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A Discerning Eye is an anthology of some of the finest and most lasting essays by a great critic-historian of Early Italian painting, Richard Offner. Its contents span the Florentine fourteenth century and thus compose a kind of portrait album of some of its most notable painters between the Gothic and Renaissance eras, from the Magdalen Master in the thirteenth century to Masaccio in the early fifteenth. Each essay contains insights that are as incisive, fresh, and evocative today as when they were first written. The essays are illustrated using Offner&’s original photographs supplemented by new or additional photographs when dictated by the material or when the reader might be better helped to see the relationship between Offner&’s analytical prose and a given image. This book reintroduces Offner and places him in the wider context of art-historical writing to reassess his work and underscore what his writings have to offer art historians working today. Three interpretive essays approach Offner from distinct but complementary perspectives: historiographical, philosophical, and biographical. Reassessments of such figures as Erwin Panofsky and Millard Meiss aid the ongoing debate about what art history is and how it ought to be practiced. The reader is asked to reconsider not merely the value but also the philosophical foundation of connoisseurship as a method of investigation and its compatibility with other methods.
Andrew Ladis is Franklin Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia. Over the course of the last twenty years he has written extensively on Italian art. In addition to books on Taddeo Gaddi and on the Brancacci Chapel, he has made notable contributions to the study of early Italian painting and sculpture with essays on such figures as Giovanni Pisano, Giotto, Jacopo del Casentino, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Niccolo di Tommaso. But the range of his interests, made apparent by this collection, extends far beyond fourteenth-century Florence and Siena to encompass Tuscan painting of the fifteenth century, Renaissance maiolica, the writings of Giorgio Vasari, biography, and modern historiography. Further, the assembled essays and book reviews embrace a wide array of art historical problems, such as connoisseurship, patronage, workshop procedure, and the relationship between form and meaning. Of particular note is a major interpretive essay on one of the key monuments of the Renaissance, the mural decoration of the Brancacci Chapel painted by Masaccio, Masolino, and Filippino Lippi. Appearing here in revised form, this study is newly accompanied by a copious number of illustrations, including some never before published.
In Monumental Sounds, Matthew G. Shoaf examines interactions between sight and hearing in spectacular church decoration in Italy between 1260 and 1320. In this "age of vision," authorities' concerns about whether and how worshipers listened to sacred speech spurred Giotto and other artists to reconfigure sacred stories to activate listening and ultimately bypass phenomenal experience for attitudes of inner receptivity. New naturalistic styles served that work, prompting viewers to give voice to depicted speech and guiding them toward spiritually fruitful auditory discipline. This study reimagines narrative pictures as site-specific extensions of a cultural system that made listening a meaningful practice. Close reading of religious texts, poetry, and art historiography augments Shoaf's novel approach to pictorial naturalism and art's multisensorial dimensions. This book has received the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. The award supports the publication of outstanding works of scholarship that cover European civilization before 1700 in the areas of music, theater, French or Italian literature, or cultural studies.
With many illustrations and diagrams, Images of Thought provides easy to follow ways in which to read Indian, Persian and European paintings in terms of composition, proportion, colour symbolism and references to myth. Yet it also provides the intellectual contexts of Islamic cultures which inform our perceptions of how this visual language works. The author uses salient aspects of critical theory, anthropology and theology to sensitise viewers to the diversity and difference of cultural readings but never loses sight of the primacy of the visual and formal characteristics, gestures, geometrical structures and their cooperation with myths and theologemes. The book provides access to one of the world’s major visual traditions whose characteristics continue to inform and elucidate Indian and Islamic contemporary thought today. Images of Thought is a major, scholarly and provocative contribution not only to our understanding of cultural individuality but it offers important examples of how to engage in transcultural understanding and ways of seeing.
Joanna Cannon's scholarship and teaching have helped shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art; this essay collection by her former students is a tribute to her work.
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.
Vol. 1: Life Giotto (1334) is the first European artist about whom it is possible to write following the schema of "life and work". The situation of the sources, however, is complicated: On Giotto's life, there are – on the one hand – biographical accounts from the mid-fourteenth century onwards that responded to various ideological requirements (patriotism, humanism, Renaissance ideology, cult of the artist); on the other, there is extensive documentary material from Giotto's lifetime, which seems to reflect less the biography of an artist than that of a bourgeois businessman resolutely climbing the social ladder. The present volume focuses on this second aspect of the Giotto figure's double life relating it to the form of existence of the pre-modern artist. Vol. 2: Works The paintings examined and contextualised in this volume are those secured for Giotto through early written sources. These sources also help to reconstruct the sequence of his works and artistic inventions as is plausible in the context of media culture in the decades around and after 1300: while Giotto was spiritually and intellectually formed in the sphere of the Florentine Dominicans, his artistic path began in Rome in the shadow of the Curia. The breakthrough to his own artistic concept came immediately before and during his work in Padua. In addition to prominent churchmen, ecclesiastical institutions, and the King of Naples, his clients were predominantly members of Italy's urban and financial elites. The adoption and further development of his inventions by other - especially Sienese - painters pressured him in his later years to try new approaches again. Vol. 3: Survival Giotto is considered by many to be the founder of modern painting. This thesis is discussed and modified in the present volume on an empirical basis. What emerges is that Giotto's impact cannot be reduced simply to the introduction of the study of nature. Rather, his art was involved in the development of pictorial idioms that were attuned to the skills and interests of their audiences. The new approaches in his painting contributed in particular to the possibility of examining and communicating psychological, narrative and allegorical content of great complexity outside the media of language and text, which not only changed the face of European art but certainly contributed to the intellectual opening of Western societies.
Giotto is considered by many to be the founder of modern painting. This thesis is discussed and modified in the present volume on an empirical basis. What emerges is that Giotto's impact cannot be reduced simply to the introduction of the study of nature. Rather, his art was involved in the development of pictorial idioms that were attuned to the skills and interests of their audiences. The new approaches in his painting contributed in particular to the possibility of examining and communicating psychological, narrative and allegorical content of great complexity outside the media of language and text, which not only changed the face of European art but certainly contributed to the intellectual opening of Western societies.