A librarian’s dream trip to Florence, Italy.

The sumptuous illuminated manuscripts of Early Renaissance Florence have traditionally been overshadowed by the better-known monumental arts of the period. The Metropolitan Museum of Art seeks to redress the imbalance by mounting an exhibition of Florentine miniatures produced between 1300 and 1450 from collections in Europe and the United States. A selective group of bound manuscripts and single leaves from disassembled books is joined with panel paintings and works in perishable media—such as drawings, embroideries, and reverse painting on glass—created by the same masters. Some of the important books whose pages have been disseminated are here reconstructed for the first time since they were cut apart. During the incredible efflorescence of the visual arts in Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, some artists turned their hands equally to various media, manuscript painting among them. In the fourteenth century these included one of the most mysterious and engaging personalities of early Renaissance Italian painting, the Master of the Codex of Saint George, as well as such artists as Pacino di Bonaguida, the Maestro Dadesco, the Master of the Dominican Effigies, Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci, and Don Simone Camaldolese. Toward the close of the fourteenth century, there emerged in the same Camaldolese ambiance where Don Silvestro and Don Simone flourished a major artist of international stature, Lorenzo Monaco. Don Lorenzo eventually left the monastery to operate a secular workshop that became an important force in the early fifteenth century Florentine art world, producing lavish illuminated manuscripts in addition to frescoes, altarpieces, and numerous picture for a growing domestic market. One of Don Lorenzo's greatest legacies may have been the training of Fra Angelico, a Dominican monk, and a painter of surpassing genius, who is in large part responsible for the evolution of a truly Renaissance style in the visual arts. The innovative naturalism of Angelico and his followers effectively brings to a close the great age of illumination in Early Renaissance Florence. By way of introduction to the objects themselves are three essays. The first, by Laurence B. Kanter, presents an overview of Florentine illumination between 1300 and 1450 and thumbnail sketches of the artists featured in this volume. The second essay, by Barbara Drake Boehm, focuses on the types of books illuminators helped to create. As most of them were liturgical, her contribution limns for the modern reader the medieval religious ceremonies in which the manuscripts were utilized. Carl Brandon Strehlke here publishes important new material about Fra Angelico's early years and patrons, the result of the author's recent archival research in Florence. In addition to the three essays elucidating different aspects of the topic, this volume contains 55 entries on works of art, accompanied by 296 illustrations, 120 of them in color. Each entry includes a descriptive commentary, a provenance, and references. A bibliography and an index appear as well.

Florentine woodcuts were generally shaded with parallel lines that give a sense of depth and sculptural form.

Lacquer has long been one of the most intriguing arts of East Asia but is surprisingly little understood in this country. Fortunately, the American collectors Florence and Herbert Irving have lovingly assembled a distinguished collection of East Asian lacquer that is particularly strong in examples from the medieval period and in important but relatively unfamiliar types of lacquer. More than 180 treasures from that collection make up a remarkable exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and are presented in this book. The luxury associated with lacquerware is legendary. Derived from the sap of a tree, lacquer is used to protect and decorate platters, boxes, and a wide range of other objects, many of them made for personal use. The methods employed vary enormously in technique and visual effect but have in common the lavish expenditure they require of time, labor, and artistry. In one type of Chinese lacquer, objects were coated with hundreds of applications of lacquer to build up a thick layer into which complex, rhythmic images were carved. Other types of lacquerware carry engaging scenes filled with figures and animals executed in intricate mother-of-pearl inlay. Japanese lacquerers developed an array of techniques for producing makie, a brilliant gold and silver decoration often used to illustrate seasonal themes or poignant passages from literature. Also from Japan, but entirely different, are austere, undecorated Negoro lacquers, prized for the color modulations worn into their surfaces by the passage of time. Other striking effects have been achieved through decorative techniques that include designs engraved and filled with gold, lacquer modeled in relief, the use of basketry, and inlays of metal, stone, or tortoiseshell. Astonishing in their inventiveness and virtuosity, all of these lacquer works provide rich visual rewards as well as aesthetic insights into the cultures that produced them. The outstanding lacquers in this selection from the Irving Collection represent a wide range of styles and techniques. They date from the thirteenth to the twentieth century and originate in all four of the major East Asian areas of lacquer production: China, Japan, Korea, and the Ryukyu Islands. The essays presented here draw on new scholarship to trace the history of lacquer's development within each of these cultures, explore stylistic relationships, and explain techniques of the art. Each catalogued object is discussed in detail and illustrated in color. Thus, the volume is at once an introduction to the lacquer of East Asia, a comprehensive scholarly treatment of it, and an immersion in its intense pleasures. The authors of this book are James C. Y. Watt, Brooke Russell Astor Senior Curator of Asian Art, and Barbara Brennan Ford, Associate Curator of Asian Art, both at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. An essay on Japanese lacquer of the Momoyama period was contributed by Haino Akio, Curator at the Kyoto National Museum.

Chief librarian Ken Soehner on his favorite depictions of books.