In the tradition of The Swerve and Galileo's Daughter, Piero's Light reveals how art, religion and science came together at the dawn of the modern world in the paintings of one remarkable artist. An innovative painter in the early generation of Renaissance artists, Piero dell Francesca was also an expert on religious topics and a mathematician who wanted to use perspective and geometry to make painting a “true science.” Although only sixteen of Piero’s works survive, few art historians doubt his importance in the Renaissance. A 1992 conference of international experts meeting at the National Gallery of Art deemed Piero, “One of the most highly regarded painters of the early Renaissance, and one of the most respected artists of all time.” In recent years, the quest for Piero has continued among intrepid scholars, and Piero's Light uncovers the life of this remarkable artistic revolutionary and enduring legacy of the Italian Renaissance.

Although 19th century art historians appreciated Piero della Francesca and Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi loom larger in Piero criticism, Roger Fry occupies a special place in the shaping of public opinion regarding the painter. From the time he first saw the Arezzo frescoes in May 1897 Fry was under the spell of Piero, considering him the greatest Italian painter after Giotto. Elam says Fry's role was to bring together the taste for Piero in English and Italian collectors with the admiration felt for the painter by 19th-century French painters such as Puvis de Chavannes. Fry's place as founder of the Omega Workshops and his enthusiasm for Cezanne made his reverence for Piero seem to be a modern taste. Using Fry's written work, some of it unpublished, Elam notes that Fry highly regarded both Piero's handling of paint and perspective and the lack of emotion in his work. The latter Fry wrestled with, considering it variously a strength and a limitation. Fry's own painting has been said to have an "intellectual clarity of construction" and his Quakerism made him distrust display. Perhaps he felt a personal as well as a critical affinity to Piero as a painter. This text from a lecture at the Frick Collection notes that Roger Fry advised Henry Clay Frick (Rembrandt's Polish Rider) and that the Frick owns several Piero-related works (acquired after Frick's death) but asserts no Frick-Fry-Piero link.

SALTZMAN/OLD MASTERS; NEW WORLD

Established following the 125th anniversary of the foundation of the Chair of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh and named after the painter Sir John Watson Gordon, the Watson Gordon Lectures typify the long-standing and positive collaboration betwe

An evocative exploration of the impact of the Mediterranean on British culture, ranging from the mid-eighteenth century to today Ever since the age of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, the Mediterranean has had a significant pull for Britons—including many painters and poets—who sought from it the inspiration, beauty, and fulfillment that evaded them at home. Referred to as “Magick Land” by one traveler, dreams about the Mediterranean, and responses to it, went on to shape the culture of a nation. Written by one of the world’s leading historians of the Mediterranean, this book charts how a new sensibility arose from British engagement with the Mediterranean, ancient and modern. Ranging from Byron’s poetry to Damien Hirst’s installations, Robert Holland shows that while idealized visions and aspirations often met with disillusionment and frustration, the Mediterranean also offered a notably insular society the chance to enrich itself through an imagined world of color, carnival, and sensual self-discovery.

The definitive biography of this brilliant polymath--director of the National Gallery, author, patron of the arts, social lion, and singular pioneer of television--that also tells the story of the arts in the twentieth century through his astonishing life. Kenneth Clark's thirteen-part 1969 television series, Civilisation, established him as a globally admired figure. Clark was prescient in making this series: the upheavals of the century, the Cold War among others, convinced him of the power of barbarism and the fragility of culture. He would burnish his image with two memoirs that artfully omitted the more complicated details of his life. Now, drawing on a vast, previously unseen archive, James Stourton reveals the formidable intellect and the private man behind the figure who effortlessly dominated the art world for more than half a century: his privileged upbringing, his interest in art history beginning at Oxford, his remarkable early successes. At 27 he was keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean in Oxford and at 29, the youngest director of The National Gallery. During the war he arranged for its entire collection to be hidden in slate mines in Wales and organized packed concerts of classical music at the Gallery to keep up the spirits of Londoners during the bombing. WWII helped shape his belief that art should be brought to the widest audience, a social and moral position that would inform the rest of his career. Television became a means for this message when he was appointed the first chairman of the Independent Television Authority. Stourton reveals the tortuous state of his marriage during and after the war, his wife's alcoholism, and the aspects of his own nature that he worked to keep hidden. A superb work of biography, Kenneth Clark is a revelation of its remarkable subject.