This book examines and explains the appearance, function and uses of painting in one of the day's most important cultural centers. Monks from the Camaldolese house of Santa Maria degli Angeli had access to some of the most innovative paintings produced in Florence between 1350 and 1425. Leading painters of the day, like Nardo di Cione and Lorenzo Monaco, filled manuscripts and decorated altars with richly ornamented pictures that related directly to liturgical passages recited - and theological positions embraced - by members of the institution.
Essays: Lorenzo Monaco: Notes on an exhibition; Lorenzo Monaco, Santa Maria degli Angeli and the Camaldolese visual culture; The coronation of the virgin of the main altar of Santa Maria degli Angeli: iconography and purpose; Note on an early addition to the coronation of the virgin in the Uffizi; Lorenzo Monaco: later years; Notes on the punched decoration in Lorenzo Monaco's panel paintings; Lorenzo Monaco and Fra Angelico; The world of Lorenzo Monaco: the rise and the late Gothic in Florentine painting; Lorenzo Monaco, illuminator: the early days; Lorenzo Monaco, illuminator: between 1410 and his final years. + Catalogue.
Street corners, guild halls, government offices, and confraternity centers contained paintings that made the city of Florence a visual jewel at precisely the time of its emergence as an international cultural leader. This book considers the paintings that were made specifically for consideration by lay viewers, as well as the way they could have been interpreted by audiences who approached them with specific perspectives. Their belief in the power of images, their understanding of the persuasiveness of pictures, and their acceptance of the utterly vital role that art could play as a propagator of civic, corporate, and individual identity made lay viewers keenly aware of the paintings in their midst. Those pictures affirmed the piety of the people for whom they were made in an age of social and political upheaval, as the city experimented with an imperfect form of republicanism that often failed to adhere to its declared aspirations.
. By way of introduction to the objects themselves are three essays. The first, by Laurence B. Kanter, presents an overview of Florentine illumination between 1300 and 1450 and thumbnail sketches of the artists featured in this volume. The second essay, by Barbara Drake Boehm, focuses on the types of books illuminators helped to create. As most of them were liturgical, her contribution limns for the modern reader the medieval religious ceremonies in which the manuscripts were utilized. Carl Brandon Strehlke here publishes important new material about Fra Angelico's early years and patrons - the result of the author's recent archival research in Florence.
The Santa Maria di Firenze, the venerable Benedictine abbey located in the heart of Florence, is the subject of this book. Leader's richly illustrated, interdisciplinary study examines the abbey's history during the Renaissance.
The eleven chapters in this international volume draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to focus our attention on medieval and early modern things (ca. 700–1600). The range of things includes actual objects (the Altenburg Crucifixion, a copy of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi, a pilgrim’s letter), imagined objects (a prayed cloak for the Virgin Mary), and narrative objects in texts (the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Ordene de Chevalerie, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, Heinrich of Neustadt’s Apollonius of Tyre, Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and the vita of Saint Guthlac). Each in its own way, the papers consider how things do what they do in texts and art, often foregrounding the intersection between the material and the immaterial by exploring such questions as how things act, how they express power, and how texts and images represent them. Medieval and early modern things are repeatedly shown to be more than symbolic or passive, they are agentive and determinative in both their intra- and extradiegetic worlds. The things that are addressed in this volume are varied and are embedded, or entangled, in different contexts and societies, and yet they share a concerted engagement in human life.
With illustrations that demonstrate the rich colors and intense light that imbue Fra Angelico’s work, this book takes a deeper look at one of the master painters of the Florentine Renaissance. One of the great fifteenth-century masters, Fra Angelico was one of several painters who shaped the beginnings of the Florentine Renaissance. Although, because of his occupation as a friar, he is sometimes considered separately from his contemporaries, including Masaccio, Masolino, Paolo Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Nanni di Banco, and Filippo Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance examines his early works and shows that not only was he a participant in the artistic culture of the time, but also a key innovator. Angelico’s breakthrough work from the mid-1420s, the Prado’s great Annunciation altarpiece, is regarded as the first Renaissance-style altarpiece in Florence. Published to accompany the exhibition “Fra Angelico and the Rise of the Florentine Renaissance” at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, this book reveals the results of the Prado’s extensive conservation and technological research efforts on The Annunciation, as well as two other recently acquired Angelico paintings: the Alba Madonna and the Funeral of Saint Anthony Abbot. Vividly illustrated and deeply illuminating, this book investigates the origins of the Florentine Renaissance and positions Angelico at the heart of the story.
This volume offers unparalleled coverage of all aspects of art and architecture from medieval Western Europe, from the 6th century to the early 16th century. Drawing upon the expansive scholarship in the celebrated 'Grove Dictionary of Art' and adding hundreds of new entries, it offers students, researchers and the general public a reliable, up-to-date, and convenient resource covering this field of major importance in the development of Western history and international art and architecture.
In the choir of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, a truly sacred temple of the Medici dynasty, Pontormo painted a grandiose cycle of frescos between 1545 and 1556, which were then unfortunately destroyed in the mid-18th century. Far earlier, Giorgio Vasari issued a severe judgment on them that lasted into the modern day. His was a dismissal motivated formally by artistic reasons, but it concealed other, more insidious, ideological and religious motivations. On the basis of drawings, copies, paintings and literary sources, this study reconstructs the design and arrangement of the frescoes, revealing them to have been inspired by a contemporary heterodox text, one that was included in the Index in 1549. From a dense web of Florentine religious, cultural and political life and its shifts in the middle decades of the century, the political motivations underlying Vasari's commitment to transforming the doctrinal heresy from which those grandiose paintings had drawn inspiration into an artistic heresy emerge. It was a commitment that, after the conclusion of the Council of Trent, risked reflecting upon the new Counter-Reformist structure of Medici power.
