Madonna of the Harpies

~On 22 August 1582, Ammanati wrote to his colleagues from the Accademia del Disegno in Florence warning them to avoid...

~~In 1593 Andrea Andreani, an itinerant woodblock cutter in Siena, packed up shop and returned to his native Mantua to begin work on a print commission from Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga. The task was...

We take for granted the transition from Early to High Renaissance in Florence, as if the new half-millennium automatically engendered the new style. We fail to recognize the extent to which it is a new style, and not the necessary next phase of Renaissance naturalism. It is hard to envisage how the new beginning of what Wölfflin would call “the classic style” would have...

So advised Paolo da Certaldo in his mid-fourteenth-century book of behavioral guidance. Though the spiritual gaze might seem awkwardly bifocal, with one eye raised and the other lowered, the injunction rests on great authority.