Book Description
The National Gallery of Art collection of Italian fifteenth-century paintings, the finest in any American museum, has not been published in its entirety since the 1979 Catalogue of Italian Paintings by Fern Rusk Shapley. Among the altarpieces, devotional works, portraits, and allegorical scenes are many world-famous masterpieces. In addition to Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, paintings by Domenico Veneziano, Castagno, Sassetta, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio make this a book of major masters of the Renaissance.
Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century FROM THE PUBLISHER
"The National Gallery's collection of Italian fifteenth-century paintings, the finest in any American museum, has not been published in its entirety since the 1979 Catalogue of Italian Paintings by Fern Rusk Shapley." Among the altarpieces, devotional works, portraits, and allegorical scenes are many world-famous masterpieces. In addition to Leonardo's Ginevra de'Benci and the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, paintings by Domenico Veneziano, Castagno, Sassetta, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio make this a book of major masters of the Renaissance.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
What format works best for a catalog of a major collection of 15th-century Italian painting, such as the National Gallery in Washington, DC, or London's National Gallery? London recently chose to split its catalog into two volumes, with the first, by Gordon Dillian, coming out last August and covering 1400-60. This new catalog for Washington's collection is a single, weighty book of text and full-page color plates (153), updating the two-volume 1979 catalog by Fern Rusk Shapley. Arranged alphabetically by artist, the entries begin with a brief biography and bibliography, followed by technical notes on condition, detailed provenance, and lengthy discussion of the paintings, with notes and references. The artists range from Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi to Perugino, Leonardo, and Bellini, incorporating discoveries of dating and attribution based on new conservation techniques and emphasizing 1930s black-and-white photographs of works from the previously sealed Duveen archives. Boskovits (Universite degli Studi di Firenze) is the dominant authority on the Florentine/Tuscan School, and his entries are translated from the Italian. Brown (curator of Italian paintings, National Gallery, Washington) and the other writers cover the majority of non-Florentines, and their prose is crisper and more immediate. Much new information is added here, although one wishes for more pictorial representations, as found in the London catalog. The virtue of the single-volume catalog, however, is its comprehensive compactness and its price-a third less than London's. Academic, large public, and special libraries wanting to modernize their collections are advised to purchase.-Ellen Bates, New York Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Art & Photography
Book Info
