Small and frequently exquisite images painted on wood panels, glass, and parchment between 1300 and 1450 by five generations of artists in Florence are the focus of this book.

Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence 1300-1450

Arts & Photography

Kanter, Laurence B.

Boehm, Barbara Drake

Kanter, Laurence

History & Criticism

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This beautiful book, published in conjunction with the first major exhibition of Fra Angelicos work since the cinquecentenary exhibition of 1955 in Florence, will feature more than seventy paintings, drawings, and manuscript illuminations covering all periods of the artists career, from round 1410 to 1455. Also included will be fifty selected works by his assistants and closest followers.Fra Angelico (the angelic friar; ca. 1390/95-1455) was one of Renaissance Florences leading painters. In addition to his celebrated altarpieces and frescos in Florence, Fiesole, Cortona, Perugia, and Rome, Fra Angelico also completed many masterpieces on a small scale. His predella panels, the small narrative scenes included beneath large altarpieces, are among the most innovative creations in fifteenthcentury Florence, while his images of the Virgin and Child still retain the inspirational immediacy and presence that first secured the artists reputation

Fra Angelico (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series)

Palladino, Pia

Individual Artists

Richard L. Feigen has amassed a collection of Italian paintings that is widely admired for its depth and quality, especially for the works it features by the principal masters of the early Italian Renaissance. This beautifully illustrated catalogue of the complete collection presents rare masterpieces by artists from Bernardo Daddi to Fra Angelico, Orazio Gentileschi€™s Danaø«, Annibale Carracci€™s Virgin and Child, and precious, small-scale coppers by major Mannerist and Baroque masters.Italian Paintings from the Richard L. Feigen Collection catalogues more than fifty major works from the 14th to the 17th century, and is the first publication of this remarkable and important collection.

Italian Paintings from the Richard L. Feigen Collection

Marciari, John J.

Yale University Press

Saint James Freeing Hermogenes, an important painting by one of the world’s most beloved Renaissance artists, was privately owned and rarely seen until two decades ago, when it was acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum. Now an eminent authority reviews previous studies on this beautiful Fra Angelico painting and draws on new technical and archival research to provide a more precise reconstruction of its original format and context. In analyzing this painting, Laurence Kanter reexamines and confirms Fra Angelico’s status as a pioneer of the new representational style championed in Florence in the early fifteenth century by Brunelleschi, Masaccio, and Donatello, and he shows why he was one of the great artistic minds of his age. Kanter presents both detailed information for students and an introduction for the general reader to the methods and procedures of reconstructing and interpreting history when little contemporary written testimony survives.

Reconstructing the Renaissance: "Saint James Freeing Hermogenes" by Fra Angelico (Kimbell Masterpiece Series)

Kimbell Art Museum

The frames created in Italy during the Renaissance are unequaled in their range of design, richness of decoration, and craftsmanship. Often works of art in themselves, they have suffered nonetheless from their subordinate role. The objects framed might be treasured but the frames were expendable, and frequently they were altered or discarded to keep pace with changes in taste over succeeding generations. The result of such neglect is that comparatively few Renaissance frames survive and little is known today about the artists and artisans who designed and made them. The study of Italian Renaissance frames, as of frames in general, is a study in its infancy.Drawing on the outstanding collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this book presents a unique, fully illustrated survey that traces the Italian frame from its origins in the great Gothic altarpieces through its various, often elaborate manifestations as an independent unit up to the seventeenth century. Within this chronological context, selected examples are grouped by type, and centers of production are identified wherever possible. Profile drawings provide specialist information. The discussion includes frames for mirrors as well as pictures and reliefs, and bronze and terracotta frames as well as wood.(This title was originally published in 1989/90.)

Italian Renaissance Frames

Newbery, Timothy J.

Bisacca, George

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

Christiansen, Keith

STREHLKE, Carl Brandon

Presents exciting, original conclusions about Leonardo da Vinci’s early life as an artist and amplifies his role in Andrea del Verrocchio’s studio This groundbreaking reexamination of the beginnings of Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) life as an artist suggests new candidates for his earliest surviving work and revises our understanding of his role in the studio of his teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488). Anchoring this analysis are important yet often overlooked considerations about Verrocchio’s studio—specifically, the collaborative nature of most works that emerged from it and the probability that Leonardo must initially have learned to paint in tempera, as his teacher did. The book searches for the young artist’s hand among the tempera works from Verrocchio’s studio and proposes new criteria for judging Verrocchio’s own painting style. Several paintings are identified here as likely the work of Leonardo, and others long considered works by Verrocchio or his assistant Lorenzo di Credi (1457/59–1536) may now be seen as collaborations with Leonardo sometime before his departure from Florence in 1482/83. In addition to Laurence Kanter’s detailed arguments, the book features three essays presenting recent scientific analysis and imaging that support the new attributions of paintings, or parts of paintings, to Leonardo.

Leonardo: Discoveries from Verrocchio's Studio: Early Paintings and New Attributions

Yale University Art Gallery

Italian Paintings at the Yale University Art Gallery: Volume 1: 1230-1420

Giorgio Vasari remarked that Luca Signorelli was "as famous a painter in Italy as any one has ever been." Mentored by Piero della Francesca, he developed a unique style which was characterized by violent and torturous movement of the figures and complex iconography. In this continuation of our successful Renaissance painters' series, Signorelli experts Tom Henry and Laurence Kanter offer a thorough consideration of the artist's entire body of painting in the first comprehensive treatment of his work.

Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings

Henry, Tom

Rizzoli

Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300-1450

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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