Caroline Elam

Andrea Mantegna painted The Triumphs of Caesar between the mid-1480s and 1506. The series of nine canvases reconstructs the magnificent procession held in 46 bc celebrating the victories of the Roman general – and later dictator – Julius Caesar. This introduction to the series begins by exploring Andrea Mantegna’s career and artistic production in Mantua between 1460 and 1506. During this period, his output included altarpieces and frescoes, as well as portraits and paintings of pagan and devotional subjects. Obsessive in his attention to detail and expert in illusionistic representations of space, Mantegna transformed Mantua into a ‘modern’ avant-garde centre whose influence spread all over Italy and beyond. A second chapter focuses specifically on the Triumphs. Mantegna took on this highly ambitious project when he was working as a court painter for the ruling Gonzaga family in Mantua. He drew on ancient and contemporary writings for this powerful and sustained evocation of the classical world, incorporating imagery from Roman antiquities. Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press

Roger Fry (1866–1934) is best known as a champion of Post-Impressionism and a pioneer of Modernist art criticism. But his fi rst love was early Italian painting, on which he became a recognized authority, publishing a monograph on Giovanni Bellini in 1899. Even after the Post-Impressionist exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 and the foundation of the Omega Workshops, Fry continued to write and lecture on Italian art right up until his death. He looked at modernism through Quattrocento eyes rather than the other way around, as is often wrongly assumed. It is impossible not to be struck by how fresh and immediately readable his writings are, how pioneering in some ways his approach remains. His work on Italian art modifi es the received view of him as a pure formalist. Apart from a famous article on Giotto which Fry republished in Vision and Design (1920), the writings on Italian art are relatively little known, and a selection of the best of them is republished here, thus introducing an important aspect of Fry’s many-sided work to a new audience. The fi rst part of the book sets Fry’s writing on Italian art into context by combining intellectual biography with the history of art history, art criticism and art institutions. It draws on new documentary material, including Fry’s travel notebooks, which contain sketches and brilliant observations taken down in front of works of art. By exploring the whole range of Fry’s published and unpublished writings, the author is able to refute erroneous received ideas – that he was uninterested in colour, for example. The infl uence of his Italian lectures and publications on such fi gures as E. M. Forster, Kenneth Clark and Michael Baxandall is also examined. The second part consists of writings by Fry – each with an introductory text by the author and fully illustrated in colour. Included in this volume are some of the unpublished lectures that his biographer Virginia Woolf suggested would make a fascinating book of extracts. Four long pieces are of outstanding interest – on Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Baldovinetti and Piero di Cosimo, all artists whose critical status was radically re-examined in the twentieth century. Fry had a close and lifelong connection with The Burlington Magazine, as cofounder, contributor, saviour-fundraiser, editor (1909-1919) and adviser. Roger Fry and Italian Art is appropriately the fi rst in a series of books on art history to be published by The Burlington Magazine and Ad Ilissvm in association - to be announced in due course.