Italian Frescoes - Tapa dura

"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"

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 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 GiottoGCOs 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 easily stands alone as a masterpiece of art and scholarship which will be welcomed by art historians and art lovers alike.