This ambitious exhibition catalog explores the shifting ideas of beauty, ugliness, idealization, and caricature in Renaissance art, tracing how artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries transformed physical appearance into a subject of intellectual, moral, and artistic inquiry.
Bringing together works from both the Italian Renaissance and the Northern European tradition, the publication examines how artists navigated the tension between ideal beauty and exaggerated realism. Through paintings, drawings, and portraits, the catalog reveals how fascination with the human face and body evolved into new visual languages of expression, satire, symbolism, and psychological observation.
The volume features works by major Renaissance masters including Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Titian, Tintoretto, Lorenzo Lotto, and Quentin Matsys. Richly illustrated and supported by scholarly essays, the catalog places Renaissance concepts of beauty and deformity into a broader cultural and historical framework.
Published by Bozar Books and Mercatorfonds, this hardcover volume is both a substantial work of Renaissance scholarship and a visually compelling exhibition publication for collectors, researchers, and readers interested in Renaissance portraiture, aesthetics, and the history of representation.
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