The Complete Paintings of Piero della Francesca

Fülszöveg

CLASSICS OF THE WORLD'S GREAT ART
Titles available or in preparation in this series: Michelangelo • Giotto • Raphael • Caravaggio • Bosch Leonardo da Vinci • Vermeer • Bruegel • IVIanet • Giorgione Piero della Francesca • Botticelli • The Van Eycks • Canaletto Mantegna • Watteau • Picasso-Blue and Rose Periods • Dürer
This series is based upon an exhaustive assembly of facts, painstal<ingly compiled. Its special feature, the comprehensive catalogue raisonné, summarizes the best available sources and examines the works themselves, giving specific attention to history and historiography, ancillary historical details, sociology, aesthetics, art criticism, iconography, symbolism, chronology, painting techniques, scientific methods of examination, conservation and restoration, literary influences, bibliography, catalogue references, comparative studies, copies and replicas. Such a feature, which should be of particular interest to students, arms the reader with the data necessary to... Tovább

Fülszöveg

CLASSICS OF THE WORLD'S GREAT ART
Titles available or in preparation in this series: Michelangelo • Giotto • Raphael • Caravaggio • Bosch Leonardo da Vinci • Vermeer • Bruegel • IVIanet • Giorgione Piero della Francesca • Botticelli • The Van Eycks • Canaletto Mantegna • Watteau • Picasso-Blue and Rose Periods • Dürer
This series is based upon an exhaustive assembly of facts, painstal<ingly compiled. Its special feature, the comprehensive catalogue raisonné, summarizes the best available sources and examines the works themselves, giving specific attention to history and historiography, ancillary historical details, sociology, aesthetics, art criticism, iconography, symbolism, chronology, painting techniques, scientific methods of examination, conservation and restoration, literary influences, bibliography, catalogue references, comparative studies, copies and replicas. Such a feature, which should be of particular interest to students, arms the reader with the data necessary to appreciate the works In depth. The criteria of authenticity and documentary references have been scrupulously reviewed; opposing critical schools have been objectively confronted; and conclusions have been drawn only where the evidence for them Is unimpeachable.
HARRY N. ABRAMS, I NC./110 East 59th Street, New York. N.Y. 10022

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THE COMPLETE
PAINTINGS OF
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA
The fifteenth-century Tuscan master, Piero della Francesca, is surely one of the most enigmatic figures in Renaissance art. So little is known about bis personal life and character - except what can be gleaned from snatches of vital information in public records, and from Vasari's readable but mainly inaccurate life of the artist - that we must rely on his art to speak for its creator.
Piero's art, however, only increases the enigma. It presents us with the image of an endlessly patient, meticulous painter who was brilliantly in the forefront of the then developing Renaissance ; he advanced the art of his time through a new sensitivity to color and atmosphere, and through great skill in the use of perspective. But, at the same time, his works also reflect the image of a withdrawn, meditative, and aloof artist who sought only to represent his private vision of a world of uncanny clarity, unearthly calm, and delicate poise, a world so breathtakingly present in his few surviving frescoes and panel paintings.
This volume presents all of Piero's extant works (many of them in large colorplates), including the marvelous fresco cycle relating the History ofthe True Cross. There are also special appendices devoted to his drawings and theoretical writings.
Peter Murray is Professor of the History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written many books, among them Watieau 1948, Dictionary of Art and Artists 1959, a History of English Architecture 1962 and The Art of the Renaissance 1963.
6 4 pages of color
III black-and-white illustrations
Cover illustration : Detail from The Nativity Vissza