Moral Essays on the High Renaissance consist of critical essays on the art and thought of major figures of sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance art. Looking at these artists from an ethical point of view, these provocative essays set out to discover and describe the moral basis of High Renaissance art. Important areas of focus include the paintings and sculpture of Michelangelo, the artistic style and sense of the life of Raphael, and the ethical approach of the Cinquecento biographer Giorgio Vasari. Consideration is given also to the worldly, graceful art of Leonardo da Vinci and the painterly hedonism of the Venetians. The volume concludes with a semi-autobiographical essay that restates the underlying moral principles behind the earlier chapters. The book is well illustrated with numerous black-and-white reproductions of important works of High Renaissance art and architecture.