Ita Mac Carthy, Christian K. Kleinbub, and former Kent Phd student Alexandra Kocsis.
A virtual book launch will take place at the Italian Cultural Institute in London on Monday 21 December at 5pm.