The Fifteenth Century Italian Paintings Volume I

The National Gallery holdings of Italian paintings are both deep and wide-ranging. This beautifully illustrated catalogue of the Italian paintings from 1400-1460 includes entries on masterpieces by the greatest artists of the period such as Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Pisanello and Uccello.

      The examples of their work represented here, and the scholarship brought to bear on them, reveal the richness and the importance of this area of the Gallery's collection.

        Since the publication in 1961 of Martin Davies's catalogue of the earlier Italian Schools, new evidence has become available about the identity of the artists, the nature of their subject matter and the original settings of their work.

        Among the findings published here are the discovery of a concealed signature on an Annunciation by the Florentine painter Zanobi Strozzi, the identification of the missing predella panel from the Trinity altarpiece which was begun by Pesellino and completed by Filippo Lippi, and new discoveries regarding Uccello's Battle of San Romano which was not commissioned by the Medici, as had previously been thought.

          Every picture has been re-examined by conservators, and new information gleaned about its technique and condition. All the paintings are reproduced full-page, in colour, together with many details, comparative illustrations and reconstructions.

            An essay by Susanna Avery-Quash traces the growth of interest in early Italian painting in Britain.  

          This catalogue has been generously funded with a grant from the American Friends of the National Gallery, London made possible by a generous donation from the Arthur and Holly Magill Foundation.