Three essays explore three great masterworks of European art that visualize the relationship between spiritual and physical love expressed passionately and graphically in the biblical Song of Songs. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin writes on Cimabue's vast fresco cycle of the Virgin in the apse of San Francesco in Assisi, at the threshold of the Renaissance, where the Franciscan belief in the bodily Assumption is couched in terms of the Old Testament love poem. Irving Lavin demonstrates how the invocation of love in the Song of Songs molded the form of Michelangelo's Medici Madonna as well as his concept for the entire design and meaning of the Medici mortuary chapel in San Lorenzo, Florence. Writing together, the Lavins reveal the generative power of biblical fulfillment in Rembrandt's famous portrayal of a loving couple, called The Jewish Bride. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin is known for her fundamental work on the history of mural decoration in the churches of Italy, and is the recipient of the coveted Morey Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the College Art Association. Irving Lavin, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, is best known for his work on the Italian Baroque sculpture Gianlorenzo Bernini, but his publications range over a wide span of Western art, from Late Antiquity to Jackson Pollock. Marilyn Lavin has been a visiting professor at Princeton University since 1975. Irving Lavin holds the chair in art history at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has taught the history of art at Washington University, the University of Maryland, Yale, Princeton, and Universita di Roma, La Sapienza. Specializing in Italian 13th16th century painting, she is internationally known for her books and articles on Piero della Francesca. Her other books include The Place of Narrative: Mural Painting in Italian Churches, 4311600 AD., and Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art, both of which were recipients of international prizes for distinguished scholarship. She is one of the leaders in the use of computers and digitized imagery for research, teaching, and publication in the history of art. This book offers a series of case studies intended to introduce and define an important class of fifteenth-century Italian art not previously recognized. It is argued that the paintings and sculptures discussed were created privately by artists for personal satisfaction and internal needs, outside the traditional framework of patronage and commercial gain. Since there is no direct documentation from this period of a work being privately made, the selection presented here is necessarily speculative. Instead, the essays focus on works by Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Bellini, and Titian that appear in the artists testaments, letters of refusals to sell, and inventories showing ownership at the time of death. The task at hand is to uncover the motivation and meaning of works of art in which the medieval craftsman began to rise to the status of independent artist, and the maker and the viewer confront each other face to face for the first time.

"Aymeri of Narbonne" tells the story of Aymeri, son of one of Charlemagne's paladins, who alone accepts the great emperor's challenge to reconquer Narbonne in Languedoc from the Saracens. Epic siege and battle, betrayal, and acts of individual heroism evoke all the elements of the great age of French chanson de geste epitomized in the Song of Roland. Unlike Roland and many of its imitators - tales that breathe the air of military culture and the crusade - Aymeri of Narbonne takes a step forward, toward the age of the Romance, with a second plot that is no less important than great battles and Christian-Moslem conflict. Aymeri is advised by his court that he must seek and marry a noble princess. His quest eventually takes him across the Alps to Pavia, there to meet and woo Hermenjart, princess of Lombardy. On the way, the heroic epic takes a detour into the realm of self-discovery and social satire: of Italian merchants and German knights, and French obtuseness to the rules of courtly behavior and of civil life. But the real focus of the tale soon turns to the lovely - and courageous - Hermenjart. No passive object of desire or chivalric quest, the princess of Pavia becomes a character every bit as dynamic as her male suitor and his companions. Forthright about the status and prospects of a woman in "chivalrous" France, she long refuses many suitors and only welcomes Aymeri's advances when she is convinced of his sincere respect and love - and her own status. The couple goes on to high adventure and a long, triumphant life. This first English translation, by Michael A.H. Newth, employs a strict but natural verse. His introduction gives the tale its historical context and offers a solid review of its antecedents, authorship, genre and poetics. Newth also addresses the Crusade and Christian-Moslem relations, the problem of the "other" in medieval literature, gender roles and the continuing relevance of the chansons. Includes introduction, notes, bibliography.

"Lavin's study of the Pierro della Francesca "Flagellation" at Urbino, as befits this exquisite masterpiece, is a model of lucid and precise exposition as well as being an exciting exercise of scholarship. Informed with the intellectual rigour of Scholastic exegesis, it deserves to be placed with the classic readings of fifteenth and sixteenth century works by Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind."--"Spectator
"[Lavin] leaves the picture more wondrous than before, a simultaneous triumph of the theological and biographical, as well as pictorial, imagination."--Rackstraw Downes, "New York Times Book Review

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has taught the history of art at Washington University, the University of Maryland, Yale, Princeton, and Universita di Roma, La Sapienza. Specializing in Italian 13th16th century painting, she is internationally known for her books and articles on Piero della Francesca. Her other books include The Place of Narrative: Mural Painting in Italian Churches, 4311600 AD., and Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art, both of which were recipients of international prizes for distinguished scholarship. She is one of the leaders in the use of computers and digitized imagery for research, teaching, and publication in the history of art. This book offers a series of case studies intended to introduce and define an important class of fifteenth-century Italian art not previously recognized. It is argued that the paintings and sculptures discussed were created privately by artists for personal satisfaction and internal needs, outside the traditional framework of patronage and commercial gain. Since there is no direct documentation from this period of a work being privately made, the selection presented here is necessarily speculative. Instead, the essays focus on works by Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Michelangelo, Bellini, and Titian that appear in the artists testaments, letters of refusals to sell, and inventories showing ownership at the time of death. The task at hand is to uncover the motivation and meaning of works of art in which the medieval craftsman began to rise to the status of independent artist, and the maker and the viewer confront each other face to face for the first time.