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Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance

Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350

By (Editor) Christine Sciacca

Fondo Oro:

While our hearts often beat with a particular fervor for the Sienese school, one cannot truly grasp the majesty of the Fondo Oro tradition without confronting the formidable brilliance of Florence during the early Trecento. Christine Sciacca’s Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance is an essential inclusion in our library because it captures the city at its most revolutionary moment. It is a time when Giotto, Bernardo Daddi, and Taddeo Gaddi were not merely painting; they were redefining the human experience through the luminous medium of gold and tempera, bridging the gap between the celestial and the earthly.

What secures this volume's place among our recommendations is its rare focus on the intersection of panel painting and manuscript illumination. By reuniting the scattered leaves of the Laudario of Sant' Agnese, this book allows us to witness the spiritual and artistic aspirations of a city in full flower. It provides a masterfully detailed look at the shared language of the bottega, where stained glass, parchment, and wood all served the same divine purpose. For any serious collector or scholar, this is a profound study of how Florence laid the very foundations of the Renaissance.

J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012, 448 pages, Hardcover, ISBN: 9781606061268

Florence and the Renaissance have become virtually synonymous, bringing to mind names like Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and many others whose creativity thrived during a time of unprecedented prosperity, urban expansion, and intellectual innovation. With more than 200 illustrations, Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance reveals the full complexity and enduring beauty of the art of this period, including panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and stained glass panels. The book considers not only the work of Giotto and other influential artists, including Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, and Pacino di Bonaguida, but also that of the larger community of illuminators and panel painters who collectively contributed to Florence's artistic legacy. It places particular emphasis on those artists who worked in both panel painting and manuscript illumination, and presents new conservation research and scientific analyses that shed light on artists' techniques and workshop practices of the times. Reunited here for the first time are twenty-six leaves of the most important illuminated manuscript commission of the period: the Laudario of Sant' Agnese. The splendor of this book of hymns exemplifies the spiritual and artistic aspirations of early Renaissance Florence. 

A major exhibition on this subject will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum November 13, 2012, through February 10, 2013, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario March 16, 2013, through June 16, 2013.

Contributors to this volume include Roy S. Berns, Eve Borsook, Bryan Keene, Francesca Pasut, Catherine Schmidt Patterson, Alan Phenix, Laura Rivers, Victor M. Schmidt, Alexandra Suda, Yvonne Szafran, Karen Trentelman, and Nancy Turner.