Bücher der Reihe Painters

PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA By Naomi Haskell One of the major artists of the Quattrocento, Piero della Francesca, who died in 1492, turned mathematics and perspective into a mysticism of space and light. Piero's graceful planar geometry was a precursor of Cubism and 20th century abstraction. Naomi Haskell concentrates on Piero's series of monumental Madonnas, the magnificent Madonna della Misericordia and the mysterious pregnant Goddess, the Madonna del Parto, also his Arezzo fresco cycle, the Resurrection, and the enigmatic Flagellation. Piero della Francesca has one of the most special and distinctive forms of space in painting. The bright, timeless spaces of Piero della Francesca are instantly recognizable, and critics sometimes evoke Greek sculpture in connection with Piero's paintings. One might also see in his hermetic, ritualized and timeless paintings the art of Chinese landscape painting, with its evocations of emptiness, which hints at the radical void of Eastern mysticism (in Zen Buddhism and Taoism). Piero's hypnotic art coolly melds science with art, space with spirit, the personal with the cosmic, and history, myth and religion with time. Like the art of ancient Greece, Piero's paintings rejoice in eternal brilliance, an architectonic precision, a 'Classical' feeling for proportion and harmony. In Piero della Francesca's epoch, perspective, proportion and geometry attained a fetishistic quality. 'Seeing was theory-laden' as Michael Baxandall put it. Piero's sense of mathematics and perspective took in commercial arithmetic on the one hand, and the transcendent purity of the Pythagorean solids on the other. For Piero della Francesca, geometry, proportion, perspective and mathematics had a magical quality. His art exalts, on one level, a jouissance of mathematics and measurement, in which the 'science' of Renaissance perspective is joyously explored. Piero seemed to learn towards the cool, impersonal, impassive scientific inquiry of Aristotlean philosophy, rather than the more sensuous, more obviously mystical aspects of Platonic philosophy. Fully illustrated. Bibliography and notes. 188 pages. ISBN 9781861715548. The book has been updated with new illustrations. www.crmoon.com

PRE-RAPHAELITISMTWO LECTURESBy John RuskinTwo lectures by the important art critic John Ruskin are reproduced here, looking at the Pre-Raphaelite circle in Victorian Britain. Among the artists that Ruskin considers are Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Ford Maddox Ford and John Millais. Ruskin's lectures were delivered in 1851 and 1853. Fully illustrated, with works by all of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, and their successors. With a full colour cover. Painters Series. Bibliography and notes. 164pp. www.crmoon.com

TURNER AND HIS WORKSBy John RuskinEngland's greatest artist J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is explored in this lecture by one of Turner's staunchest supporters, the art critic John Ruskin. Taken from Ruskin's Complete Works, the 1853 lecture on Turner offers an introduction to his art from a critic who knew the artist. Ruskin also considers the forerunners of Turner's art, in aesthetic areas such as colour and light. Fully illustrated with works from each stage of J.M.W. Turner's career. 108pp. www.crmoon.com