Brian Kish – författare

First impressions count, especially in Milano. In this unprecedented photographic journey, editor Karl Kolbitz opens the door to 144 of the city’s most sumptuous entrance halls, captivating in their diversity and splendor. These vibrant Milanese entryways, until now hidden away behind often restrained façades, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian modernism, mediating public and private space with vivid configurations of color and form, from floors of juxtaposed stones to murals of minimalist geometry.The collection spans buildings from 1920 to 1970 and showcases the work of some of the city’s most illustrious architects and designers, including Giovanni Muzio, Gio Ponti, Piero Portaluppi, and Luigi Caccia Dominioni, as well as non-pedigreed architecture of equal impact and interest. The photographs for the publication were exclusively shot by Delfino Sisto Legnani, Paola Pansini, and Matthew Billings, each evoking the entryways with individual sensibility and a stylistic interplay of detail shots—such as stones, door handles, and handrails—with larger architectural views.The images are accompanied by concise contributions from Penny Sparke, Fabrizio Ballabio, Lisa Hockemeyer, Daniel Sherer, Brian Kish, and Grazia Signori, together bringing a wealth of architecture, design, and natural stone expertise to guide the reader through the applied materials and fittings as well as the art-historical and social implications of each of the ingressi. As much an architectural city guide as an aesthetic study, the book provides the exact address and an annotated Milan map for all featured entryways, as well as the architect name and date of construction.In the well-documented realm of 20th-century Italian design, Kolbitz has stepped over the threshold and delivered a brand new area of inquiry in Milanese modernism. With the rigor of its multifaceted research, poised photography, and breadth of its featured hallways, this is an invigorating new reference work and an inside look at the city’s design DNA across high to low architecture.

In this compelling photographic journey Arthur Becker captures the intensity and power of the ceiling frescoes of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Vividly presented here in all of their diversity and splendour, these illusionistic ceilings, mainly located in the churches and palaces of 16th to early 18th century Italy but also found in Austria, Germany, and Spain, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian artistic imagination by some of the major figures of the period, including Mantegna, Melozzo da Forlì, Michelangelo, Correggio, Tintoretto, the Carracci, Caravaggio, Guercino, Guido Reni, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Andrea Pozzo, Sebastiano Ricci, and the Tiepolo dynasty. These images, many of which represent turning-points in the history of art, are accompanied by an in-depth introductory essay placing them in context by the art and architectural historian Daniel Sherer, who teaches at the Princeton University School of Architecture, concise descriptions by Brian Kish, a well-known expert on Italian art and design, and a postface by Martin Kemp, the renowned scholar of Renaissance and Baroque art and science of Oxford University. Bringing together in one place these remarkable frescoes for the first time, this book will be indispensable for art historians, connoisseurs of photography, and all those interested in Renaissance and Baroque art.