The Great Masters of Italian Art

"This book offers a highly condensed overview, if that is the right choice of words, of the art that flourished in Italy between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth: five centuries during which, in the various states into which the peninsula was divided prior to its unification (1861, followed by the taking of Rome in 1870), great master followed after great master, producing masterpiece upon masterpiece. It is true that it is Italy's privilege and pride to be able to offer an unparalleled "dispersed museum." Archeological sites, churches and monasteries, civic monuments of architecture and statuary, museums, public and private art collections, historic gardens, landscapes shaped by centuries of human labor: all these and more form a network of high-quality art that covers not only the great urban centers but the whole of the territory. A network that, despite the destruction wrought by thousands of agonizing events, from pillage by armies to natural disasters, has held and still holds magnificently, thanks to the strength of its historical structure, made up of institutional and human relationships. Admiring a work of art in an Italian museum or church, where the work itself still holds a dialogue, beyond the walls that enclose it, with the urban or rural environment of which it is an expression and reflection, is always a quite different thing from looking at it in the often impeccable but inevitably aseptic surroundings of a great museum in Europe, America or any other part of the world.

But if, taking up the challenge presented by our peculiar and impatient times, an attempt is made to compress the output of the five centuries in which Italy held undisputed sway in the world of art, then it becomes necessary to abandon contemplation of that artistic and historical tissue in all its variegated and fascinating complexity and to aim our sights high, at the galaxy of great masters, and pick out their finest and most expressive works. It is rather like shifting our gaze from a densely populated and intensively cultivated valley bottom and staring up at the mountain peaks instead. Here the panorama is no longer complex and detailed, but simple and majestic. In making this choice, which has entailed leaving out a great deal, an effort has been made to stick to a number of basic, though flexible and multifaceted guidelines. The focus has been placed on the authors and the works without which the history of art - and to a degree the very history - of Western civilization would have been different; in other words, on artists whose names are widely or universally known and on works of art that have acquired a strong identity over the course of time and whose aesthetic value is generally recognized. Works that we would like to save, if we were ever threatened by planetwide catastrophe, by sending them into space as evidence of human creativity...C.A.L.

Cristina Acidini Luchinat, head of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, is the author of numerous articles, essays and books on Renaissance art in Florence and Tuscany. She has been in charge of the restoration of important monumental frescoes. She has conceived and coordinated a number of art exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

Elena Capretti has been collaborating on a regular basis with the Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici (Artistic and Historical Assets Service) of Florence for some years. She has published articles and monographs of a scholarly character on the Florentine art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She has contributed, as author and coordinator, to the catalogues of a number of major exhibitions.