High quality reprint of Florentine Painting And Its Social Background by Frederick Antal.

An eminent art historian gives us here a full account of the history of Florentine art in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as well as a stimulating exploration of questions about the social content of art. Frederick Antal sketches a portrait of Florence in this richly productive period—the economic and social conditions as well as religious tenets and intellectual controversies. He traces the course of painting and sculpture from Giotto to Brunelleschi and Masaccio, and shows how major stylistic developments are related to changing economic and social structures. His analysis is fully illustrated by 210 halftones.

An eminent art historian gives us here a full account of the history of Florentine art in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as well as a stimulating exploration of questions about the social content of art. Frederick Antal sketches a portrait of Florence in this richly productive period—the economic and social conditions as well as religious tenets and intellectual controversies. He traces the course of painting and sculpture from Giotto to Brunelleschi and Masaccio, and shows how major stylistic developments are related to changing economic and social structures. His analysis is fully illustrated by 210 halftones.

Attempts to provide a comprehensive study of the paintings produced in Florence between circa 1100 and 1270 - the scope of the book ranges from early examples of medieval art to the generation of painters preceding Cimabue. All known works of the period are included accompanied by descriptions.

A collection of essays on Florentine history by a seasoned and innovative Renaissance scholar

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.