In this important and revelatory book, David Young Kim examines how mobility and travel affected the identities and artistic styles of artists such as Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. It is well known that Italian Renaissance artists traveled; this book considers the cultural and historical contexts of their voyages. Kim establishes connections between artists’ travel and responses to their work in early modern literature, with critical analysis of 16th-century written culture. Relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Lives of the Artists are explored in depth. Through new readings of critical ideas, prejudices, and entire biographies in Renaissance art literature, Kim makes a groundbreaking case for the circuitous development of the artists’ individual styles, offering a complex understanding of how the concepts of mobility and identity were changing in a shifting and widening world.

An illuminating look at a fundamental yet understudied aspect of Italian Renaissance painting The Italian Renaissance picture is renowned for its depiction of the human figure, from the dramatic foreshortening of the body to create depth to the subtle blending of tones and colors to achieve greater naturalism. Yet these techniques rely on a powerful compositional element that often goes overlooked. Groundwork provides the first in-depth examination of the complex relationship between figure and ground in Renaissance painting. “Ground” can refer to the preparation of a work’s surface, the fictive floor or plane, or the background on which figuration occurs. In laying the material foundation, artists perform groundwork, opening the ground as a zone that can precede, penetrate, or fracture the figure. David Young Kim looks at the work of Gentile da Fabriano, Giovanni Bellini, Giovanni Battista Moroni, and Caravaggio, reconstructing each painter’s methods to demonstrate the intricacies involved in laying ground layers whose translucency and polychromy permeate the surface. He charts significant transitions from gold ground painting in the Trecento to the darkened grounds in Baroque tenebrism, and offers close readings of period texts to shed new light on the significance of ground forms such as rock face, wall, and cave. This beautifully illustrated book reconceives the Renaissance picture, revealing the passion and mystery of groundwork and discovering figuration beyond the human figure.

This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood. David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Artists, in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.

Vasari's Lives -- Vasari and Renaissance Art -- Cimabue -- Giotto -- Uccello -- Ghiberti -- Masaccio -- Brunelleschi -- Donatello -- Piero della Francesca -- Fra Angelico -- Alberti -- Fra Filippo Lippi -- Botticelli -- Verrocchio -- Mantegna -- Leonardo da Vinci -- Giorgione -- Correggio -- Raphael -- Michelangelo -- Titian.

A new edition--now in two volumes--of the largest and most comprehensive textbook about Italian Renaissance art. Now in its second edition, Italian Renaissance Art presents an updated and even more accessible history. The book has been split into two volumes: the first, covering the period 1300 to 1510; the second, 1490 to 1600. The volumes retain the same innovative decade-by-decade structure as the first edition, and a number of chapters have been revised by the authors to reflect the latest scholarship. The coverage of the Trecento has been expanded, and a new appendix section explains all the key Renaissance art-making techniques, with illustrations and step-by-steps for such processes as lost-wax casting. This book tells the story of art in the great cities of Rome, Florence, and Venice while profiling a range of other centers throughout Italy--including in this edition art from Naples, Padua, and Palermo.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Bode-Museum, Berlin, Aug. 25-Nov. 20, 2011, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 21, 2011-Mar. 18, 2012.

A team of specialists addresses a foundational concept as central to early modern thinking as to our own: that the past is always an important part of the present.