Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book will appeal not only to all students of Italian Renaissance painting but also to everyone interested in representational painting in general, for it offers a new perspective on the appreciation of works of art.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel was the classroom of High Renaissance artists , demonstrating as it did his superb mastery of lightlight that models form while suggesting spiritual meaning. Hills sees the origin of this mastery in the painting of the 13th and 14th centuries. Through close analysis of works by Cavallini, Giotto, Gaddi, the Sienese school, Gentile da Fabriano, and Masaccio himself, Hills explores how the use of shimmering surfaces and pictorial light changed during the formative period 1250-1430. He links these developments with contemporary scientific and religious thought as well as techniques of panel and fresco painting.A thoughtful study for specialized collections. Annette Melville, Research Libs. Group, Oakland, Cal. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Hills has made an important contribution to our understanding of the treatment of color, its sources, and its meaning in early Renaissance painting. By concentrating on the work of leading painters from Cavallini to Masaccio he traces specific technical changes in paint application and suggests new reasons for the spatial characteristics of the paintings over and above the perspectival conventions also used. Of particular interest is Hills's clear explication of the common understanding of light as a particular source, as a radiation from a source, and as a surface property. Hills draws on painting manuals (which he lists in a separate bibliographical appendix), on the contemporary optical theory of Bacon, Pecham, and Witelo, and on modern studies on perception. From the point of view of technique Hills's book forms a useful pendant to Moshe Barasch's earlier volume on color theory; it will undoubtedly be the standard work in English for anyone concerned with the ways in which artists translated theory into practice.-J.T. Paoletti, Wesleyan University