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Early Italian painting 1290-1470

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection

by Miklos Boskovits

Fondo oro:

As the publisher of Fondo Oro, dedicated to the study and appreciation of early Italian gold-ground painting and the great masters of the Trecento and early Quattrocento, I am delighted to recommend Miklós Boskovits’ Early Italian Painting 1290–1470. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Boskovits, one of the most rigorous and insightful connoisseurs of the period, offers not only a superb catalogue of the Thyssen-Bornemisza holdings — including the magnificent Duccio panel from the Maestà — but also places these works within the broader context of Florentine, Sienese, and other regional schools. The quality of the reproductions, combined with the author’s profound scholarship and fresh interpretations drawn from recent research, makes this book far more than a simple collection catalogue: it becomes a true instrument of knowledge and aesthetic discovery.

The careful analysis of technique, style, and iconography, alongside the rich comparative material, helps both specialists and enthusiasts better understand the extraordinary flowering of Italian painting in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Philip Wilson Publishers, 1990, 226 pages, Hardcover, ISBN: 0856673811

If one painting sums up the exceptional quality of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Italian paintings in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, it is the panel by Duccio from the back predella of his Maestà for Siena cathedral. Other major Trecento and Quattrocento artists included in this volume are Fra Angelico, Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, Giovanni di Paolo, Lorenzo Monaco, Lorenzo Veneziano, Paolo Uccello and Vitale da Bologna. Less well-known artists of the Florentine, Sienese, Venetian and other schools are also represented, by works of particular quality and in a good state of preservation.

The text will enrich the reader's appreciation not only of the collection, but also of the Trecento and Quattrocento in general. The author draws upon a very wide knowledge of the period and a broad bibliography. A number of new or revised interpretations are proposed in the light of recent research. Color photographs and details of the Thyssen paintings are complemented by comparative black and white illustrations of other works, as well as line drawings and photomontages of dismembered polyptychs. The entries are supplemented by concise biographies of each artist.