Andrew Ladis begins his book with Giorgio Vasari’s famous story of Giotto’s O, in which the artist drew a perfect circle freehand, baffled Pope Benedict XI’s foolish messenger, and demonstrated his artistic brilliance to those qualified to understand. The fundamental premise of Ladis’s work is that the Arena Chapel, like Giotto’s mythical O (or tondo), must be understood as a complete, unified whole. He tells us, “the cycle of murals in the Arena Chapel has a depth that underpins the whole, an unpretentious profundity manifested in a formal order, and as in the case of the O, one must have the wherewithal to discern Giotto’s achievement beyond the directness and emotional power of the narrative.” Ladis does not write about the program from the more expected standpoints of patronage or audience, or via extensive analysis of archival source material. Instead, without discounting the former approaches, Ladis considers Giotto’s conception of the Arena Chapel in terms of biblical exegesis, a central geometry, and what he sees as the program’s carefully planned symmetry. He urges the viewer to abandon the temporal narrative and follow “visual cues that encourage readings that transcend narrative time,” and so he moves through a discussion of Giotto’s frescoes, offering new insights about particular passages and continually considering how the meaning of each section resonates with others throughout the chapel.

Giotto's O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel

Arts & Photography

Ladis, Andrew

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Edgewear to dustjacket and boards.

The Brancacci Chapel Florence (Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)

George Braziller

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568) has been a key subject of study for students of the Italian Renaissance over the hundreds of years since its publication. It has maintained a powerful grip on the historical imagination and continues to influence the way scholars treat the Renaissance, its artists, and the entire intellectual enterprise of Western art. Focusing on Vasari's literary and narrative achievements, Andrew Ladis turns to Vasari's villains, rather than his heroes, to demonstrate the biographer's foremost interest in glorifying Michelangelo. Approaching Lives on Vasari's terms--as the grand story of the rebirth and triumph of art in Italy--Ladis argues that Vasari was not a mere compiler of facts, but a shrewd, self-confident author aware of the power of metaphor. With a literary reading of the text, Ladis analyzes Vasari's motives and methods as an attempt to portray the great Michelangelo as a Christlike exemplum of ultimate light and goodness. Through biographic details both real and invented, Vasari presents all other artists as various players with varying degrees of heroic and villainous value. Antiheroic characters such as Buffalmacco, Lippi, and Castagno, Ladis argues, serve to accentuate the contrasting greatness of Michelangelo.

Victims and Villains in Vasari's Lives (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

The University of North Carolina Press

In this collection of nine essays some of the preeminent art historians in the United States consider the relationship between art and craft, between the creative idea and its realization, in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The essays, all previously unpublished, are devoted to the pictorial arts and are accompanied by nearly 150 illustrations. Examining works by such artists as Michelangelo, Titian, Volterrano, Giovanni di Paolo, and Annibale Carracci (along with aspects of the artists' creative processes, work habits, and aesthetic convictions), the essayists explore the ways in which art was conceived and produced at a time when collaboration with pupils, assistants, or independent masters was an accepted part of the artistic process.
The consensus of the contributors amounts to a revision, or at least a qualification, of Bernard Berenson's interpretation of the emergent Renaissance ideal of individual "genius" as a measure of original artistic achievement: we must accord greater influence to the collaborative, appropriative conventions and practices of the craft workshop, which persisted into and beyond the Renaissance from its origins in the Middle Ages. Consequently, we must acknowledge the sometimes rather ordinary beginnings of some of the world's great works of art--an admission, say the contributors, that will open new avenues of study and enhance our understanding of the complex connections between invention and execution.
With one exception, these essays were delivered as lectures in conjunction with the exhibition The Artists and Artisans of Florence: Works from the Horne Museum hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art in the fall of 1992.

The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop

Wood, Carolyn

Univ of Georgia Pr

Taddeo Gaddi: A Critical Reappraisal and a Catalogue Raissone

Univ of Missouri Pr

This publication includes essays on the life and art of Gerald Brockhurst, one of the 20th century's great printmakers and draftsmen, and an analysis of the women featured in his work. Brockhurst, celebrated for his sophisticated renderings of the women in his life, is known for his portraits of the celebrities and "society" figures of his era. This first large-scale U.S. exhibition of the artist's prints, drawings, and etchings epitomizes the elegance associated with the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. A catalogue of exhibited works is also included.

The Art of Gerald Brockhurst

Phagan, Patricia

Brumbaugh, Thomas B.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Univ of Georgia Georgia Museum

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (1550, 1568) has been a key subject of study for students of the Italian Renaissance over the hundreds of years since its publication. It has maintained a powerful grip on the historical imagination and continues to influence the way scholars treat the Renaissance, its artists, and the entire intellectual enterprise of Western art. Focusing on Vasari's literary and narrative achievements, Andrew Ladis turns to Vasari's villains, rather than his heroes, to demonstrate the biographer's foremost interest in glorifying Michelangelo.Approaching Lives on Vasari's terms--as the grand story of the rebirth and triumph of art in Italy--Ladis argues that Vasari was not a mere compiler of facts, but a shrewd, self-confident author aware of the power of metaphor. With a literary reading of the text, Ladis analyzes Vasari's motives and methods as an attempt to portray the great Michelangelo as a Christlike exemplum of ultimate light and goodness. Through biographic details both real and invented, Vasari presents all other artists as various players with varying degrees of heroic and villainous value. Antiheroic characters such as Buffalmacco, Lippi, and Castagno, Ladis argues, serve to accentuate the contrasting greatness of Michelangelo.

Humor & Entertainment

This volume brings together Ladis' writings produced during the last twenty years. The principal theme is the relationship between form and meaning but papers also discuss patronage, workshops and some of the main Florentine and Sienese artists, especially Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Masaccio.

Studies in Italian Art

Pindar Press

Pindar Pr

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

Books by Ladis, Andrew

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

Giotto's O: Narrative, Figuration, and Pictorial Ingenuity in the Arena Chapel

The Brancacci Chapel Florence (Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)

Victims and Villains in Vasari's Lives (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop

Taddeo Gaddi: A Critical Reappraisal and a Catalogue Raissone

The Art of Gerald Brockhurst

Victims and Villains in Vasari's Lives (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

Studies in Italian Art

Studies in Italian Art