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Ranked by many scholars as the greatest master of early Italian Renaissance painting, Masaccio (1401-1428) was the first artist to use effects of light to create three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional plane. This achievement, revolutionary in Masaccio's day, is one of the painter's significant contributions to art history. This book explores Masaccio's accomplishment as epitomized by the multipaneled painting of which theSaint Andrewpanel is thought to have once formed a part: the Pisa Altarpiece, one of the truly great polyptychs in the history of Italian Renaissance art, produced in 1426 for a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Pisa. The text discusses Masaccio's short life and illustrious career; the commission for the altarpiece; its patron and program; the painting's original location; and the role that the church friars played in the actual commission. Finally, after examining the polyptych's individual panels, the book traces their subsequent history and recounts how art historians came to identify them.
This Companion explores the visual, intellectual, and religious culture of Renaissance Florence in the age of Masaccio, 1401-1428. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars and conservators, the essays in this volume investigate the artistic, civic, and sacred contexts of Masaccio's works and the sites in which they were seen. Inspired by the 600th anniversary of Masaccio's birth, The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio celebrates the achievements, influence and legacy of early Renaissance art and one of its greatest masters.
This is the biography of 7 painters who, from the 14th to the 19th century changed the history of art forever. The book is not just about their painting but also tells about their lives, their triumphs and their disasters.
This volume presents the medieval Eucharist in all its glory combining introductory essays on the liturgy, art, theology, architecture, devotion and theology from the early, high and late medieval periods.
A fresh look at the early Renaissance, considering Florentine and Netherlandish art as a single phenomenon, at once deeply spiritual and entirely new. Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden of Eden into a rocky landscape, their naked bodies lit by a cold sun, their gestures and expressions a study in shame and anguish. A serious man, well attired, kneels in prayer before the Virgin and Child, close enough to touch them almost, his furrowed brow setting off the saintly perfection of their features. In fifteenth-century Florence and Flanders, painters were using an arsenal of new techniques—including perspective, anatomy, and the accurate treatment of light and shade—to present traditional religious subjects with an unprecedented immediacy and emotional power. Their art was the product of a shared Christian culture, and their patrons included not only nobles and churchmen but also the middle classes of these thriving commercial centers. Shirley Neilsen Blum offers a new synthesis of this remarkable period in Western art—between the refinements of the Gothic and the classicism of the High Renaissance—when the mystical was made to seem real. In the first part of her text, Blum traces the emergence of a new naturalism in the sculpture of Claus Sluter and Donatello, and then in the painting of Van Eyck and Masaccio. In the second part, she compares scenes from the Infancy and Passion of Christ as rendered by artists from North and South. Exploring both the images themselves and the theological concepts that lie behind them, she re-creates, as far as possible, the experience of the contemporary fifteenth-century viewer. Abundantly illustrated with color plates of masterworks by Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Rogier van der Weyden, and others, this thought-provoking volume will appeal equally to general readers and students of art history.
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.
While the Renaissance is generally perceived to be a secular movement, the majority of large artworks executed in 15th century Italy were from ecclesiastical commissions. Because of the nature of primarily basilica-plan churches, a parishioner's view was directed by the diminishing parallel lines formed by the walls of the structure. Appearing to converge upon a mutual point, this resulted in an artistic phenomenon known as the vanishing point. As applied to ecclesiastical artwork, the Catholic Vanishing Point (CVP) was deliberately situated upon or aligned with a given object--such as the Eucharist wafer or Host, the head of Christ or the womb of the Virgin Mary--possessing great symbolic significance in Roman liturgy. Masaccio's fresco painting of the Trinity (circa 1427) in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, analyzed in physical and symbolic detail, provides the first illustration of a consistently employed linear perspective within an ecclesiastical setting. Leonardo's Last Supper, Venaziano's St. Lucy Altarpiece, and Tome's Transparente illustrate the continuation of this use of liturgical perspective.
Albrecht Dürer’s master engraving, Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about melancholia and an allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences. Zealously interpreted since the nineteenth century, the work also presides over the origins of modern iconology. Yet more than a century of research has left us with a tangle of mutually contradictory theories. In Perfection’s Therapy, Mitchell Merback discovers in Melencolia’s opacity a fascinating possibility: that Dürer’s masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly analyses the visual and narrative structure of Dürer’s image, revisits its philosophical and medical contexts, and resituates it within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer’s project in dialogue with that of humanism’s founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths the German artist’s ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated by contemporaries as the “Apelles of our age,” and ever since as Germany’s first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a project of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, rebalance the passions, remedy the soul, and help in getting on with the project of perfection.
The Italian Renaissance is considered by many to mark the beginning of the modern age. The name itself (literally "rebirth") accurately expresses the innovation that took place during that period. Renaissance thinkers took a vital interest in history, literature, and the arts, focusing on the human world as much as, if not more than, that of God. The rapid development of the arts and sciences reflected their study of the visible, physical world in all its three-dimensional glory. The source of these new impulses, says the author, can be found in what Rudolf Steiner calls the birth of "the consciousness soul"--the faculty for objective self-awareness. Instead of a primarily inward-looking consciousness, people began looking outward with greater intensity, observing the world around them in detail. With greater conscious of their separate being, people of the Renaissance began to study the phenomena of the world of nature from an individual, personal perspective. In this enlightening book, illustrated with sixteen pages of color plates, the author illuminates the concept of the consciousness soul, showing how it is reflected in fifteenth-century Florentine painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as in the impulses issuing from Plato's Academy of Athens.
Christian mission in previous centuries often drew on images of imperial expansion and war. While few today would describe the gospel task in such imperialistic terms, have we developed appropriate alternate images to associate with the good news of Jesus Christ? In "Picturing Christian Witness" missiologist Stanley Skreslet searches for new, more holistic images of mission from Scripture. Undertaking a novel exegetical study of mission in the New Testament, he highlights five actions that depict the witness of Jesus' first followers: announcing good news, sharing Christ with friends, interpreting the gospel, shepherding, and building/planting. After carefully examining key biblical passages, Skreslet draws out the implications of these five images for the theology of mission and lets each image take shape visually through an array of Western and non-Western art. "Picturing Christian Witness" will provoke readers to imagine what mission will look like when actively embodied by contemporary disciples of Jesus.