An introduction to 15th century Italian painting and the social history behind it, arguing that the two are interlinked and that the conditions of the time helped fashion distinctive elements in the painter's style.

The National Gallery of Art collection of Italian fifteenth-century paintings, the finest in any American museum, has not been published in its entirety since the 1979 Catalogue of Italian Paintings by Fern Rusk Shapley. Among the altarpieces, devotional works, portraits, and allegorical scenes are many world-famous masterpieces. In addition to Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci and the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, paintings by Domenico Veneziano, Castagno, Sassetta, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Perugino, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio make this a book of major masters of the Renaissance.

This new, illustrated catalogue deals with artists the bulk of whose work falls within the first half of the fifteenth century, around 1400-1460, predominantly in Tuscany. Yet within this relatively narrow chronological and geographical confine we find some of the most influential and innovative painters of the Italian Renaissance, including Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Pisanello and Uccello. An essay by Susanna Avery-Quash traces the growth of interest in early Italian painting in Britain. Every picture has been re-examined with conservators, and new information gleaned about its technique and condition. All the paintings are reproduced full-page, in colour, together with many details, comparative illustrations and reconstructions.

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

"This ... illustrated catalogue deals with artists the bulk of whose work falls within the firt half of the fifteenth century, around 1400-1460, predominantly in Tuscany ... All the paintings are reproduced full-page, in colour, together with many details, comparative illustrations and reconstructions"--Cover.

This groundbreaking book spans the fields of art history, material culture, and gender studies in its examination of a range of objects from Italian Renaissance society. Addressing painted and sculpted portraits, marriage and betrothal gifts, and paxes, Adrian W. B. Randolph uses themes such as family and individual memory, windows, perspectival space, and touch to investigate how these items were experienced at the time, particularly by women. Rather than focusing on the social contexts of the objects, this original study deals with the objects themselves, asking how individuals lived with, looked at, and responded to complex things that at the time hovered between the nascent category of art and the everyday. Accompanied by beautiful and engaging accounts and illustrations of late-14th- and 15th-century Italian art, this compelling and thought-provoking argument makes the case for an alternate account of art and experience that challenges many conceptions about Renaissance art.