A Discerning Eye is an anthology of some of the finest and most lasting essays by a great critic-historian of Early Italian painting, Richard Offner. Its contents span the Florentine fourteenth century and thus compose a kind of portrait album of some of its most notable painters between the Gothic and Renaissance eras, from the Magdalen Master in the thirteenth century to Masaccio in the early fifteenth. Each essay contains insights that are as incisive, fresh, and evocative today as when they were first written. The essays are illustrated using Offner's original photographs...

Andrew Ladis begins his book with Giorgio Vasari's famous story of Giotto's O, in which the artist drew a perfect circle freehand, baffled Pope Benedict XI's foolish messenger, and demonstrated his artistic brilliance to those qualified to understand. The fundamental premise of Ladis's work is that the Arena Chapel, like Giotto's mythical O (or tondo), must be understood as a complete, unified whole. He tells us, "the cycle of murals in the Arena Chapel has a depth that underpins the whole, an unpretentious profundity manifested in a formal order, and as in the case of the O, one must have...

In this collection of nine essays some of the preeminent art historians in the United States consider the relationship between art and craft, between the creative idea and its realization, in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The essays, all previously unpublished, are devoted to the pictorial arts and are accompanied by nearly 150 illustrations. Examining works by such artists as Michelangelo, Titian, Volterrano, Giovanni di Paolo, and Annibale Carracci (along with aspects of the artists' creative processes, work habits, and aesthetic convictions), the essayists explore the ways in which art...