A fully illustrated survey of Early Netherlandish painting, featuring all of the major artists, and many lesser-known painters.

Volume 2 of two-volume set. Total of 1566 extracts reveal full range of Leonardo's versatile genius: his writings on painting, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, mining, inventions, music. Dual Italian-English texts, with 186 plates on mss. pages, over 500 additional drawings faithfully reproduced.

One of the miracles of art history.
"The book is a work of astonishing beauty. Its yellowing vellum pages of handwritten text are exquisitely decorated with illuminated capitals and tiny brightly colored miniatures of religious subjects and scenes from 15th-century life. It is universally recognized as one of the two or three finest illuminated medieval manuscripts in existence. 'Incomparable' is how John Plummer, curator of medieval and renaissance manuscripts at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, describes it."--"The New York Times"
Cited as "one of the miracles of art history" by Kenneth Clark, "The Tres Riches Heures" is the most luxurious and most famous of such books and marks the zenith of manuscript illumination in late medieval Europe. Commissioned by the influential patron, Jean de Berry, in the early years of the fifteenth century, this masterpiece was executed by the three Limbourg brothers, the greatest miniaturists of the time. The manuscript opens with a calendar illuminating scenes of daily life during the twelve months and is followed by the prayers of offices celebrated at different times of the day. These texts are often accompanied by miniatures, in which the artists' imaginative and decorative genius are fully revealed. The personal approach of the Limbourgs to nature, human activity, and beauty represents the transition from medieval attitudes to those of the Renaissance. Their elegant images, in fact, were to influence the course of painting in France and all of Northern Europe; but, as Millard Meiss comments, 'no painter could match the smooth perfection of their surface, their limpid color and complex simplicity. Their art could capture thedelicate transitory beauty of a newly opened flower.' This edition reproduces each of the miniatures in "The Tres Riches Heures" to scale and in full color, elegantly capturing both the subtle color and minute detail of these historic images.

Museum visitors today usually see pre-16th-century Italian painted altarpieces exhibited alone, as single paintings. Yet this beautiful catalogue shows that these works were once part of decorative, integrated schemes, and the original experience for viewers of the paintings was significantly different from our own.

Focusing on Italian altarpieces from the second half of the 13th century to the very end of the 15th, the book investigates the original functions and locations of altarpieces as well as the circumstances of their dislocations, dismantlings, and reconstructions. Regional variations are also analyzed, and the author examines altarpieces' formal and typological development, taking into account the wealth of related scholarship undertaken in the past thirty years.

Albrecht Durer's prints and drawings have inspired hundreds of artists, both during his life and after his death. Yet his talent as a painter and colorist, and his enthusiasm for the scientific world have not been widely appreciated. Durer's influence was both international and intergenerational-indeed Picasso claimed to have been inspired by the 16th-century artist. Reproduced in stunning detail and including illustrations of Durer's most famous prints and drawings, a catalog raisonne of his paintings, and biographical research, this book presents a Durer for the 21st century. Producing more self-portraits than any other artist of his day; mass marketing his best-selling prints; even inventing his own monogram logo; Albrecht Du rer was commercially astute long before today's generation of self-promoting and financially-savvy artists. There are 55 extant Durer paintings, of which 17 are in dispute. Using scientific research, this book puts all arguments to bed resulting in the definitive catalog raisonne of the paintings. Drawing on in-depth research, this book reveals the truth behind Durer and his art.

Precious spices and textiles, imported from distant trading posts in the eastern Mediterranean, stocked Venetian markets in the Middle Ages; but Venice's merchants imported more than material goods from the East -- they acquired also a wealth of visual ideas and information from Muslim culture. This lively and richly illustrated book investigates the influence of oriental trade and travel on medieval Venice and its architecture.

Architectural historian Deborah Howard examines the experiences of Venetian merchants overseas, focusing on links with Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, as well as with Persia and the Silk Route. She argues that many Venetians gained insight into Islamic culture through personal contacts with their Muslim trading partners. Based on wide-ranging multidisciplinary research, this book examines the mechanisms that governed the exchange of visual culture across ideological boundaries before the age of printing. Howard explores a range of building types that reflect the impact of Islamic imagery, paying special attention to two icon buildings, San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale. She considers the complexities of importing Muslim ideas to an unambiguously Christian city, itself the point of embarkation for pilgrims to the Holy Land.

Under the rule of Henry VII (r. 1485-1509) England became a powerful nation. The Tudor court sought to express its worldliness and political clout through major artistic commissions, employing Florentine sculptors and painters to create lavish new interiors, suitable for entertaining foreign dignitaries, for its royal palaces. These were exemplified by Henry VIII's palace of Nonsuch, so named because no other palace could match its magnificence. Italian sculpture, painting, and tapestries of the day reflected an interest in portraiture and dynastic monuments, epitomized in England by the royal tomb projects created by Baccio Bandinelli, Benedetto da Rovezzano, and Pietro Torrigiani.

Generously illustrated throughout, "The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance" traces the artistic links between Medicean Florence and Tudor England through essays by an international team of scholars and explores how the language of Florentine art effectively expressed England's political aspirations and rose to prominence as a new international courtly style.

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was the greatest artist of the Northern European Renaissance. Durer's virtuoso woodcuts and engravings ensured his fame throughout the Continent during his own lifetime. Yet he also produced an extraordinary output in other media - including painting, watercolour and drawing - which encompasses riveting portraits and self-portraits, grand altarpieces and meticulous studies of animals and nature. In this major new monograph, Jeffrey Chipps Smith examines the myths that have contributed to Durer's legend, considering his life and career within the framework of a tumultuous epoch in European history. Taking account of the extensive scholarship on the artist, Smith provides fresh insights into many of his most notable works, uncovering the creative process behind them and their wealth of meanings and ideas. Central to Smith's focus is the historical and cultural ferment of pre- and post-Reformation Europe, as he traces Durer's formative years in the Imperial free city of Nuremberg and his subsequent travels across Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The result is a vivid picture of the professional activity of a prolific and psychologically complex figure. With its detailed commentary and original research, this is both an authoritive and an approachable monograph - indispensable for the student or scholar, while certain to appeal to anyone interested in this brilliant artist.

Two paintings by Paolo Veronese, Saint Jerome in the Desert and Saint Agatha in Prison, dating to 1566 and located in the church of San Pietro Martire in Murano, have been recently restored, together with their seventeenth-century gilded frames. Before the restoration, the paintings were in bad condition, very dark and scarcely readable, due to the application of varnishes that had oxidized over the years. The rich and unusual seventeenth-century frames, sculpted and gilded, were also in bad condition. Both works are relatively unknown because of their position in a lesser-known location and the poor condition they were in before the current restoration. The restoration has brought back to life the brilliant colours of the canvases and the vigorous gilded carvings of the frames, giving also the occasion to study their provenance and commission as well as their conservation history.

Recent studies and exhibitions, combined with the discovery of work by hitherto little-known artists have enabled Merot to take a fresh look at the period and to suggest a new configuration. The great names of the period - Poussin, Vouet, Le Sueur, de La Tour, Mignard - are located in relation to other developments. Merot includes discussion of the impact of contemporary literature and political, philosophical and social influences. The foundation of the Royal Academy of Painting in 1648, and the influence of Mazarin on artistic developments are considered with other issues of status, patronage and connoisseurship. The book provides a panorama of the period; the text is profusely illustrated in colour, and accompanied by a comprehensive bibliography.

Sassetta, the subtle genius from Siena, revolutionized Italian painting with an altarpiece for the small Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro in 1437 1444. Originally standing some six yards high, double-sided, with a splendid gilt frame over the main altar of the local Franciscan church, it was the Rolls Royce of early Renaissance painting. But its myriad figures and scenes tempted the collectors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today its disassembled panels can be found in twelve museums throughout Europe and the United States.

To produce this landmark volume, experts in art and general history, painting technique and conservation, woodworking, architecture, and liturgy have joined forces across the boundaries of eight different nations. A model of collaboration, it opens new windows onto the creative process of the artist as he confronted a late-medieval church at a crossroad of cultures, the miracle-working body of a holy man, and a community of Franciscan friars breathing the exhilarating air of reform. To confront such challenges, Sassetta raised the most spiritual school of early Italian art, the Sienese, to a higher level of understanding, grace, and splendor.

Originally published in 2000. Fashioning Identities analyses some of the different ways in which identities were fashioned in and with art during the Renaissance, taken as meaning the period c.1300-1600. The notion of such a search for new identities, expressed in a variety of new themes, styles and genres, has been all-pervasive in the historical and critical literature dealing with the period, starting with Burckhardt, and it has been given a new impetus by contemporary scholarship using a variety of methodological approaches. The identities involved are those of patrons, for whom artistic patronage was a means of consolidating power, projecting ideologies, acquiring social prestige or building a suitable public persona; and artists, who developed a distinctive manner to fashion their artistic identity, or drew attention to aspects of their artistic personality either in self portraiture, or the style and placing of their signature, or by exploiting a variety of literary forms.