Browse our books below. You can also search for books.
NORMAN, Diana, Siena and the Virgin. Art and Politics in a Late Medieval City State. Yale University Press, New Haven / London, 1999. IX,251p. Cloth wrps. Nice copy.'This impressive and meticulous study contributes significantly to our understanding of the function of art in binding together Trecento Siena and the 'contado', the outlying regions which where subject to its rule. Too often the culture of major Italian urban centers or courts is treated in isolation. Here, however, Norman's work takes a wider view. Her compelling narrative of Siena's most prestigious Trecento paintings is set within an account of the rich web of reciprocal activity - economic, political and religious - between the city and the subject territories surrounding it. (…) Late Trecento artists are seen not as caught in paralyzing stylistic thrall to earlier revered models, but as appreciating the role of those models as authoritative visual statements of a continuingly elaborated civic ideology of the Virgin as patron and spiritual protector of Siena.' (TIMOTHY WENGERT in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol.31, 2000, p.1234). € 32.50 (Antiquarian)