Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance 1400-1470 (v. 1) (Hardcover)

by Steffi Roettgen (Author), Antonio Quattrone (Photographer), Russell Stockman (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"...brings home masterpieces that in some cases can only be seen with difficulty in out-of-the-way places." -- Chicago Tribune

"...captures the magnificence of religious painting through Roettgen's lucid text and magnificent color photographs by Antonio Quattrone." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

Product Description
The first comprehensive survey in modern times of the surviving fresco cycles of the early Renaissance, this pathblazing work is an extraordinary achievement in scholarship and publishing.

Certain Italian fresco cycles, notably the Brancacci Chapel in Florence by Masaccio, Masolino, and Filippino Lippi, are well known. Others, such as Piero della Francesca's work in Arezzo and Benozzo Gozzoli's Chapel of the Magi in Florence, have been reproduced countless times. Yet no publisher--until now--has attempted to gather together and document in extensive photographs the essential fresco cycles of the early Italian Renaissance. The list of works covers the regions of Italy, from the Alpine mountain areas to Puglia, with an emphasis on Tuscany and Florence, the artistic center that gave life to the Renaissance.

Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance, 1400-1470 opens with a concise introductory text discussing various aspects of fifteenth-century fresco painting: artists, patronage, cultural and historical conditions, technical methods, and questions of local tradition. The central section of the book examines twenty-one fresco cycles, each representing a crowning achievement in this field. A descriptive and interpretive essay introduces each cycle and is followed by a series of full-page and double-page color plates-many of them new photography of recently restored frescoes-covering the entire work. This parade of colorful masterpieces, paired with Steffi Roettgen's authoritative text, makes a brilliant volume that will be treasured by scholars and art lovers alike. A second volume, Professor Roettgen's Italian Frescoes: The Flowering of the Renaissance, 1470-1510 , continues the story with works by Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and many others.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Abbeville Press; 1st edition (September 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789201399
• ISBN-13: 978-0789201393
• Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 10.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #571,139 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, July 14, 2001

By	Cas (the Idaho mountains) - See all my reviews

This fine, large hardback is lush, made with thick paper. Inside, it details frescoes from around Italy in more or less chronological order, earliest-created first. Each chapter details one set of frescoes, giving extensive history and corroborating details along with art analysis of style, including reproductions of other art, then shows diagrams of where each piece of fresco it depicts comes from in the building in question. Then it gives the frescoes themselves, some in wide-shot, some in close-up detail.

The frescoes are beautifully reproduced, in vibrant color, some so close up you can see brushstrokes. They depict people from all walks of life in Italy doing just about everything from praying to hunting to giving birth to you name it. Of particular interest to me were the Sienese hospital frescoes depicted therein -- the most complete I've ever seen anywhere.

Personally, me, I got this for the beautiful costumes it depicts, and it hasn't steered me wrong. It really is an inspiration. But I think anybody interested in art history or in Renaissance art would adore having this magnificent work on his or her shelf. It's worth noting that there's another book in this set which looks to be of equally high quality.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gives you a lot and makes you want more, November 26, 2001

By	James F. Welch (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is one of the most focused introductions to the vast (and often overwhelming) subject of Italian Renaissance frescoes. Ms. Roettgen has written a 2-volume, chronological study of the most famous, extant, complete fresco cycles. Her work starts in 1400, which is after Giotto, and it ends in 1521, before Michelangelo's birth. Neverthelees, she states that this time period was the Golden Age of the Italian fresco. She starts with the earliest cycles and works her way through so that you see the developmemt of realism, and most importantly, perspective in Western art. Perspective is important because it helped pave the way for optics, the camera oscura, and other scientific and technological developments which created the modern world we live in.
She discusses each cycle as to its history and historical context, iconography (I had to look the word up), and technique. One of the best things about the text is Dr. Roettgen's great gossip about the artists. Fra Lippo Lippi's sex scandal with the Buti sisters at the nunnery makes the Renaissance more real and amusing.
If you don't want to read the fascinating text, the photography is so clear and colorful you will feel like you have actually seen these stunning works of art. In truth, one can see the details of these works much better than the originals because these are so much closer.
These 2 volumes will whet your appetite to learn more about this subject, but are good enough for you to have a huge knowledge and understanding of it on their own. I read these books before going on a trip to Italy, where I saw many of the cycles described. It made the whole trip so much more enjoyable to know what I was looking at.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First in the series is the best..., November 19, 2006

By	Richard D. Kaneen "montovanow" (Tucson, Az USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Stunning photography, well-written, comprehensive historical narrative, and a wide range of styles have made the Italian Frescoes series, now at four volumes, a magificent achievement. From the age Giotto to the advent of mannerism, these incredible books cover the great age of fresco in Italy as well as one could ever hope for. The full-page photos are of amazing quality and give close-up views of sections one could only see from dozens of feet below in many of the chapels, duomos, and palazzos where they are located.

Of the four volumes, this is my personal favorite because it focuses on the true 'renaissance' of the fresco form - the decades when masters like Masolino and Masaccio were taking the advances of Giotto into an era of perspective and realism not seen before. "The Early Renaissance" includes works by these two often collarborators in addition to Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Castagno, Gozzoli, and other early masters who, although perhaps not as well known as the painters of the high Renaissance (spectacularly covered in the next volume in this series), were pushing the boundaries of the fresco toward the epic achievements that would appear in the first decades of the 16th century. As I've written in other reviews of these books - this is the best view you will ever have of these magnificent works short of seeing them in person. And actually, given the distances to ceilings, the available light, and the excellent chance and any of these works could be 'en restoro' for a decade or so, these photos might be better than a visit.

The photography is museum quality and the introductory history and analysis of each of the 21 works covered here by Steffi Roettgen is informative and insightful without becoming laboriously dense in the way some art history books can. The sections on each fresco are accompanied by annotated illustrationa of their location within the structure containing them...a very useful tool to determine exactly which section of the painting each photo represents as well as the challenges the architecture imposed on the artist and his workshop.

If you are interested in the few hundred years during which the fresco was a dominate form in Italy, this book, and the others in the Abbeville series, are ones that you will treasure forever. "The Early Renaissance" just happens to be my favorite of the four. It is worth every penny you will spend to purchase it.