Vacillating between the majesty of the Greco-Byzantine heritage and the modernity forecasted by Giotto, Early Italian painting summarises the first steps that lead to the Renaissance. Trying out new mediums, those first artists left frescoes for removable panels. If the sacred faces shock us novices, this distance was more than wanted during this era and in order to emphasize the divinity of the characters, it highlighted their divinity comforted the sanctified with a background covered with gold leaves. The elegance of the line and the colour choice was combined to reinforce the symbolic choices. The half-confessed ultimate goal of the Early Italians artists was to make the invisible… visible. In this magnificent book, the author emphasizes the importance that the rivalry between the Siennese and Florentine schools played for the evolution of art history. And the reader, in the course of these forgotten masterworks, will discover how, little by little, the sacred became incarnate and more human…opening a discrete but definitive door through the use of anthropomorphism, as was cherished by the Renaissance.

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