Renaissance Rivals, Piet Zwart & Dutch Paintings

Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian

For the great Renaissance masters, the creation of art was not only an intellectual or aesthetic exercise. It was a contest. The artists of sixteenth-century Italy knew each other's work, knew each other's patrons, and knew each other-sometimes as friends and colleagues, sometimes as enemies, but always as rivals. This enthralling book views the lives and greatest works of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian through the prism of their ardent rivalry. Rona Goffen, one of the most highly respected scholars of the Italian Renaissance today, brings the artists to life in this lively account of their impassioned strivings to outdo both living competitors and the masters of antiquity.
Quoting from poems, letters, treatises, contracts, and other contemporary writings, the author demonstrates the extent to which artists, as well as their patrons and colleagues, characteristically thought about art in the context of rivalry. Renaissance patrons often stipulated in contracts with artists that their commissions be more beautiful than works made for other patrons. The artists themselves competed for commissions. Goffen brings into sharp focus the immediacy, intensity, and complexity of artistic rivalry among the Renaissance masters, recovering for us the emotional and professional circumstances that brought about their magnificent creations.
Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian by Rona Goffen
Yale University Press, ISBN 0300094345

The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance

The story begins in the waning days of the fourteenth century, the Trecento, a time when the two masters were young, full of dreams and promise, and Florence herself - already old and storied - stood at a crossroads, not only in Italy but in the history of the western world, a crossroads that could only lead in one of two directions: destruction or rebirth.
The competition began with the creation of the door for the church of St. John the Baptist. Lorenzo Ghiberti, ayoung, unknown, and inexperienced painter, produced an elegant panel cast almost entirely in a single sheet of bronze. Filippo Brunelleschi, a local goldsmith, designed a far more dramatic and expressive panel that also drew considerable attention. In the end, Ghiberti was chosen to make the doors. Brunelleschi took a path that led him to rediscover the laws of perspective and reinvent the role of the architect.
Fifteen years later, the two artists faced off again in a contest to design the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. After more than a century of planning and work, the enormous structure was nearing completion, yet a gaping hole lay awaiting the great cupola. It was to be the widest, heaviest, and highest dome ever constructed, and while no one doubted that it could be made, it was unsure who would rise to the challenge. This time, the wealthy patrons turned to Brunelleschi. His ingenious designs gained him the most important commission in the history of Florence, crowning the cathedral with a dome of such magnificence and beauty that it has become one of the most enduring symbols of the Renaissance.
In this lush, imaginative history - a fascinating true story of artistic genius and personal triumph - Paul Robert Walker brings to life two talented, passionate artists and the competitive drive that united and divided them. As it illuminates the drama surrounding the birth of a new artistic vision, the story also explores the lives of other fascinating individuals from Daonatello and Masaccio to Cosimo de' Medici and Leon Battista Alberti. The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance offers a glorious tour of fifteenth-century Florence, a bustling city on the verge of greatness, during a time of flourishing creativity.
The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance : How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World by Paul Robert Walker
William Morrow; ISBN: 0380977877

Archaic and Classical Greek Art

Archaic and Classical Greek Art is a revolutionary introduction to the images and sculptures of Ancient Greece from the Geometric period to the early Hellenistic. By carefully examining the context in which sculptures and paintings were produced, author Robin Osborne shows how artists responded to the challenges they faced in the formidable and ambitious world of the Greek city-state, producing the rich diversity of forms apparent in Greek art. Artistic developments of the period combined the influences of the symbolism and imagery of eastern Mediterranean art with the explorations of humanity embodied in the narratives of Greek poetry, while drawings and sculptures referred so intimately to the human form as to lead both ancient and modern theorists to talk in terms of the 'mimetic' role of art. Ranging widely over the fields of sculpture, vase painting, and the minor arts, and offering a wide selection of unusual images alongside the familiar masterpieces, this work discusses the changing forms of art, and how art was used to define mens relationships with other men, women, slaves, society, nature, and the gods.
Archaic and Classical Greek Art by Robin Osborne
Oxford, 1998

Piet Zwart by Kees Broos

Piet Zwart: Typotect is the essential - and only - book on the Dutch typographer, photographer, and industrial designer Piet Zwart (1885–1977), who is famous for rejecting traditional typographic conventions and applying instead the formal principles of constructivism and De Stijl to Dutch commercial design. Zwart experimented exuberantly with bold sans-serif lettering, repetitive word patterns, strong diagonals, and photomontage. His intuitive and elegant manipulation of typographic elements, combined with a preference for the De Stijl primary colors, provided a contrast to the more formal, dogmatic approach of other contemporary exponents of the new typography. Designed in the spirit of Piet Zwart as a picture book, this beautiful monograph shows the inspiring work of this Dutch typographer in over 400 illustrations.
Piet Zwart by Kees Broos
Princeton Architectural Press, 1568984154

Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

From the hardships of a long and arduous war against Spain, seventeenth-century Dutch artists seem to have drawn strength, and Dutch paintings of this period express pride in a unique social and cultural heritage. The ability of Dutch artists to convey the poetry of everyday life, represent the textures of the manmade and natural worlds, portray vivid likenesses, and reinterpret history and mythology themes is evident in such paintings as Vermeer's A Lady Writing, Willem Claesz. Heda's Banquet Piece, Frans Hals' Willem Coymans, and Rembrandt's Lucretia.
Paintings by these and other masters attracted the American collectors P. A. B. Widener, his son Joseph, and Andrew W. Mellon, whose bequests form the heart of the National Gallery's distinguished and remarkably cohesive collection of ninety-one Dutch paintings. Included in this volume are: an essay on attribution to Rembrandt and his school; an appendix of artists' signatures and monograms; and a summary of the technical notes resulting from examinations in the National Gallery's conservation laboratories using infrared reflectography and x-radiography.
Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century by Arthur K. Wheelock
Oxford University Press, 1995