The Rise of the Image reveals how illustrations have come to play a primary part in books on art and architecture. Italian Renaissance art is the main focus for this anthology of essays which analyse key episodes in the history of illustration from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The authors raise new issues about the imagery in books on the visual arts by Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea Palladio, Girolamo Teti and Andrea Pozzo. The concluding essays evaluate the roles of reproductive media, including photography, in Victorian and twentieth-century art books. Throughout, images in books are considered as vehicles for ideas rather than as transparent, passive visual forms, dependent on their accompanying texts. Thus The Rise of the Image enriches our understanding of the role of prints in books on art.

Contents: Introduction, Rodney Palmer; 17th-century illustrations for the chapters on motion in Leonardo's Trattato, Juliana Barone; 'The outer man tends to be a guide to the inner': the woodcut portraits in Vasari's Lives as parallel texts, Sharon Gregory; 'Of little or even no importance to the architect': on absent ideals in Serlio's drawings in the sixth book on domestic architecture, Vaughan Hart; 'Brevity without obscurity': text and image in the architectural treatises of Daniele Barbaro and Andrea Palladio, Robert Tavernor; 'The beauty and majesty of images': Pietro da Cortona's Barberini Ceiling in Teti's Aedes Barberinae, Thomas Frangenberg; 'All is very plain, upon inspection of the figure': the visual method of Andrea Pozzo's Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum, Rodney Palmer; Photography in 19th-century art publications, Anthony Hamber; 'Still a makeshift'?: Changing representations of the Renaissance in 20th-century art books, Valerie Holman; Index.