Perhaps more than any other collector of his generation in the United States, Robert Lehman was interested in acquiring early drawings. He made a great effort to add drawings to the collection of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, glass, and other objects that his father, Philip Lehman, had begun assembling. The 116 Italian drawings analyzed and discussed in this volume are among the more than 2,000 works of art from the collection now housed in the Robert Lehman Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Robert Lehman's collection demonstrates the variety of drawings produced in Italy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, a period when the purposes and techniques of drawings, as well as the aims and abilities of the artist who made them, became increasingly sophisticated. The volume includes an elaborate design for an equestrian monument by Antonio Pollaiuolo, a magnificent study of a bear by Leonardo da Vinci, a cartoon by Luca Signorelli, a study for a vault fresco by Taddeo Zuccaro, and many other drawings that are among the best Italian examples to have survived from that era. Most types of drawings, in a wide variety of techniques, are represented—figure studies, grand compositions, landscapes, cartoons, modelli, and even sculptors' studies. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

The collection of post-antique Italian sculpture in the Detroit Institute of Arts is considered among the three finest and most comprehensive outside Europe; however, this large and distinguished collection, whose formation began a century ago, has never been published in its entirety as a museum catalogue. Ranging from early medieval, pre-Romanesque stone carvings of the eighth and ninth centuries to works created more than a millennium later, the collection numbers over 350 pieces of Italian sculpture in wood, stone, terracotta, stucco, porcelain and bronze. More than half of the collection consists of sculpture from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (or the Early, High and Late Italian Renaissance), and approximately one-fifth dates from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (roughly, Italian Gothic sculpture). Although the remainder is more or less equally balanced in number between the eighth to the twelfth centuries, and those pieces from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, the latter group of Italian baroque to nineteenth-century sculpture contains some of the most important and most recently acquired Italian works of art in the collection.

An exploration of ways of looking in Renaissance Florence, where works of art were part of a complex process of social exchange Renaissance Florence, of endless fascination for the beauty of its art and architecture, is no less intriguing for its dynamic political, economic, and social life. In this book Patricia Lee Rubin crosses the boundaries of all these areas to arrive at an original and comprehensive view of the place of images in Florentine society. The author asks an array of questions: Why were works of art made? Who were the artists who made them, and who commissioned them? How did they look, and how were they looked at? She demonstrates that the answers to such questions illuminate the contexts in which works of art were created, and how they were valued and viewed. Rubin seeks out the meeting places of meaning in churches, in palaces, in piazzas--places of exchange where identities were taken on and transformed, often with the mediation of images. She concentrates on questions of vision and visuality, on "seeing and being seen." With a blend of exceptional illustrations; close analyses of sacred and secular paintings by artists including Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi, and Botticelli; and wide-ranging bibliographic essays, the book shines new light on fifteenth-century Florence, a special place that made beauty one of its defining features.