Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi

Father and daughter Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi were unusual and gifted artists. Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) was the most talented follower of Caravaggio and a figure of international renown, active at the courts of Marie de' Medici in France, Charles I in England, and in Rome, Genoa, and Turin. Artemisia (1593– 1652/3) was the first Italian woman artist who was not only praised for her art by her contemporaries but whose paintings influenced the work of later generations. She is today a key figure in gender studies. Essays by an international group of art historians not only explore the development of each of these two painters individually but also compare their work, showing how both were influenced by their times and milieus. The book also includes new transcriptions of key parts of the notorious rape trial of Artemisia.

Arts & Photography

Christiansen, Keith

Christiansen et al., Mr. Keith

Mann, Judith W.

History & Criticism

Metropolitan Museum of Art

From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master

In this fascinating book, Fra Carnevaleheretofore a mysterious, quasi-legendary figureemerges as a well-defined and pivotal artist in Renaissance Florence. In presenting their case, the authors take the reader from the workshop of Filippo Lippi in Florence to Urbino, capital of Federico da Montefeltro’s duchy in the region of the Marches. It was a road most memorably traveled by Piero della Francesca, who worked in Florence in 1439 and became Federico’s favorite artist. This book shows that other lesser known artists like Fra Carnevale also took the same path.
Among the many other artistspainters and sculptorscrucial to Fra Carnevale’s formation and discussed in this volume are Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia, Pesellino, and Agostino di Duccio. Essays by Keith Christiansen, Andrea De Marchi, and Matteo Ceriana and a documentary appendix by Andrea Di Lorenzo and Matteo Mazzalupi transform our knowledge of this exciting moment in the history of Renaissance art.

In 2004 the Metropolitan Museum acquired an extremely rare and beautiful Madonna and Child by the great painter Duccio di Buoninsegna. Duccio, who died in 1318, has long been recognized as the father of Sienese painting, and he fostered a new generation of talented and innovative painters. In art history textbooks, however, his considerable contribution to European painting is often overshadowed by the work of his contemporary Giotto. Christiansen examines the fascinating connection between Giotto and Duccio, which he likens to Michelangelo’s relationship with Raphael, or Picasso’s with Matisse, and explains the particular qualities that make Duccio such an essential artist.

Duccio and the Origins of Western Painting

Few artists have managed to imprint their personality so indelibly on posterity as Andrea Mantegna (c. 1430–1506). Before he reached the age of twenty, Mantegna was already being praised for his alto ingegno (exalted genius), and he became the court artist for the Gonzaga family in Mantua before he was thirty. Yet, this book argues, Mantegna was not simply a great painter. Together with Donatello, he was the defining genius of the 15th century: the measure of what an artist could be. His highly original and deeply personal vision, the descriptive richness of his pictures, and his biting, hypercritical but always exalted mind gave Mantegna’s art an extraordinary edge and earned him a preeminent place in the Renaissance.

The Genius of Andrea Mantegna

The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini

In the words of cultural historian Jacob Burkhardt, fifteenth-century Italy was "the place where the notion of the individual was born." In keeping with that idea, early Renaissance Italy was a key participant in the first great age of portraiture in Europe. As groundbreaking artists strove to evoke the identity or personality of their sitters—from heads of state and church, military commanders, and wealthy patrons to scholars, poets, and artists—they evolved daring new representational strategies that would profoundly influence the course of Western art. More than a mere likeness, the fifteenth-century Italian portrait was an attempt to wrest from the unpredictability of life and the shadow of mortality and image that could be passed down to future generations. 
The Renaissance Portrait, which accompanies a landmark exhibition at the Bode-Museum, Berlin, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, provides new research and insight into the early history of portraiture in Italy, examining in detail how its major art centers—Florence, the princely courts, and Venice—saw the rapid development of portraiture as closely linked to Renaissance society and politics, ideas of the individual, and concepts of beauty. Essays by leading scholars provide a thorough introduction to Renaissance portraiture, while individual catalogue entries illustrate and extensively discuss more than 160 magnificent examples of painting, drawing, manuscript illumination, sculpture, and medallic portraiture by such artists as Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, and Giovanni Bellini. With abundant style and visual ingenuity, these masters transformed the plain facts of observation into something beautiful to behold.

This book tells the story of Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca (1411/13–1492) by focusing on four paintings he created over the span of his career. It also provides the first study of his small-scale devotional paintings, including the exquisite Saint Jerome and a Donor. One of today’s most prominent scholars narrates the painting’s mysterious history and uncovers new insights gleaned during its recent study and restoration. The authors explore the relationship between this painting and other works made by Piero for private devotion, including one of his last and most striking paintings, the magnificent Madonna di Senigallia. New research describes the complex relationships between Piero and his patrons and other contemporaries. This book brims with revelatory details about Piero’s work that will intrigue both casual readers and devoted fans of the artist, and will form a gateway to a larger analysis of Piero’s overall body of work.

Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters

This beautifully produced volume brings together for the first time works by two remarkable painters of seventeenth-century Italy who happen also to have been father and daughter: Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Famous in their own day, these two artists have enjoyed renewed fame in the twentieth century: Orazio as one of the first and certainly the most individual of Caravaggio's followers; Artemisia as the outstanding female painter prior to the twentieth century. The tumultuous lives of these two artists moved along parallel trajectories and take the reader from the popular quarters of papal Rome and the rough-and-tumble world of Naples to the courts of the grand duke of Tuscany, Marie de' Medici in Paris, and Charles I in London. These changing circumstances nourished two different aesthetic visions, both of which were deeply rooted in the Caravaggesque practice of painting directly from the posed model. While Orazio's art became every more refined and elegant, Artemisia espoused a rhetorical form of dramatic presentation that is the basis of Baroque painting. Written to accompany the landmark exhibition held in Rome, New York, and Saint Louis, the book includes essays that describe the art and people the two painters encountered in the course of their peripatetic careers and address such issues as feminism and the critical interpretation of Artemisia's work. The essays, arranged chronologically to follow the artists as they moved from city to city, not only provide critical commentary but illuminate the historical context in which they worked. The appendices include previously unpublished documents relating to the trial of Orazio's colleague Agostino Tassi for his rape of Artemisia, which shed new light on her father's workshop practice, and a recently discovered inventory of Artemisia's household goods drawn up on the eve of her departure from Florence to Rome. The book is the work of Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, with contributions by a team of outstanding scholars. [This book was originally published in 2001 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

This first comprehensive study in English devoted to Sienese painting to be published in four decades centers on the fifteenth century, a fascinating but frequently neglected period when Sienese artists confronted the innovations of Renaissance painting in Florence. The painters of Siena, without betraying their heritage of the previous century―which had produced some of the greatest artists of all time, including Duccio, Simone Martini, and Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti―succeeded in adapting their artistic traditions to a new and completely original vision, rejecting many of the norms by which subsequent generations have come to define Renaissance art. These later Sienese artists frequently took a nonrational approach, seeking not to replicate nature, but to explore a more subjective world―one that in some respects is akin to that of twentieth-century art. The result is one of the most singular schools of Italian painting, which must be viewed on its own terms and understood within the religious and social framework of fifteenth-century Siena.
 Two introductory essays survey fifteenth-century Sienese painting, and individual entries examine 139 key works in exhaustive detail, presenting new insights into long-debated issues of interpretation and attribution, and often utilizing previously unpublished material. Most of the major paintings are reproduced in color and are supplemented with illustrations of related comparative works. The focus is on the reconstruction of narrative cycles from major altarpieces by Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo, the Master of the Osservanza, Matteo di Giovanni, and Benvenuto di Giovanni, among others, and the entry on Giovanni di Paolo's well-known panels illustrating the Life of Saint Catherine of Siena establishes a new basis for appreciating one of the greatest visionary works of Renaissance art.
 In presenting this impressive body of material, the authors have given Sienese painting of the Renaissance the attention it deserves, providing a basis for all future research on the subject. Keith Christiansen, curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the author of a monograph on Gentile da Fabriano, as well as of numerous articles on Italian Renaissance painting. Laurence B. Ranter, curator of the Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is co-author of the catalogue of Italian paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection. Carl Brandon Strehlke, curator of the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is currently writing a catalogue of Italian paintings in the Johnson Collection and has published articles on Sienese painting. The catalogue concludes with an extensive bibliography and an index. [This book was originally published in 1999 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500

STREHLKE, Carl Brandon

Kanter, Laurence

Gentile Da Fabriano

Cornell Univ Pr

This beautiful series lavishly illustrates the world's major fresco cycles from the early fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Each book also contains a comprehensive text, a biography of the artist, a bibliography, and a glossary.

Andrea Mantegna: Padua and Mantua (The Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)

George Braziller, Inc.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Christiansen, Keith. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Christiansen, Keith

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Christiansen, Keith. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi

From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master

Duccio and the Origins of Western Painting

The Genius of Andrea Mantegna

The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini

Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters

Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi

Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500

Gentile Da Fabriano

Andrea Mantegna: Padua and Mantua (The Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)