Phaidon P – The Bell Bookshop

Rembrandt

Emma — Sun, 01 Mar 1992 00:00:00 +0000

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69) transcends any period or social milieu: he is one of the world’s great masters and though his works reflect the confidence of newly independent Holland, his vision extends far beyond these narrow confines. A deeply perceptive artist (his many self-portraits show his continued interest in the study of human nature), he sought to go beyond superficialities, to endow his biblical paintings, historical narratives, genre scenes and portraits with psychological depths hitherto unknown in Dutch painting. Impatient with conventionally stiffly posed group portraits, he produced such masterpieces as The Night Watch, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp and the Staal Meesters, while his studies of Saskia, his wife, and his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels reveal his deeply sensuous, compassionate nature.

Michael Kitson has revised his highly successful book in the light of the most recent scholarship on Rembrandt, making this the ideal survey of the career of a much-loved genius.

Goya

Emma — Tue, 01 Mar 1994 00:00:00 +0000

Goya (1746-1828) is one of Spain’s most famous artists and is widely acknowledged as an outstanding painter in the European tradition, often called the last of the Old Masters and the first of the Moderns. He is appreciated as a portrait painter; a creator of menacing and melancholy images in oils; a master of enigmatic, satirical and revolutionary drawing and etching; the champion of Spanish people in their struggle against oppression and the recorder of their life and sufferings in war. This book brings out many of Goya’s moods, from the gaiety and tenderness of the tapestry cartoons to the mysterious ferocity of the Black Paintings made in his old age.

Holbein

Emma — Mon, 01 Mar 1993 00:00:00 +0000

Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543) is renowned for his incisive portraits of Norhern Europe’s courtiers, thinkers and statesmen, but his output was far more various, and included book illustration, large religious paintings and designs for jewellery and court fashions. This fine record of his career examines these varied aspects of his genius and beautifully illustrates the ways in which his miraculous technical accomplishment and attention to surface detail were married to acute observations of an empathy with his human subjects.

For this new edition of Helen Langdon’s introduction to Holbein, art historian James Malpas has selected additional illustrations and written detailed commentaries on each colour plate.

Fra Angelico

Emma — Sat, 01 Aug 1992 00:00:00 +0000

Fra Angelico (c. 1400-55) is one of the most popular artists of the early Italian Renaissance. In his own lifetime churches and cathedrals competed for his work, and the style he evolved has come to be regarded as the natural language of religious painting. For more than a century the popular image of an angel has been that of an angel by Fra Angelico.

Perhaps his best known work is the series of fresco decorations in the convent of San Marco in Florence, where Angelico was a friar. These paintings tell the story of the life of Christ as vividly and movingly today as they must have done over five hundred years ago. The powerful simplicity of the forms, the treatment of light and the subtlety of colour testify both to Fra Angelico’s personal religious conviction and to his awareness of recent developments in Florentine art.

This comprehensive survey of Angelico’s work includes many panels from San Marco, and from his other important commission in the Vatican, and a superb selection of altarpieces and panels spanning his whole working life.

Christopher Lloyd’s authoritative essay on Angelico was first published in 1979, with the forty-eight full page colour plates. For this revised edition, David White has added a full and clear commentary on each picture, and numerous black-and-white illustrations to compare with the paintings.