"Considered one of the three greatest painters of sixteenth-century Venice, along with Titian and Veronese, Tintoretto was a bold innovator. His free, expressive brushwork made his work look unfinished to contemporaries but is now recognized as a key step in the development of oil-on-canvas painting. Even today's audiences are astonished by the superhuman scale, painterly dynamism, and visionary qualities of his work. On the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto's birth, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of his career and achievement, with fifteen essays and reproductions of more than 140 paintings--many newly conserved--as well as a selection of his finest drawings. One special contribution is a focus on the artist's portraiture" -- Library of Congress.

This highly anticipated catalogue of sixteenth-century paintings from the distinguished collection of the National Gallery in London encompasses artists who were active in Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona, cities characterized as much by the artistic interaction between them as by the influence of Venice. The artists include such well-known names as Lorenzo Lotto, Moretto, and Moroni, along with less familiar ones such as Bartolomeo Veneto and Callisto Piazza. For each of the paintings, distinguished scholar and curator Nicholas Penny provides information about technique and materials, conservation and condition, and subject and iconography. An account of the painting's original patronage is followed by a discussion of changing tastes, interpretation, and how the picture was esteemed (or neglected) over the centuries. One third of the paintings catalogued here are portraits, and entries include fascinating sections on contemporary dress, furnishings, and accessories. An appendix provides an illuminating account of some of the great collectors and collections of the past.

Heda's Banquet Piece, Frans Hals' Willem Coymans, and Rembrandt's Lucretia. Paintings by these and other masters attracted the American collectors P. A. B. Widener, his son Joseph, and Andrew W. Mellon, whose bequests form the heart of the National Gallery's distinguished and remarkably cohesive collection of ninety-one Dutch paintings.

An illustrated feast for the eye and intellect Dutch Art explores developments in art, art history, art criticism, and cultural history of the Netherlands from the artists' workshops for the Utrecht Dom in 1475 to the latest movements of the 1990s. it is lavishly illustrated with 147 black-and-white photographs and 16 pages in full color. More than 100 internationally recognized scholars, museum professionals, artists, and art critics contributed signed essays to this monumental work, including historians, sociologists, and literary historians.