The frames created in Italy during the Renaissance are unequaled in their range of design, richness of decoration, and craftsmanship. Often works of art in themselves, they have suffered nonetheless from their subordinate role. The objects framed might be treasured but the frames were expendable, and frequently they were altered or discarded to keep pace with changes in taste over succeeding generations. The result of such neglect is that comparatively few Renaissance frames survive and little is known today about the artists and artisans who designed and made them. The study of Italian Renaissance frames, as of frames in general, is a study in its infancy. Drawing on the outstanding collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this book presents a unique, fully illustrated survey that traces the Italian frame from its origins in the great Gothic altarpieces through its various, often elaborate manifestations as an independent unit up to the seventeenth century. Within this chronological context, selected examples are grouped by type, and centers of production are identified wherever possible. Profile drawings provide specialist information. The discussion includes frames for mirrors as well as pictures and reliefs, and bronze and terracotta frames as well as wood.

Pictures have always been required to live unobtrusively among furnishings of a period not their own, and frames have always been the vehicle enabling them to do so.

Giorgione and Titian in Venice and Correggio in Parma were brilliant practitioners of what [Vasari] called the maniera moderna, or modern manner of painting.

The primary functions of the institution of marriage centered on the family and society, and love rarely entered into the equation. Yet the subjects of love, beauty, and attraction mesmerized Renaissance men and women.

Marriages, which were also mergers, were potentially explosive moments, and lavish festivities may have diffused some of the tensions that might arise between families over dowry arrangements and other touchy subjects.

Some of the most rhetorically elevated, learned, and refined works of Renaissance art and literature were produced by painters and poets who turned their energies with equal facility to lewd, salacious, and erotic subject matter.

No later than the last quarter of the fifteenth century, Italian sculptors began to use methods to cast bronzes without destroying their original model.

Marriages engendered the creation of new furnishings and decoration that expressed the dynastic and political aspirations of the families that purchased or commissioned them.

The physical embodiment of desire, these objects often display literary or symbolic representations of the pursuit or attainment of the lover.

Italian Renaissance artists became anatomists by necessity, as they attempted to refine a more lifelike, sculptural portrayal of the human figure.

2015

"Sometimes a narrative will occur to me that is funny."

The Artist Project is an online series in which we give artists an opportunity to respond to our encyclopedic collection.