Edited by Peter M. Lukehart, 2009

This volume reexamines the establishment and early history of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, one of the most important centers of governance, education, and theory in the arts for the early modern period and the model for all subsequent academies of art worldwide.

Eleven essays by an international group of historians, archivists, and art historians provide the most comprehensive history of the Accademia to be published in more than forty years, and the first in nearly two hundred years to be based almost entirely on primary and documentary material. The authors examine the institution’s founding and development through unpublished documents as well as reinterpretation of technical materials and theoretical treatises. In so doing, they also provide new means for following the progress of the most significant artists—in addition to a host of lesser-known painters, sculptors, and architects—who were working in Rome in the early seventeenth century. 

Published by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.