A revised edition of Whitney Chadwick’s seminal work on the women artists who shaped the Surrealist art movement. This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas, and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, embodied their age as they struggled toward artistic maturity and their own “liberation of the spirit” in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico. Whitney Chadwick, author of the highly acclaimed Women, Art, and Society, interviewed and corresponded with most of the artists themselves in the course of her research. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, now revised with a new foreword by art historian Dawn Ades, contains a wealth of extracts from unpublished writings and numerous illustrations never before reproduced. Since this book was first published, it has acquired the undeniable status of a classic among artists, art historians, critics, and cultural historians. It has inspired and necessitated a revision of the story of the Surrealist movement.

"In the tradition of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Palombo has married fine art with romantic historical fiction in this lush and sensual interpretation of Medici Florence, artist Sandro Botticelli, and the muse that inspired them all." - Booklist A girl as beautiful as Simonetta Cattaneo never wants for marriage proposals in 15th Century Italy, but she jumps at the chance to marry Marco Vespucci. Marco is young, handsome and well-educated. Not to mention he is one of the powerful Medici family’s favored circle. Even before her marriage with Marco is set, Simonetta is swept up into Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici’s glittering circle of politicians, poets, artists, and philosophers. The men of Florence—most notably the rakish Giuliano de’ Medici—become enthralled with her beauty. That she is educated and an ardent reader of poetry makes her more desirable and fashionable still. But it is her acquaintance with a young painter, Sandro Botticelli, which strikes her heart most. Botticelli immediately invites Simonetta, newly proclaimed the most beautiful woman in Florence, to pose for him. As Simonetta learns to navigate her marriage, her place in Florentine society, and the politics of beauty and desire, she and Botticelli develop a passionate intimacy, one that leads to her immortalization in his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus. Alyssa Palombo’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence vividly captures the dangerous allure of the artist and muse bond with candor and unforgettable passion.

This book examines a Renaissance Florentine family's art patronage, even for women, inspired by literature, music, love, loss, and religion.

Florence Armes Hosmer, born in 1880, was a farmer's daughter determined to succeed as an artist. Acclaimed in the early part of the twentieth century, she has fallen almost entirely from view. This is the story of how Miss Hosmer, a feisty New England woman, painted her way through the new century and created well more than five hundred works. Helen Marie Casey won the fourteenth National Poet Hunt in 2009. Helen's published two poetry chapbooks, 'Fragrance Upon His Lips', a series of poems about Joan of Arc, and 'Inconsiderate Madness', which won the 2005 Black River Chapbook Competition.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de? Medici?s impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman?s contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family?s domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi?s Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi?s painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de? Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women?s agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

"Rich and engaging. This account of Florentine art tells the story of who commissioned these works, who made them, where they were seen, and how they were experienced and understood by their viewers. Includes a useful timeline, glossary, and series of artists' biographies."--Patricia L. Reilly, Swarthmore College "An extraordinarily useful book, not only for teachers, but also for historically minded travelers interested in an illustrated guide to the art of Renaissance Florence."--Evelyn Lincoln, Brown University "Clear and compelling. The well-chosen illustrations include ground plans and diagrams of key architectural monuments and sculpture. The updated, judicious bibliography is a resource for anyone tackling the vast scholarship on the art of Renaissance Florence."--Cristelle Baskins, editor of The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance