MetPublications

Velázquez Rediscovered documents the recent cleaning of Diego Velázquez's (Spanish, 1599–1660) Portrait of a Man, which has revealed it as a picture of astonishing freshness and striking presence, undeniably an autograph work by the seventeenth-century Spanish master. In his introduction, Keith Christiansen describes the provenance of the portrait, the vicissitudes of its attribution since it was first considered by the scholar August L. Mayer in 1917, and his own acquaintance with the painting over three decades, which culminated in the transformative cleaning in the summer of 2009. Jonathan Brown, the leading Velázquez scholar of our time, offers an intriguing identification of the sitter, while conservator Michael Gallagher presents an illuminating account of his cleaning and restoration of the work. Included among the illustrations are other relevant paintings by the artist, including Las Meninas and the Surrender of Breda; reproductions from periodicals showing the condition of the portrait in the early twentieth century; before- and after-treatment photographs; and numerous informative details.

This beautifully produced volume brings together for the first time works by two remarkable painters of seventeenth-century Italy who happen also to have been father and daughter: Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Famous in their own day, these two artists have enjoyed renewed fame in the twentieth century: Orazio as one of the first and certainly the most individual of Caravaggio's followers; Artemisia as the outstanding female painter prior to the twentieth century. The tumultuous lives of these two artists moved along parallel trajectories and take the reader from the popular quarters of papal Rome and the rough-and-tumble world of Naples to the courts of the grand duke of Tuscany, Marie de' Medici in Paris, and Charles I in London. These changing circumstances nourished two different aesthetic visions, both of which were deeply rooted in the Caravaggesque practice of painting directly from the posed model. While Orazio's art became ever more refined and elegant, Artemisia espoused a rhetorical form of dramatic presentation that is the basis of Baroque painting. Written to accompany the landmark exhibition held in Rome, New York, and Saint Louis, the book includes essays that describe the art and people the two painters encountered in the course of their peripatetic careers and address such issues as feminism and the critical interpretation of Artemisia's work. The essays, arranged chronologically to follow the artists as they moved from city to city, not only provide critical commentary but illuminate the historical context in which they worked. The appendices include previously unpublished documents relating to the trial of Orazio's colleague Agostino Tassi for his rape of Artemisia, which shed new light on her father's workshop practice, and a recently discovered inventory of Artemisia's household goods drawn up on the eve of her departure from Florence to Rome. The book is the work of Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann, with contributions by a team of outstanding scholars.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is delighted to present Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters. This book—an appropriately small gem—has been published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Met around one of the jewels in the collection of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice: Piero della Francesca's Saint Jerome and a Supplicant. This is the first time the panel has traveled outside Italy. The exhibition and publication are the result of a rare convergence of events. Giovanna Damiani, Superintendent of Venice, and Matteo Ceriana, director of the Gallerie dell'Accademia, invited the Met to collaborate on a project involving the technical examination and cleaning of the Saint Jerome painting. Concurrently, Daniele Bodini and Alain Elkann proposed that the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture sponsor an event comparable in importance to the 2005 Met exhibition "Antonello da Messina: Sicily's Renaissance Master," for which they were responsible. The Met was pleased to embrace the project, and Keith Christiansen, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Museum's Department of European Paintings, worked in close collaboration with colleagues in Italy and Germany to make it a reality. Taking the Accademia painting as a starting point, he expanded the initial idea to create the first study devoted to Piero della Francesca's devotional paintings. These magical pictures trace Piero's development as a painter of devotional images from his earliest work, made in Florence about 1439–40, to one of his latest, the solemn Madonna and Child with Two Angels painted for Federico da Montefeltro's court at Urbino—a loan made possible, in recognition of the Year of Italian Culture, by the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo and the work of the Italian Carabinieri Command. Although modest in scale, together the works testify to Piero's consummate power of invention and to his masterful combination of intimacy and gravity that both invited the viewer and inspire a sacral awe.

This first comprehensive study in English devoted to Sienese painting to be published in four decades centers on the fifteenth century, a fascinating but frequently neglected period when Sienese artists confronted the innovations of Renaissance painting in Florence. The painters of Siena, without betraying their heritage of the previous century—which had produced some of the greatest artists of all time, including Duccio, Simone Martini, and Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti—succeeded in adapting their artistic traditions to a new and completely original vision, rejecting many of the norms by which subsequent generations have come to define Renaissance art. These later Sienese artists frequently took a non-rational approach, seeking not to replicate nature, but to explore a more subjective world—one that in some respects is akin to that of twentieth-century art. The result is one of the most singular schools of Italian painting, which must be viewed on its own terms and understood within the religious and social framework of fifteenth-century Siena. Two introductory essays survey fifteenth-century Sienese painting, and individual entries examine 139 key works in exhaustive detail, presenting new insights into long-debated issues of interpretation and attribution, and often utilizing previously unpublished material. Most of the major paintings are reproduced in color and are supplemented with illustrations of related comparative works. The focus is on the reconstruction of narrative cycles from major altarpieces by Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo, the Master of the Osservanza, Matteo di Giovanni, and Benvenuto di Giovanni, among others, and the entry on Giovanni di Paolo's well-known panels illustrating the Life of Saint Catherine of Siena establishes a new basis for appreciating one of the greatest visionary works of Renaissance art. In presenting this impressive body of material, the authors have given Sienese painting of the Renaissance the attention it deserves, providing a basis for all future research on the subject. Keith Christiansen, curator of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the author of a monograph on Gentile da Fabriano, as well as of numerous articles on Italian Renaissance painting. Laurence B. Ranter, curator of the Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is co-author of the catalogue of Italian paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection. Carl Brandon Strehlke, curator of the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is currently writing a catalogue of Italian paintings in the Johnson Collection and has published articles on Sienese painting. The catalogue concludes with an extensive Bibliography and an Index.

The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and Paul Cézanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1821, "This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time." This volume, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is the first in-depth examination of landscapes in Poussin's work. The artist's pictorial imagination and intelligence are affirmed in forty-five canvases, ranging from early Venetian-inspired pastorals to austere, grandly structured scenes and deeply poetic landscapes designed as metaphors for or allegories of the processes of nature. It is in his late landscapes that Poussin's imagination and his preoccupation with fate and humankind's interactions with nature are given free rein. Nearly fifty of the artist's drawings—the most luminous of which were done en plein air—provide fascinating insight into Poussin's thematic interests and working methods. Essays by internationally renowned scholars examine the visual, literary, and philosophical influences on Poussin as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon. Comparative paintings, drawings, and engravings by Poussin and others illuminate the essays and complement the exhibited works. Following the essays and a brief overview of key dates in the artist's life, noted Poussin scholar Pierre Rosenberg provides a detailed catalogue of the 113 works in the exhibition, exploring questions of authorship, dating, interpretation, and execution, often righting earlier mistakes and raising new questions. In a separate section of the catalogue, Rosenberg considers a selection of drawings traditionally attributed to Poussin but now considered more likely to be by followers and contemporaries. This groundbreaking book gives the fullest possible representation of Poussin as a painter of landscapes, at the same time providing a unique occasion to explore the most personal side of this great artist's creative achievement.

Praised in fifteenth-century humanist circles for his uncanny ability to create figures "so well that they seemed alive and missing only a soul," the great Quattrocento master Antonello da Messina was born Antonello di Giovanni d'Antonio in Messina, a small city on the periphery of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, about 1430. This catalogue accompanies a small, focused exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art centered around the loan by a trio of Sicilian museums of three masterpieces by Antonello, which will be seen for the first time in the United States. The recently rediscovered double-sided painting from Messina of the Madonna and Child, with a Praying Franciscan Donor, perhaps the artist's earliest extant work and with a poignant image of Christ Crowned with Thorns on the reverse, is joined by the Portrait of a Man from Cefalù, a psychological tour de force, and by the centerpiece of the group—the compelling and mysterious Virgin Annunciate from Palermo, whose haunting beauty and serenity have been compared to that of Leonardo's Mona Lisa. A handful of other works by Antonello—including the Metropolitan Museum's Christ Crowned with Thorns; a drawing attributed to the artist, in the Metropolitan's Robert Lehman Collection; and a panel of the Ecce Homo with a scene of Saint Jerome in the Desert on the reverse side, on loan from a private collection—as well as four related works by Antonello's contemporaries, from the Museum's own collection, complete the exhibition. The drawing and each of the paintings are reproduced in full color, some with fascinating details, and, in addition, several of the master's key iconic paintings are shown in comparative illustrations. Although details about Antonello's beginnings are scarce, clouded by legend and sometimes dubious information in the early sources, his artistic formation appears to have taken place in Naples, during the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, in a cultural climate open to French, Provençal, Spanish, and Netherlandish influences. Already an independent master by 1457, he received numerous local commissions and was the head of a thriving workshop. A possible first trip to Rome about 1460 may have afforded Antonello the opportunity to experience the work of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca firsthand. However, the defining moment in his artistic development was to come later, in 1474–75, when Antonello made his first documented journey to Venice, a landmark occasion; it was there that he was commissioned to paint the principal altarpiece, his masterpiece, for the church of San Cassiano. This innovative work would leave a lasting imprint on the art of Giovanni Bellini and other Venetian masters, while the portraits Antonello painted in that city represent a new stage in the evolution of the genre in Italy. No greater artists would emerge from Southern Italy in the fifteenth century. The introductory essay by Keith Christiansen illuminates the high points of Antonello's achievements in the context of his time and his culture; the essay by Gioacchino Barbera offers a comprehensive study of Antonello's life, family background, artistic training, travels, expertise as a portraitist, preoccupation with the theme of the Ecce Homo, late career, and artistic legacy. Entries on the exhibited works, by Gioacchino Barbera and Andrea Bayer, precede a capsule biography of the artist, information about the three lending museums in Sicily, a checklist of the supplementary exhibited works, and a selected bibliography.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition From Van Eyck to Bruegel this book presents an overview of one of the great epochs of Western art as seen through the extensive collection of the Metropolitan Museum. The period covered, sometimes referred to as the northern Renaissance, encompasses a century and a quarter of unparalleled artistic innovation and achievement realized in the geographic area of modern Belgium and the Netherlands. It opens about 1425 with the legendary inventor of oil painting, Jan van Eyck, and concludes with one of the most original geniuses of European art, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Virtually every major master active during this era is represented, including Van Eyck, Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Dieric Bouts, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, Gerard David, Joos van Cleve, Quentin Massys, Jan Gossart, Bernard van Orley, Joachim Patinir, and Bruegel. Early Netherlandish artists pioneered a realistic style that redefined the nature of painting and the way contemporary viewers related to pictures. Through the use of a newly perfected oil technique, painters embraced the vastness and variety of the world and suggested the actuality of everyday life. The viewer becomes an active participant in the images these artists created, in which the sacred and the profane, the real and the imagined intermesh. The volume is arranged thematically to emphasize the ways artists employed realism as a strategy. Introductory essays illuminate aspects of early Netherlandish painting: the history of its critical fortunes and scholarship; its acquisition by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century patrons; its relationship to Italian Renaissance painting; and the building of the Museum's collection in this area. Shorter essays that precede chapters of entries on individual pictures address religious painting, portraiture, and workshop practice and the art market, as well as the Bruges painter Gerard David and Bruegel's role in the development of modern landscape painting. The texts are lavishly supported by illustrations of works in the Museum's collection as well as comparative material. This is the first catalogue to bring together all the Metropolitan's holdings of Netherlandish art—the largest such collection in the Western hemisphere. Written by a team of staff experts, it is a major contribution to the understanding and study of early Netherlandish painting. A map, provenances, references, biographies of the artists, an illustrated appendix of un-catalogued paintings in the collection, a glossary of terms, an extensive bibliography, and an index are provided.

Following Caravaggio's death in 1610, the French artist Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632) emerged as one of the great champions of naturalistic painting. The eminent art historian Roberto Longhi honored him as "the most energetic and passionate of Caravaggio's naturalist followers." In Rome, Valentin—who loved the tavern as much as the painter's pallette—fell in with a rowdy confederation of artists but eventually received commissions from some of the city's most prominent patrons. It was in this artistically rich but violent metropolis that Valentin created such masterworks as a major altarpiece in Saint Peter's Basilica and superb renderings of biblical and secular subjects—until his tragic death at the age of forty-one cut short his ascendant career. With discussions of nearly fifty works, representing practically all of his painted oeuvre, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio explores both the the artist's superlative depictions of daily life and the tumultuous context in which they were produced. Essays by a team of international scholars consider his key attributions to European painting, his devotion to everyday objects and models from life, his technique of staging pictures with the immediacy of unfolding drama, and his place in the pantheon of French artists. An extensive chronology surveys the rare extant documents that chronicle his biography, while individual entries help situate his works in the contexts of his times. Rich with incident and insight, and beautifully illustrated in Valentin's complex, suggestive paintings, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio reveals a seminal artist, a practitioner of realism in the seventeenth century who prefigured the naturalistic modernism of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet two centuries later.

In 1934 the Italian government lifted restrictions governing the gabled Barberini Collection in Rome, making it possible for two intriguing fifteenth-century paintings to be put on the international art market. Within just two years both had been sold—one to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Neither their authorship nor their subjects were certain, but their ambitious depiction of architecture no less than their discursive, anecdotal approach to narration made them unique among Early Renaissance paintings. Who was their author? What was their function? How to explain their mastery of perspective and their sophisticated architectural settings? Building on over a century of scholarship as well as completely new archival information, this catalogue proposes answers to all three questions. In doing so, it examines the art of Florence in the 1440s and the work of, among others, Fra Filippo Lippi, Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia, and Michelozzo. It then turns to the introduction of Renaissance style north of the Appenines, in the region of the Marches, and to the culture of the court at Urbino in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, dominated by its ruler, Federico da Montefeltro, the humanist-architect Leon Battista Alberti, and the sublime painter Piero della Francesca.