Early Italian Painting
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Oscillating between the majesty of the Greco-Byzantine tradition and the modernity predicted by Giotto, Early Italian Painting addresses the first important aesthetic movement that would lead to the Renaissance, the Italian Primitives. Trying new mediums and techniques, these revolutionary artists no longer painted frescos on walls, but created the first mobile paintings on wooden panels. The faces of the figures were painted to shock the spectator in order to emphasise the divinity of the character being represented. The bright gold leafed backgrounds were used to highlight the godliness of the subject. The elegance of both line and colour were combined to reinforce specific symbolic choices. Ultimately the Early Italian artists wished to make the invisible visible. In this magnificent book, the authors emphasise the importance that the rivalry between the Sienese and Florentine schools played in the evolution of art history. The reader will discover how the sacred began to take a more human form through these forgotten masterworks, opening a discrete but definitive door through the use of anthropomorphism, a technique that would be cherished by the Renaissance.
Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300-1450
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Published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, November 1994 to February 1995. Four extended essays explore several aspects of illuminated books by five generations of artists in Florence. The catalogue section includes 55 entries on 110 works of art, accompanied by 296 illustrations, about half in color; each entry includes a descriptive commentary, a provenance, and references. Because many illuminated books were cut apart and disseminated into different collections, a goal of the exhibition was to reconstruct disassembled books, in some cases for the first time. 10x12" Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Cimabue
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Duccio
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Duccio Di Buoninsegna
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The Library of Great Masters is a series of 27 paperback books on the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Each book is 80 pages (8 1/4 x 11 ") and contains approximately 100 color illustrations of very high quality including both full page and many details. Review "...each volume in the Library of Great Masters provides succinct historical and biographical information about the artist and his work, accompanied by approximately 100 color plates including many full-page (8-1/4 x 11 inch) reproductions. These color-rich and finely-detailed books are excellent introductions to the lives and work of remarkable and enduringly influential Renaissance artists and contain substantially more examples of their paintings and sculptures than a chapter on Italian art in a standard art-history textbook. And the price can't be beat." -- Booklist, 12/15/94.
Giotto
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Giotto
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Giotto is famous as the first name in European painting since antiquity, and that he breathed new life into what was still considered nothing more than another craft, rather than a creative art. Giotto was born around 1265, and one his most famous works, where the first clear signs of the nature of his artistic revolution are to be found, are the frescoes in the Upper Church at Assisi, which include the St. Francis cycle. Giotto examines the work and techniques of this painter, from the turning point of his early career in Assisi, and the new technique of fresco painting he introduced, and his use of architectural settings to create pictorial depth and reflect contemporary Italian architecture.
The World of Giotto
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Simone Martini
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Very little is known about the life of Simone Martini; but it is thought that he was born around 1284, in Siena, and that he probably learnt his trade in the workshop of Duccio di Buoninsegna. He found fame with his painting of the Maesta in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, in 1315. Simone Martini explores what is known and can be surmised about the life of this painter: This book shows reproductions of his paintings in full colour, including the cycle of ten episodes from the life of St. Martin.
c.1326
works
The Decameron
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The Decameron (c.1351) is an entertaining series of one hundred stories written in the wake of the Black Death. The stories are told in a country villa outside the city of Florence by ten young noble men and women who are seeking to escape the ravages of the plague. Boccaccio's skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in these vivid portraits of people from all stations in life, with plots that revel in a bewildering variety of human reactions.
Lamentation
