Italian Frescoes: The Flowering of the Renaissance 1470-1510 - Hardcover

Roettgen, Steffi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0789202212 ISBN 13: 9780789202215

Publisher: Abbeville Press, 1997

Synopsis

Praised by historians and art lovers alike, Steffe Roettgens first volume on the frescoes of the early Italian Renaissance is the most comprehensive survey of the surviving fresco cycles painted from 1400 to 1470. In this second volume, featuring paintings from 1470 to 1510, scores of new photographs document the brilliance of works by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, Perugino, and Signorelli in palaces and chapels stretching from the Alps to Rome.

Professor Roettgens concise and authoritative text illuminates such celebrated sites as the Tornabuoni Chapel in Florence, the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, and the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua. She also reveals the charm of lesser-known works, such as those in the tiny northern town of Issogne, which capture fifteenth-century men and women bargaining and flirting at an outdoor market.

Descriptive and interpretive essays on each of the seventeen cycles touch on all aspects of fresco painting: the artists and their patrons, cultural and historical conditions, local traditions, and technique. Each essay concludes with a diagram of the site, followed by a stunning series of full-page and double-page color plates of the wall paintings, many of them newly restored. This second volume of Professor Roettgens survey builds on the strengths of Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, and easily stands alone as a record of the spectacular art of a flourishing culture.

About this title

Review

Steffi Roettgen's first volume, Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, 1400-1470, was called "by far the finest book on the subject" by Everett Fahy, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If this second volume, focusing on the Renaissance from 1470 to 1510, is even more beautiful, it is because the artists represented here--including Boticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, Perugino, and Fra Angelico--represent, as the subtitle puts it, "the flowering of the Renaissance." The 470-page book, which documents fresco cycles by more than a score of artists in 16 different locations, is organized by place, with each chapel, sacristy, or cloister treated separately, in its own chapter. The mostly uncaptioned color plates fill the large pages in a carefully organized sequence, according to maps of the buildings (or ceilings or walls) that are shaded to show each cycle of paintings as it is pictured. Roettgen's text, translated by the excellent Russell Stockman, is masterly--clear and authoritative, descriptive and interpretive--but the success of Roettgen's great undertaking also depends largely on the photographs by Antonio Quattrone, primarily, and Fabio Lensini. Quattrone in some cases has captured the frescoes' balance, color, and realism--and their lovely details--with the kind of clarity that no one has brought to them before. His lighting is shadowless, his camera centered and still. These remarkable photographs give the reader a privileged view instead of the dim, squinting one we normally have, from below. It's almost like being on the scaffold with the artists themselves. --Peggy Moorman

From the Back Cover

Certain Italian fresco cycles, notably the Brancacci Chapel in Florence by Masaccio, Masolino, and Filippino Lippi, are well known. Others, such as Piero della Francesca's work in Arezzo and Benozzo Gozzoli's Chapel of the Magi in Florence, have been reproduced countless times. Yet no publisher - until now - has attempted to gather together and document in extensive photographs the essential fresco cycles of the early Italian Renaissance. The list of works covers the regions of Italy, from the Alpine mountain areas to Puglia, with an emphasis on Tuscany and Florence, the artistic center that gave life to the Renaissance. Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, 1400-1470 opens with a concise introductory text discussing various aspects of fifteenth-century fresco painting: artists, patronage, cultural and historical conditions, technical methods, and questions of local tradition. The central section of the book examines twenty-one fresco cycles, each representing a crowning achievement in this field. A descriptive and interpretive essay introduces each cycle and is followed by a series of full-page and double-page color plates - many of them new photography of recently restored frescoes - covering the entire work.

Edition details

• Publisher: Abbeville Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0789202212
• ISBN 13: 9780789202215
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 471