Lives of Rubens (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781606066232)

Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688) was a German Baroque art historian and painter active in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age. He was known as an accomplished painter of genre scenes and became a famous portraitist. However, he is best known as an author of books on art, especially for his historical work, Teutsche Academie, published between 1675 and 1680, which is a compilation of short biographies of artists that was inspired by Karel van Mander's similar Schilder-boeck. Both Sandrart and van Mander based their Italian sections on the work of Giorgio Vasari.

Roger de Piles (1635-1709) was a French painter, engraver, art critic, and diplomat. He was secretary to the French ambassador to Venice and while there started a famous collection of prints, drawings, and paintings by Giorgione, Correggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, and others. While imprisoned in the Hague for carrying a false passport, he wrote L'Abrégé de la vie des peintres avec un traité du peintre parfait (Summary of the Lives of Painters, with a treatise on perfect painting) published in 1699. In his Dialogue sur le coloris, he initiated his famous defense of Rubens in a discussion of the relative merits of drawing and color. In his last published work, Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres (1708) Piles listed fifty-six painters and graded each on composition, drawing, color, and expression. He gave Raphael the highest marks on drawing, and Rubens the best score on use of color. Bellini, Giorgione and Caravaggio received poor scores on everything but color.