Roger Fry (1866-1934) is best known as a champion of Post-Impressionism and a pioneer of Modernist art criticism. But his fi rst love was early Italian painting, on which he became a recognized authority, publishing a monograph on Giovanni Bellini in 1899. Even after the Post-Impressionist exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 and the foundation of the Omega Workshops, Fry continued to write and lecture on Italianart right up until his death. He looked at modernism through Quattrocento eyes rather than the other way around, as is often wrongly assumed. It is impossible not to be struck by how fresh and immediately readable his writings are, how pioneering in some ways his approach remains. His work on Italian art modifi es the received view of him as a pure formalist. Apart from a famous article on Giotto which Fry republished in Vision and Design (1920), the writings on Italian art are relatively little known, and a selection of the best of them is republished here, thus introducing an important aspect of Fry's many-sided work to a new audience. The fi rst part of the book sets Fry's writing on Italian art into context by combining intellectual biography with the history of art history, art criticism and art institutions. It draws on new documentary material, including Fry's travel notebooks, which contain sketches and brilliant observations taken down in front of works of art. By exploring the whole range of Fry's published and unpublished writings, theauthor is able to refute erroneous received ideas - that he was uninterested in colour, for example. The infl uence of his Italian lectures and publications on such fi gures as E.M. Forster, Kenneth Clark and Michael Baxandall is also examined. The second part consists of writings by Fry - each with an introductory text by the author and fully illustrated in colour. Included in this volume are some of the unpublished lectures that his biographer Virginia Woolf suggested would make a fascinating book of extracts. Four long pieces are of outstanding interest - on Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Baldovinetti and Piero di Cosimo, all artists whose critical status was radically re-examined in the twentieth century. Fry had a close and lifelong connection with The Burlington Magazine, as cofounder, contributor, saviour-fundraiser, editor (1909-1919) and adviser. Roger Fry and Italian Art is appropriately the fi rst in a series of books on art history to be published by The Burlington Magazine and Ad Ilissvm in association - to be announced in due course.

Traces the career of the nineteenth-century English art critic and painter, who associated with the Bloomsbury group, Picasso, and Bernard Shaw

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.