Serving as both an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and as a text on how to interpret social history from the style of pictures in a given historical period, this new edition to Baxandall's pre-eminent scholarly volume examines early Renaissance painting, and explains how the style of painting in any society reflects the visual skills and habits that evolve out of daily life. Renaissance painting, for example, mirrors the experience of such activities as preaching, dancing, and gauging barrels. The volume includes discussions of a wide variety of painters, including Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Stefano di Giovanni, Sandro Botticelli, Masaccio, Luca Signorelli, Boccaccio, and countless others. Baxandall also defines and illustrates sixteen concepts used by a contemporary critic of painting, thereby assembling the basic equipment needed to explore fifteenth-century art.

    In the late 1300s, Giovannino dei Grassi and his workshop painted the first folios for Giangaleazzo Visconti, despot of Milan, but the Duke's death in 1402 interrupted the work. Belbello da Pavia completed this dazzling manuscript for Giangaleazzo's son, Filippo Maria, after he became Duke in 1412. As Millard Meiss has pointed out in his Introduction, the imaginative art of Giovannino survives in this book alone, wherein he combines an entirely personal vision of light radiating from saints and prophets - and from the Duke of Milan, as well - with an equally original exploration of the natural world. Moreover, the inventive forms and scintillating colors, the extensive and intriguing use of gold leaf, as well as the silver and lapis lazuli (a beautiful, rare, and expensive shade of blue) that abounds throughout the manuscript, surely make it a unique treasure among treasures. The Visconti Hours will enchant art lovers everywhere with its contrasts and stunning extravagance.

    Following the battle of Pavia, Pope Clement VII joined the French-led League of Cognac to resist the threatened Habsburg domination of Europe. Emperor Charles V appealed to the German diet for support and raised an army, which entered Italy in 1527 and joined the imperial forces from Milan, commanded by the duke of Bourbon. This army marched on Rome, hoping to detach the pope from the league. The many Lutherans in its ranks boasted that they came with hemp halters to hang the cardinals and a silk one for the pope. Rome fell on 6 May 1527, Bourbon being killed in the first assault. Discipline collapsed, and the city was savagely pillaged for a week before some control was restored. Judith Hook's book is a classic narrative history of these events and one of the first to appear in English.

    

    His admirers include numerous distinguished thinkers, philosophers and poets.Stokes's critical writings lie at the junction of three diverse influences: psychoanalysis, the English tradition of aesthetic writing which derives from Ruskin and Pater, and the artist's own special involvement with art. Apart from being a writer, he is himself a painter of distinction.This selection of Stoke's writing (some taken from volumes long out of print) has been ably edited and introduced by Richard Wollheim and provides the first opportunity ever offered to a wide public to acquaint itself with this strange and fascinating body of work. Extracts, which have been grouped under headings to reflect Stokes's varied concern with the nature of art, the work of individual artists, and the spirit of place, range over the whole of his criticism from The Quattro Cento (1932) to Reflections on the Nude (1967). They include passages from his early study on the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini and from the exquisite and semi-autobiographical Inside Out.