Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> These early works were still indebted to classical conventions but as the Middle Ages progressed Italian mosaics came to more clearly re- flect a Christian transcendentalist worldview. Usually their style also displayed a strong Byzantine influence; indeed some of them were ac- tually carried out by Byzantine craftsmen. Although most of the artists who designed these beautiful mosaics remain anonymous we do know the names of some of those who contributed to the final flowering of the art in the thirteenth century-including Cimabue Cavallini and Giotto the most celebrated painters of the time. Italian Mosaics opens with a concise history of the mosaicists’s art in the millennium under consideration tying together the strands of style iconography technique and cultural context. The central part of the book examines nineteen celebrated mosaic cycles in detail including those of the Mausoleum of Galla Placida in Ravenna (425-50) the old- est Early Christian monument whose decoration has survived intact; the Basilica of Santa Prassede in Rome whose mosaics commissioned by Pope Paschal I (817-824) have recently been restored to their origi nal splendor; and the Cathedral of Monreale near Palermo whose elab- orate decorative program includes the most extensive mosaic d?cor in Italy executed in only a decade (1180-90). Each cycle is introduced by a descriptive and interpretive essay and then illustrated in its entirety in a series of full- and double-page photographs most of them specially commissioned for this volume. (OS)