Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This volume, created by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows Florentine miniatures produced between 1300 and 1450. A group of bound manuscripts and single leaves from disassembled books, is joined with panel paintings, drawings, embroideries, and reverse paintings on glass.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The part played by manuscript illumination and other more ephemeral "minor arts" in the earliest phase of the Florentine Renaissance have until now been made inadequately available and were thus insufficiently appreciated by the wider art-avid public. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has in part remedied this lacuna with an excellent exhibition and this catalog of smaller works dating from c.1300 to c.1450. While the volume's introduction is graced with an apposite overview of the Florentine illuminated manuscript tradition, it is ill served by a discussion of the manuscripts' function (more appropriate to a brief appendix) and by a too terse and too arcane consideration of Fra Angelico's chronology and patronage. It is the lavishly and beautifully illustrated catalog of the content of the exhibit that most particularly recommends the work. The carefully wrought discussion of the individual artistic personalities and the meticulous descriptions and analyses of the objects are models of their kind. For Renaissance and book-arts collections.‘Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

This radiant survey of manuscript illumination, drawings, small panels, embroidery and paintings on glass presents an unconventional picture of the momentous emergence of a Renaissance style in Florence. Dominican monk Fra Angelico held illumination to be fully equal to any other art form in its expressive potential and aesthetic demands. For confirmation of that view, one need only look at Bartolomeo di Fruosino's cataclysmic rendition on parchment of Dante's descent into The Inferno; Lorenzo Monaco's stark, iconic narrative panel Lamentation Over the Dead Christ; or Fra Angelico's own meticulously rendered religious miniatures, windows onto a spiritual universe. Featuring erudite essays enhanced by 296 plates (120 in color), this catalogue of an exhibition at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art documents a flourishing visual culture developed by artists equally adept at frescoes or small-scale works. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This lavishly illustrated book is the catalog of a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although it most resembles the one issued in conjunction with the notable 1988 Met show (Keith Christiansen's Painting in Renaissance Siena, CH, Mar'90), both the earlier exhibit and its catalog made an important contribution in exposing visitors and readers to a genuinely significant, if largely overlooked, area of Italian art. Despite the beauty of the manuscripts and small panel paintings in the current exhibition, this project does not succeed in convincing the reader that the achievements of Florentine illuminators ranked with those of major Renaissance painters or sculptors or that the illustrated books of the two well-known painters in the show, Lorenzo Monaco and Fra Angelico, were considered the equal of their paintings. Nonetheless, the catalog has a particularly inclusive bibliography and offers much valuable information about specific illuminators, the art of book illustration, and the formats, uses, and patronage of the books themselves, which are almost entirely religious in nature. Most useful to upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, or professional scholars. J. I. Miller; California State University, Long Beach