Oscillating between the majesty of the Greco-Byzantine tradition and the modernity predicted by Giotto, Early Italian Painting addresses the first important aesthetic movement that would lead to the Renaissance, the Italian Primitives.

Trying new mediums and techniques, these revolutionary artists no longer painted frescos on walls, but created the first mobile paintings on wooden panels. The faces of the figures were painted to shock the spectator in order to emphasise the divinity of the character being represented. The bright gold leafed backgrounds were used to highlight the godliness of the subject. The elegance of both line and colour were combined to reinforce specific symbolic choices. Ultimately the Early Italian artists wished to make the invisible visible. In this magnificent book, the authors emphasise the importance that the rivalry between the Sienese and Florentine schools played in the evolution of art history. The reader will discover how the sacred began to take a more human form through these forgotten masterworks, opening a discrete but definitive door through the use of anthropomorphism, a technique that would be cherished by the Renaissance.


About the authors:
Sir Joseph Archer Crowe was an English consular offi cial and art critic, whose volumes of the History of Painting in Italy, co-written with the Italian critic Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897), stand at the beginning of disciplined modern art history writing in English. With Cavalcaselle (an Italian writer and art critic), he produced several historical works on art of classic importance, notably Early Flemish Painters (London,1857) and A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (London, 1864-1871, 5 vols.).