Perfection : The Essence of Art and Architecture in Early Modern Europe - Beau Livre

Whether a painting. a sculpture, or a building, works of art in early modern Europe must achieve the highest degree of perfection. If in the Middle Ages perfection is mostly perceived as a technical quality inherent in craftsmanship — a quality that can be judged according to often unspoken criteria agreed upon by the members of a guild—from the fifteenth century onward perfection comes to incorporate a set of rhetorical and literary qualities originally extraneous to an making.
Furthermore, perfection becomes a transcendent, undefinable quality : something that cannot be measured or understood only in terms of craftsmanship. In the Baroque period, perfection into obsession as a result of the emergence of historical models of artistic evolution in which perfection is already historically embodied — in the first place, Vasari'a investiture of Michelangelo as a universal canon for painting, sculpture, and architecture.
This volume aims to define, analyze, and reassess the concept of perfection in the arts and architecture of early modern Europe. What is perfection ? What makes a work of an unique, emblematic, or irreplaceable ? Does perfection necessarily relate to individuality ? Is the perfect work connate with or independent from its author ? Can perfection be reproduced or represented ? How do artists react to perfection ? How do post-Vasarian models of art history come to menus with perfection ? To what extent perfection in early modern Europe is the matter of rhetoric, literary theories, theology, and even experimentation ?