A beautiful overview of the development in style of the miniature. From the anonymous and modest early Romanesque illustrations to the luxurious late Gothic miniatures of Simon Marmion or Lucas Horenbout who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, exported their Flemish masterpieces as far afield as Spain and Russia. Never before has the reader-viewer been presented with such a complete overview of the art of Flemish miniatures from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries. Never before has a book presented such a fascinating history of eight centuries of the art of miniatures from the Low Countries. Never before have so many miniatures - more then 600 colour illustrations - been reproduced in one book. This publication offers an overview of the style of the Flemish miniature, from the anonymous and modest early Romanesque illustrations to the luxurious late Gothic miniatures, some of which were exported as far afield as Spain and Russia.
The fourth volume examines all the works attributed to masters with provisional names from the 1470s to the first half of the 16th century (Master of the Joseph Sequence, Master of the Magdalen Legend, Master of the Orsoy Altarpiece, Master of the Saint Barbara Legend, Master of the Saint Catherine Legend, Master of the Saint Lucy Legend, Master of the Saint Ursula Legend, Master of the View of Saint-Gudule, Master of 1473). It was towards 1900 that anonymous works were first grouped, on the basis of stylistic affinities, around certain paintings presenting particular characteristics. Each group is attributed to an anonymous master named after the painting (the eponymous work) which forms the basis for this group. These ensembles serve to give direction to the work of art historians, in the hope of identifying these anonymous painters at a later date. Some of these groups, to which new works have been added over past decades, appear fairly heterogeneous, and merit critical reexamination in the light of modern analysis methods. Like the three previous volumes, it is published in English and abundantly illustrated with colour photographs of the investigated paintings, detail photographs and comparative material. Each of the nineteen paintings has been submitted to exhaustive and detailed examination following a scientific research method which has been fully established over the years. This includes, on the one hand, examination of the supports and the original frames, dendrochronological analysis, infrared reflectography, stereomicroscopic observation, radiographic analysis, ultraviolet fluorescence imaging and, where possible, examination of paint samples and, on the other hand, historical, iconographic and stylistic analysis, dating, attribution and bibliography. Information is drawn from documents in the museum's archives and supplemented with material held at the Royal Institute for the Study and Conservation of Belgium's Artistic Heritage (IRPA/KIK) and the Centre for the Study of Fifteenth-Century Painting in the Southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liege. Each group of paintings attributed to a master with a provisional name is introduced with a short status quaestionis evoking the origins of the grouping and the principal publications relating to it. In their notices on the individual paintings, the authors have based their research on comparing them as closely as possible with the works around which each ensemble is grouped. Certain paintings in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium are themselves eponymous works. In these cases the authors have made every effort to document these reference works as thoroughly as possible.
The references to Charles the Bold's work, which are largely drawn from the accounts of the chambres des comptes at Lille and Brussels, amply illustrate the aesthetic preferences of the Burgundian nobility. All the relevant documents, most of which have not been published before, appear in appendix I. The second part of the book reviews the votive portraits of Charles the Bold. The circumstances surrounding the commission of the Liege statuette - Loyet's sole surviving work - are discussed in detail, and all documents relating to the statuette are included in appendix II. In the second chapter of part II, the focus is on the statuette's iconography, which is unique for a votive gift. Charles's motives are further investigated in the final chapter of part II, which discusses the votive portraits that he donated to other shrines. In the third and final part, the attention shifts to votive gifts, and more specifically to the genre of votive portraits.
Influenced by a revival of interest in Greco-Roman ideals and sponsored by a newly prosperous merchant class, fifteenth-century artists produced works of astonishingly innovative content and technique. The International Gothic style of painting, still popular at the beginning of the century, was giving way to the influence of Early Netherlandish Flemish masters such as Jan van Eyck, who emphasized narrative and the complex use of light for symbolic meaning. Patrons favored paintings in oil and on wooden panels for works ranging from large, hinged altarpieces to small, increasingly lifelike portraits. In the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Mantua, artists and architects alike perfected existing techniques and developed new ones. The painter Masaccio mastered linear perspective; the sculptor Donatello produced anatomically correct but idealized figures such as his bronze nude of David; and the brilliant architect and engineer Brunelleschi integrated Gothic and Renaissance elements to build the self-supporting dome of the Florence Cathedral. This beautifully illustrated guide analyzes the most important people, places, and concepts of this early Renaissance period, whose explosion of creativity was to spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century
Monographs on Bosch, Van Eyck etc. are numerous. But no affordable work on the subject, the period and the common style of these painters is currently available. This book therefore allows art lovers and students to understand how the art of each of these artists is inter-related.
This is the first official guide to Italy's first public museum, the Milan home of famous paintings by Bellini, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Room by room, wall by wall, this guide gives detailed information about this magnificent permanent collection spanning the 13th to 20th centuries. The introduction by the Museum Director, Luisa Arrigoni, gives the history of Pinacoteca di Brera.
The third volume includes a final group of preeminent, identified artists from the period of transition at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century. Artistic production at this time was still rooted in late medieval thought, yet more and more seized with new renaissance developments, and at a permanent state of ferment with constantly changing needs of society. The catalogue deals with correspondingly complex issues of interpretation through the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Bouts, Gerard David, Colijn de Coter and Goossen van der Weyden. It comprises a technical, stylistic and iconographical investigation of seventeen paintings on the basis of a scientific research method, which has been fully established over the years. The authors have been able to adjust various attributions and interpretations. At the same time most valuable discoveries have been made with regard to the provenance of some work belonging to the Albrecht Bouts and Colijn de Coter Groups.
