Florentine Painting and Its Social Background: The Bourgeois Republic before Cosimo de' Medici's Advent to Power, XIV and Early XV Centuries

by Frederick Antal

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674729360
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/19/2014
Series:	Paperbacks in Art History , #3
Edition description:	Reprint 2013
Pages:	414
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.45(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Editorial Reviews

The whole work is readable, learned and brilliantly conceived; on no future excursions to the Spanish Chapel and Santa Croce shall we ever see exactly what we saw before.

Antal's book is one of the first attempts to trace the origins of an extended period of art in contemporary social structure... it poses interesting problems, introduces hitherto neglected facts, and illuminates in many ways the style and the content of Florentine painting...Florentine Painting and Its Social Background raises new and important problems in the interpretation of Florentine painting, and the broad correlations which it proposes will extend its influence to the several fields of late mediaeval and Renaissance history.

From the Publisher

The whole work is readable, learned and brilliantly conceived; on no future excursions to the Spanish Chapel and Santa Croce shall we ever see exactly what we saw before.

New Statesman

Antal's book is one of the first attempts to trace the origins of an extended period of art in contemporary social structure... it poses interesting problems,
introduces hitherto neglected facts, and illuminates in many ways the style and the content of Florentine painting...Florentine Painting and Its Social Background raises new and important problems in the interpretation of Florentine painting, and the broad correlations which it proposes will extend its influence to the several fields of late mediaeval and Renaissance history.

Art Bulletin