Customer Reviews

Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting

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A wonderful read, thorough, focused and all about looking. One of only a few books that truly approaches the idea of painting and its history on its own terms. Mrs Hall beautifully discusses ideas of process as being inextricably bound to the idea of particular meaning. Beginning with painting's early interest in the description of likness and the evocation of literal space, she traces a remarkably plausible chronological development wherein all of what are now the standard conventions of painting are discovered. Mrs Hall has written a book that seems custom built for painters; it is wonderful.

This is the sort of book on art history and analysis that some right-wingers hate. They believe that the aesthetics of religious art of the past should be principally involved with religious meanings. Nothing in this book, to my memory, precludes the possibility of such an analysis. But it allows a lover of great paintings to really understand the the powerful way that the balance in pictures is crucial to their effect. Those with larger amplitudes in aesthetic understanding can discern that some of this notion of balance may have developed in relation to more esoteric or kabbalaistic understandings of balance than those of orthodox Catholicism which actually funded them. Such is the complexity of art history. After I read this book I never looked at a Renaissance painting the same way again, and especially not the one on the cover, which I look at all the time at the National Gallery. Shortly after reading it we took a trip to Italian hilltowns and I felt that I had more powerful eyes. What a splendid work of scholarship. One of the best I have ever read.

I WILL ONLY WRITE, THAT AS A PAINTER, THIS BOOK SERVES TO CREATE NOT ONLY HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF RENAISSANCE PAINTING, BUT ENRICHES THAT HISTORY WITH THOROUGH EVALUATION OF THE CURRENT USE OF SCIENTIFIC/CONSERVATION METHODS TO BETTER UNDERSTAND HOW AN ARTIST'S TECHNIQUE IS INTEGRAL TO UNDERSTANDING THE INTENT OF THE ARTIST AND THE MEANING IN A PIECE OF ARTWORK. IT REPRESENTS AN IMPORTANT BREAKTHROUGH IN MODERN ART HISTORY THROUGH ITS ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE IMPORTANCE OF TECHNIQUE, COLOR THEORY, AND THEIR SERVICE TO CONTENT IN THE RENAISSANCE. DR. HALL'S OTHER BOOK (ALSO OUT OF PRINT, ALAS), WHICH IS A SERIES OF ESSAYS BY PEOPLE IN THE FIELD, SHOULD ALSO BE IN PRINT: "COLOR AND TECHNIQUE IN RENAISSANCE PAINTING: ITALY AND THE NORTH".