Product Description

The fourth, but the earliest volume chronologically, of the only comprehensive survey in modern times of the surviving Italian frescoes from the end of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Mannerism, this groundbreaking oeuvre is an achievement in scholarship and publishing of the same magnitude as Abbeville's "Art of Florence" and "Art and Spirit of Paris". Following the success of the previous volumes in this extraordinary series: "Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance", "Italian Frescoes: The Flowering of the Renaissance", and "Italian Frescoes: The High Renaissance and Mannerism" - "Italian Frescoes: The Age of Giotto", 1280 - 1400 presents twenty-two outstanding fresco cycles. Created during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, these cycles set new standards for painting and an innovative vision of man, paving the way for the monumental achievements of the Renaissance. It was at this time that fresco painting was not only commissioned for churches and chapels, but also for such secular places as town halls and royal residences with humanist in addition to religious themes. The fresco cycles featured here include brilliant works by Giotto in Assisi, Padua, and Florence; dramatic paintings by Cimabue, thought to be Giotto's teacher; Pietro Cavillini in Rome; and the Sienese artists Simone Martini and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti - all of these works still visible on walls and ceilings of palaces and churches spanning Italy from the Veneto to Rome. The authors describe and illustrate such celebrated sites as the Church of Saint Francis in Assisi, the Chapel of the Scrovegni in Padua, the Public Palace in Siena, and the papal chapel, the Sancta Sanctorum, in Rome. Each of the twenty-two chapters is concise and authoritative, offering a descriptive and interpretive essay on all aspects of fresco painting, covering the artists and their patrons in the context of their cultural and political history. Each essay concludes with a diagram of the site, followed by a series of full- and double-page color plates showing the entire cycle, many reproduced from new photographs of recently restored frescoes. No publisher until now has attempted to gather together and document all the important fresco cycles of Italian art from the late thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. While this volume is the predecessor to the previous books, "Italian Frescoes: The Age of Giotto", 1280 - 1400 easily stands alone as a masterpiece of art and scholarship which will be welcomed by art historians and art lovers alike.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #598809 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 472 pages

Review
"Detailed plans and descriptions set the projects before us as never before, bringing home masterpieces that in some cases can only be seen with difficulty in out-of-the-way places. The second volume is eagerly awaited." - Chicago Tribune Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance captures the magnificence of religious painting between 1400 and 1470 through Roettgen's lucid text and an abundance of magnificent color photographs by Antonio Quattrone. The close-up views of famous and lesser-known sites, particularly in Tuscany, are almost as good as traveling to Italy." - Philadelphia Inquirer "Perfectly illustrated and designed to give absolute clarity to a text that is a model of concision. This is the model of how all art books ought to be." - The World of Interiors "The combination of Antonio Quattrone's marvelous photographs and Steffi Roettgen's brilliant text makes Italian Frescoes by far the finest book on the subject, and Signor Quattrone's color photography captures the glorious qualities of this quintessentially Italian art form." - Everett Fahy, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Italian Frescoes: the High Renaissance and Mannerism "The third in a series, Italian Frescoes is, by any standard, an impressive work of beauty and scholarship. From its reproductions of sweeping works on ceilings and walls to the details of a single figure, Kliemann and Rohlmann never disappoint in delighting the eye nor in broadening our knowledge about the now almost lost art of fresco. This is a gorgeous book and I highly recommend it. - Art Times "Third in a series of gorgeous, lucidly written books, 'Frescoes' admirably fills the information gap between chatty guidebooks and dry scholarship. Splendid photos, details and site plans cover 20 major cycles of religious and secular 'wall painting' as the authors rightly call frescoes by Michelangelo, Raphael, Veronese, Annibale Caracci et al." - Minneapolis Star-Tribune"

About the Author
Joachim Poeschke a professor of art history and the director of the Institute of Fine Art at the University of Munster. He is the author or co-author of several books including Michelangelo and His World: The Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. Antonio Quattrone is regarded as one of the leading photographers of works of art; his many books include the other volumes on Italian frescoes in this series. Ghigo Roli is also a specialist in fine art photography.

Customer Reviews

Magnifico!
The latest in the set of now four brilliant works on the frescoes of the Italian renaissance, "The Age of Giotto" is a masterwork that is worthy of a museum. From the Giotto, Simon Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Cimabue wall paintings in the fascinating double church in Assisi, to the lesser known (and nearly disappeared) work by Cavallini in Santa Cecilia en Trastevere, the commentary is enlightening and the photography stunning. You will not find a better book on the early examples of this wonderful art form than this one. See the other three books - "The Early Renaissance", "The Flowering of the Renaissance" and "The High Renaissance and Mannerism" - for the compete, magnificent look at 200 years of fresco masterpieces.

Il Primo
One word describes this book - brilliant! This is the best book on the market for early Italian frescoes with a happy marriage of the finest photography and finest text. Congratulations and thanks.

Hard read
I wonder how many people who buy a book like this, actually read it. It took me six months before I had the courage. And now that I have - and have three more volumes to go - I admit that I would have preferred a somewhat more pedestrian approch, perhaps - I should say - a somewhat more Anglosaxon (or American) approach. Because this book is definitely written in the German tradition, which goes especially for the several general introductions to the volume.
Short as they are, they are hard to read and a lot is taken for granted. I am an art lover, am well at home in the nineteenth century, but am less acquainted with the art of the middle ages and early renaissance, whereas on the other hand I know the general history of the period reasonably well. And although I have already visited many of the churches and chapels, frescoes and mosaics, described in the book, I still find parts of the introductory texts hard to follow. Commenting on fhe frescoes in the Assisi upper church, one of the highlights in the volume, Poeschke writes: "As for their innovate artistic qualities in general, these are already seen in the unified overall conception into the built architecture, in part by illusionistic means, and extend to the well balanced pictorial strucure, the clearly defined volumes and body language of the figures, a heightened presence of everything being represented, and an extension and refinement of the color spectrum. More than ever before, a compositional calculus asserts itself in these paintings (...)." (p.64) Which may all be very true of course, but which is also very dull, and in a way also very abstract. And whereas the layout of plates, diagrams and figures is cristalclear, I find the texts about them a lot less orderly.
Why not, before every church, a small historical introduction, and than a running and systematic textual commentary on the plates? And why not, for instance, systematically add the text of Bonaventura, on which the frescoes are based? This book has a strange way of taking its reader seriously, and at the same time not seriously enough. Where `s the editor? Where Poeschke does give an extended description of a fresco, he does so in an excellent way. But why not systematically combine the texts on the plates with the plates itself? I don't think this is really a quibble. It is a bit of a waste to produce a great looking book, without really thinking of the reader. It is easy to leaf through this book and say: "hey, this looks great", which it does, but I found reading it not always a pleasure.
But then, these are also wonderfull volumes, one has to admit. The quality of the photographs is excellent, the extensive coverage of many of the Italian medieval churches and chapels is a pleasure to behold. One may whine now and then at the tedious style, there is also an immense amount of knowledge assembled here. Would' nt it be great to have a very small pocketversion of an improved version of this book, just to take along to Italy?