Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy

Arts & Photography

Spike, John T.

History & Criticism

Univ of Washington Pr

Italian Baroque Paintings from New York Private Collections (Publications of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 14)

The description for this book, Italian Baroque Paintings from New York Private Collections, will be forthcoming.

Princeton University Press

Caravaggio and His World : Darkness and Light (THE ART GALLERY)

Capon, Edmund

Gardners Books

Bold and realistic, the narrative power of Masaccio's entire body of work is explored in this elegant volume. In just seven years before his death at the age of twenty-six, Masaccio (1401-1428) developed a fully naturalistic and dramatic style that inaugurated Renaissance painting. His best-known work is the fresco cycle in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence (painted with Masolino), one of the world's artistic landmarks. Recently restored, these frescoes - with all of Masaccio's other works - are shown in stunning detail in this volume. An opening essay places the painter in his historical and art-historical context, emphasizing Masaccio's innovations. The second part of the book presents two dozen important paintings in full-spread or full-page reproductions with enlarged details and annotated brief essays for each. The last section is an illustrated catalogue raisonne of all of Masaccio's works, from the frescoes on public view in the Brancacci Chapel to other panels in Europe and the United States. John T. Spike's lucid, authoritative text traces Masaccio's artistic development with particular attention to the artist's connection to Donatello and Brunelleschi. He proposes a new reading of the iconography of the influential Brancacci Chapel, and discusses the extent of Filippino Lippi's over-painting in the chapel, based on information gleaned from recent ultraviolet and infrared photography that appears in this volume. Comprehensive and engaging, this profusely illustrated exploration of Masaccio's genius opens new lines of inquiry that will be explored for decades to come.

Masaccio

Individual Artists

Abbeville Press

Called "Angelico" for his inimitable depictions of paradise, this artist (1400? -1455) and Dominican friar succeeded Masaccio as the foremost painter of the early Renaissance in Italy. Fra Angelico's painting has been beloved for centuries since as an emblem of the flowering genius of quattrocento Florence. In his engaging new appraisal, John Spike reveals the unexpectedly innovative qualities of Angelico's art, including his use of linear and geometric perspective (even before the publication of Leon Battista Alberti's famous treatise). Another of Angelico's inventions was the Renaissance altarpiece known as the sacra conversazione (sacred conversation), in which the Virgin and Child and saints, formerly each rigidly enclosed in separate panels, now gesture and relate to each other within a clearly unified space. Fra Angelico had a lifelong fascination with the written word, and as Spike persuasively demonstrates, the accuracy of his Greek, Latin, and Hebrew inscriptions reveal his participation in the linguistic studies that flourished in Florence and Rome in the first half of the fifteenth century. He created some of the most visionary and learned compositions of his century, from his Deposition for the private chapel of the humanist Palla Strozzi to the extensive commissions in Rome for the erudite Pope Nicholas v. In this volume Spike presents a major discovery: the secret program of the forty frescoes in the cells of the Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence. All previous studies of this artist had concluded that the subjects and arrangement of these frescoes, the artist's masterworks, were chosen at random, or by the friars themselves. Instead, as the author now shows, Fra Angelico drew upon the mystical writings of the early church fathers to construct a spiritual exercise organized into three ascending levels of enlightenment. The San Marco frescoes can finally be seen as not only the most extensive cycle of works by any single painter of this century, but indeed the most complete pictorial expression of Renaissance theology. With fresh insights that will influence studies of quattrocento art for years to come, Spike uses his perceptive eye and judicious readings of documents to reassess the works of Angelico, his masters, and his assistants. This essential volume contains an extensive essay on the artist's life and work, followed by large color plates with detailed discussions of individual works. Finally, a catalog presents the artist's oeuvre, as revised by the author's new attributions. With lavish details of Angelico's works and an up-to-date bibliography, this volume is not only a feast for the eyes but an indispensable resource for anyone interested in this critical period of the Renaissance.

Fra Angelico

Caravaggio

A leading expert on Caravaggio's life and work unveals this beautifully illustrated survey of the great painter's work, revealing his most famous paintings alongside his most shocking and controversial work.

Spike, Michele K.

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi Da

Every extant work by Caravaggio is reproduced in color in this lavish newly updated volume, the long-awaited result of more than 20 years of research by a leading authority on the artist. In an engaging and informed text, John T. Spike explores in detail Caravaggio's scandalous life and provocative work. Placing Caravaggio within the broad panorama of society and ideas at the turn of the 17th century, the author sets a richly detailed stage for an artist who has been called "the first modern painter." Caravaggio (1571-1610) reflected in his canvases his own desires and spiritual crises to an extent no one ever had imagined possible, and he shocked his contemporaries by portraying the saints and virgins of Christianity with the faces and bodies of his companions and lovers in Rome's demimonde. Accompanying the book is a critical catalog on CD-ROM in which all of Caravaggio's extant paintings, as well as lost and rejected works, are thoroughly described. Each entry specifies the work's medium, dimensions, location, and provenance, and provides an annotated bibliography of sources. Most of the entries conclude with a brief technical analysis. Much of this scientific data, of prime importance for attribution and dating, has not previously been published. With its fresh insights, as well as judicious readings of the documents and the physical evidence of the paintings themselves, Caravaggio is the most thorough study on the artist to date, and it will no doubt remain a definitive monograph for many years to come. This revised edition includes a new preface and updated bibliography.

Celebrates the life and career of the twentieth century realist who expressed radical views in his 1930's cityscapes as well as creating airy landscapes of Southhampton and Maine

Fairfield Porter

Biographies & Memoirs

Harry N. Abrams

Truly in a class of its own, Young Michelangelo is the most definitive and eye-opening study of the artist’s early life to come along in a generation.
 In this compelling account, renowned art historian John Spike paints a vivid portrait of one of the world’s greatest artists and the places and people—Lorenzo de’ Medici, Leonardo, Machiavelli—that inspired and defined his early life and career. Spike’s masterful text probes the thinking, evolution, and desires of a young man whose awareness of his exceptional talent never wavered. Michelangelo’s complex personality is revealed through lively examinations of the Pietà, the David, and all other major works. Drawing on a rich background of Italian Renaissance politics and culture, Spike deftly navigates the fiery Florentine master’s struggle to surpass da Vinci’s artistic mastery, and his troubled relationships with Julius II and other key figures of the era. Praise for Young Michelangelo: “Making the most of Michelangelo’s ample correspondence and the recently published records of his extensive banking transactions, Spike has drawn an astonishingly vivid portrait of the artist’s first 33 years. It's the best life of Michelangelo I've read, and it leaves one wishing the author would complete Michelangelo’s life with his wonderful grasp of the artist’s tenacious personality and Herculean achievement.” ~ Everett Fahy, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Tense and agile as an early sculpture, Young Michelangelo is a compelling portrait of the artist as a young man in a dangerous time.” ~ Peter Robb, Author of M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio "Spike crystallizes historical detail into vivid, memorable imagery. . . . Alternating between accounts of the turbulent political atmosphere and details of Michelangelo’s most private moments in the sculpture studio, Spike creates a rich narrative that promises more intrigue than the best adventure novel."—Publishers Weekly "Spike's original and valuable approach to studying [Michelangelo's] childhood, development, and reputation as one of the greats of the Renaissance provides a deeper understanding of such a wondrous, almost mythic figure. An essential book for Renaissance collections and devotees." —Library Journal “This erudite but immensely readable account is essential for anyone who desires to know more about Michelangelo’s formation.” ~ David Alan Brown, National Gallery of Art “Spike is a masterful weaver of disparate information into a synthetic narrative. He provides a rich web of the political, social, and personal contexts against which Michelangelo's early career unfolded.” ~ John Hunisak, Professor of Art &amp; Architecture, Middlebury College "Spike captures [Michelangelo's] magnetism, his drive and the sheer scale of his ambition.... A veteran biographer of Caravaggio, Masaccio and Fra Angelico, Spike relates Michelangelo's wanderings to his restlessness and the troubles of his era, from the rise of the fundamentalist preacher Savonarola in Florence to the many skirmishes provoked by Rome's bellicose Julius." ~ The Sunday Times "No art historian has got closer to [Michelangelo] than John T Spike. The Florence-based American, whose coup here is his access to the artist's recently published financial accounts and consequently enhanced understanding of his dealings with patrons, is an immensely flexible writer who has produced a book of alternating pans and zooms. . . . At the same time, however, the worldly dealings that Spike recounts, and his textured reconstruction of the times that his subject moved moodily through, make the artist seem more human than ever before. We're left with a Michelangelo who lived on earth as a man, but also had an element of the unearthly about him. . . . Though it probably only portends a trilogy, it's perhaps no accident that Spike's narrative ends in the artist's 33rd year." ~ The Telegraph "As John T Spike argues in this crisply thorough biography, Michelangelo Buonarroti, like so many men of talent, seems to have known his own worth almost from the moment he came into the world. . . . Certainly the man Spike gives us is an altogether more worldly figure than the agonised ecstatic served up by Irving Stone and Charlton Heston on the silver screen." ~ Daily Express "John T. Spike, an art historian, curator and critic, has done some impressive research to flesh out the early years of the artist's life, right up until his return to Rome in 1508 to focus on a commission in the Sistine Chapel. The young sculptor's daunting talent and quest to earn as much money as possible are woven into the story of the Italian Renaissance and the outsized figures of the age." ~ The Washington Post "Spike, a renowned art critic, curator, and author, is the first modern writer to create such a comprehensive account of the master's early life and rise to fame amid the political upheaval in the Papal States and Florentine Republic." ~ Art + Auction

Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine

Vendome Press

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

Books by Spike, John T.

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

Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy

Italian Baroque Paintings from New York Private Collections (Publications of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 14)

Italian Baroque Paintings from New York Private Collections (Publications of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 14)

Caravaggio and His World : Darkness and Light (THE ART GALLERY)

Masaccio

Fra Angelico

Caravaggio

Caravaggio

Fairfield Porter

Young Michelangelo: The Path to the Sistine