Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1672)—An important source for the biographies of the Italian Baroque's most famous artists.

Vincenzo Carducho, Dialogues on Painting (1633)—Written in Spanish by a native Italian artist, this collection of dialogues between a master and his students argues for the high status of painting as one of the liberal arts.

Denis Diderot, Essay on Painting (1765)—One of the Enlightenment's most important thinker's musings about the nature of good art. The work is particularly critical of Rococo conventions popular at the time, and argues that good art must not violate the standards of humankind's common sense.

Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy, The Art of Painting (1667)—Although a painter, Du Fresnoy is best remembered for this influential treatise on aesthetics in which he argues that beauty must be the prime consideration of any...