David Alan Brown – författare

This beautifully illustrated and exquisitely designed volume of paintings, sculpture, medals, and drawings celebrates the extraordinary flowering of female portraiture, mainly in Florence, beginning in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Included are many of the finest portraits of women (and a few of men) by Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Verrocchio, and Leonardo da Vinci--whose remarkable double-sided portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, which departs notably from tradition, is the focus of special attention. It was in Florence during this period that portraiture expanded beyond the realm of rulers and their consorts to encompass women of the merchant class. This phenomenon, long known to scholars, is here presented to a larger audience for the first time. The catalogue, which accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, traces how the humanist praise of women influenced and enlivened their depiction. It also considers how meaningful costumes and settings were chosen.Works from outside Florence by such masters as Pisanello, Rogier van der Weyden, and Ercole Roberti shed additional light on the evolution of female portraiture during the century from c. 1440 to c. 1540. An introduction by editor and exhibition organizer David Alan Brown and four engaging essays by other experts on Renaissance art--Dale Kent, Joanna Woods-Marsden, Mary Westerman Bulgarella and Roberta Orsi Landini, and Victoria Kirkham--perfectly complement the more than one hundred illustrations, which include ninety-seven full-color plates. The catalogue entries are concise while revealing the key aspects of each portrait--from style and sources to ongoing scholarly debates. This elegant, enlightening book is itself a telling portrait not only of the art but also of the broader issues of women's freedom, responsibility, and individuality in a most exceptional era. EXHIBITION SCHEDULE National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. September 30, 2001-January 6, 2002

A masterpiece by Canaletto leads a young art historian on the trail of an unsolved mystery. A young art historian pursuing academic success. A painting by the most famous eighteenth-century painter of vedute, Canaletto. A gondola once possibly belonging to the poet Robert Browning – and who else before him? These are the key elements of the novel. When Jeremy Allyn is assigned Canaletto’s Vedute by his teacher as the topic for his dissertation – a subject many have already written about – he realizes he must find an original perspective. He therefore decides to focus on Canaletto’s figures, a secondary feature of his celebrated architectural scenes. This marks the beginning of an adventure with unexpected turns that will lead Jeremy to make some astonishing discoveries and to uncover a crime which had remained buried for centuries.