New Releases by Giotto

The Arena Chapel is a small plain brick building in Padua whose interior is entirely covered with frescoes by Giotto, painted shortly after 1300 and still miraculously intact. Thirty-six large panels tell the stories of Joachim and Anna (the Virgin's parents), the Virgin Mary, and the life of Jesus from birth to resurrection; and on the entrance wall opposite the altar is a Last Judgment. These frescoes have always been seen as the starting point of Renaissance art, and are among its most famous masterpieces. In 1961-64 the paintings and their setting were cleaned and restored, but they are still threatened by dust from the surrounding streets, damp, movement of the building's structure, and chemical pollutants. As part of a continuing conservation campaign, between 1988 and 1991 they were thoroughly examined and recorded in minute detail. The results of this recording are now made available for the first time in their entirety. All the paintings are shown complete and in a series of details, many of them actual size, in which expressions and brush strokes speak out vividly across seven hundred years. The reproductions are printed in color to the highest standard. Accompanying texts provide the art-historical background, explain the narratives, and describe the frescoes' survival through the centuries. Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes captures as never before the artist's supreme achievement in all its epoch-making power - his magisterial representation of weight and volume, his genius for storytelling, his compassion and his irresistible sense of drama. This is the definitive record of one of Western art's greatest treasures.

"At the end of a program of restoration that lasted an incredibly short time, but for which preparations had been made down to the smallest detail over twenty years of scientific investigation, historical research, laboratory experimentation, essays, trials and monitoring, one of the most fundamental cornerstones and certainly the most dazzling incunabula of modern European painting has been reopened to the public." "Preceded by long and complex preparatory work on the building and the surroundings, the intervention of conservation on the mural decoration has made it possible to arrest the acceleration of the process of decay. This decay was chiefly the result of the combined action of damp and pollution, but had been further aggravated by the use of unsuitable restoration materials during the intervention carried out in the early sixties." "Once the problem that had prompted the decision to intervene on Giotto's cycle had been resolved, it was thought only proper to respond to the need to restore the paintings as much as possible to their original state." "The result has been to render the revolutionary spatial layout of the work more legible, along with the formal values through which Giotto expressed himself, in particular the quality of his coloring, something that is usually (and inexplicably) undervalued." "But several genuine discoveries have also emerged, such as his use of the technique required to make mock marble ("marmorino" or "Roman stucco") and of oil to "bind" the white lead, which as a consequence has not undergone any process of alteration. This has revealed, at an unparalleled (at least as far as our current knowledge is concerned), effects of sunlight or luminosity that it would be hard to regard as produced by chance."--BOOK JACKET.