Histoire DE LA Peinture

Histoire de la peinture en Italie is a work by Stendhal published in 1817, six years after the writer first conceived the idea in a letter dated October 25, 1811, in Bologna. Stendhal's initial aim was to present his readers with a manual on Italian painting. The book opens with a recontextualising historical introduction and then divides into seven books and one hundred and eighty-four chapters, all of which are, in reality, related to the Florentine school, the only one studied by Stendhal. In a pedagogical epilogue, the author finally proposes a fifty-hour course to quickly introduce readers to Italian painting. Although the book was designed to be a manual, the author indulges in personal comments on certain works of art, and rather than technically instructing his reader, as one might expect from reading a manual, it seems Stendhal primarily aims to teach them how to appreciate and feel the work of art.

When Stendhal undertook the writing of this work, he had not yet written a novel, yet one can discern characteristic traits of Stendhal's style that would later be recognised, such as the pleasure of storytelling, direct addresses to the reader, and the conversational aspect of his work.