This edition of Martin Davies's work, revised by Dillian Gordon, incorporates the advances made in the study of Trecento painting, involving new attributions, the reconstruction of the original appearance of altarpieces, and information on patronage, original location and iconography. The catalogue also takes account of the results of technical investigation by the National Gallery's Scientific and Conservation Departments after the cleaning of some of the paintings.
Winner, 2009 Best Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern WomenWinner, 2008 PROSE Award for Best Book in Language, Literature, and Linguistics. Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers This is the first comprehensive study of the remarkably rich tradition of women’s writing that flourished in Italy between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Virginia Cox documents this tradition and both explains its character and scope and offers a new hypothesis on the reasons for its emergence and decline. Cox combines fresh scholarship with a revisionist argument that overturns existing historical paradigms for the chronology of early modern Italian women’s writing and questions the historiographical commonplace that the tradition was brought to an end by the Counter Reformation. Using a comparative analysis of women's activities as artists, musicians, composers, and actresses, Cox locates women's writing in its broader contexts and considers how gender reflects and reinvents conventional narratives of literary change.
In Italy between 1270 and 1370 the whole tradition of European painting underwent a radical and enduring change of direction. This attractive and unusual study of Italian painted panels of the Early Renaissance examines the materials with which this transformation was effected and demonstrates how modern technology has increased our understanding of medieval panel painting. The authors survey the primarily religious function of these works and the professional context in which the artists worked. They provide explanations of the construction of panels and the preparation of wood for painting and of the preparation and application of gold leaf. The substantial sections on pigments and color represent original research done at the Gallery that has enabled the writers to provide the first comprehensive survey of how paints were prepared, mixed, and applied.
"The present catalogue deals with the pictures of the Earlier Italian Schools in the National Gallery ... its main subject is the Italian pictures up to the end of the Early Renaissance"--Page 3.
The Oxford History of Western Art is an innovative and challenging reappraisal of how the history of art can be presented and understood. Through a carefully devised modular structure, readers are given insights not only into how and why works of art were created, but also how works in different media relate to each other across time. Here--uniquely--is not the simple, linear "story" of art, but a rich series of stories, told from varying viewpoints. Carefully selected groupings of pictures give readers a sense of the visual "texture" of the various periods and episodes covered. The 167 illustration groups, supported by explanatory text and picture captions, create a sequence of "visual tours"--not merely a procession of individually "great" works viewed in isolation, but juxtapositions of significant images that powerfully convey a sense of the visual environments in which works of art need to be viewed in order to be understood and appreciated. The aim throughout is to make the shape and nature of these visual presentations a stimulating and rewarding experience, allowing readers to become active participants in the process of interpretation and synthesis. Another key feature of the narrative is the re-definition of traditional period boundaries. Rather than relying on conventional labels such as Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque, the book establishes five major phases of significant historical change that unlock longer and more meaningful continuities. This new framework shows how the major religious and secular functions of art have been forged, sustained, transformed, revived, and revolutionized over the ages; how the institutions of Church and State have consistently aspired to make art in their own image; and how the rise of art history itself has come to provide the dominant conceptual framework within which artists create, patrons patronize, collectors collect, galleries exhibit, dealers deal, and art historians write. Though the coverage of topics focuses on European notions of art and their transplantation and transformation in North America, space is also given to cross-fertilizations with other traditions---including the art of Latin America, the Soviet Union, India, Africa (and Afro-Caribbean), Australia, and Canada. Written by a team of 50 specialist authors working under the direction of renowned art historian Martin Kemp, The Oxford History of Western Art is a vibrant, vigorous, and revolutionary account of Western art serving both as an inspirational introduction for the general reader and an authoritative source of reference and guidance for students.
Based on the study of over 500 surviving manuscript school books, this comprehensive 2001 study of the curriculum of school education in medieval and Renaissance Italy contains some surprising conclusions. Robert Black's analysis finds that continuity and conservatism, not innovation, characterize medieval and Renaissance teaching. The study of classical texts in medieval Italian schools reached its height in the twelfth century; this was followed by a collapse in the thirteenth century, an effect on school teaching of the growth of university education. This collapse was only gradually reversed in the two centuries that followed: it was not until the later 1400s that humanists began to have a significant impact on education. Scholars of European history, of Renaissance studies, and of the history of education will find that this deeply researched and broad-ranging book challenges much inherited wisdom about education, humanism and the history of ideas.
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.
At the outset of this work I thought it possible that I might have to lay down my pen at the end of the fifth volume, but it is with con siderable pleasure I learn that my readers have been in great enough number and sufficiently satisfied with the work for my editor and myself to continue the enterprise and undertake a study of the fifteenth century, similar to that which has already appeared on the fourteenth. The spontaneous manifestations of sympathy that I have received from many different countries give me the impression that there exists a group of readers who will not be disappointed to hear of my intention to continue this history of Italian painting, at least until the end of the fifteenth century which is a period not rn any way less glorious than those with which I have already dealt. I should like to give one word of warning to the authorities of galleries and to private collectors who of late have started buying pictures of the thirteenth century. Notwithstanding the fact that the interest in this form of art is of recent date, the amount of facticious paintings of this period is already very considerable. Many of them are half-length figures of the Madonna painted on late Byzantine panels of the same subject; Greek Madonnas of the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries are in this way transformed into Italian pictures of the thirteenth.
