Associate Curator Elizabeth Cleland highlights the innovative design work of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, the focus of the upcoming exhibition Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry.

On close examination, viewers will instantly recognize how evocative and emotional [the Master of Monte Oliveto’s] pictures can be even when they have been copied from earlier prototypes.

Kathryn Greenthal's Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor is a critical study of one of the greatest artists this country has produced. The book recounts the sculptor's early days in New York as a cameo cutter's apprentice and his student years in France and Italy and identifies the sources of European influence from which he honed his native talent and earned his place in the international sculptural hierarchy. The author examines Saint-Gaudens's major achievements and reveals the associations, working methods, and fortunes of a man whose career flourished in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth. Saint-Gaudens established himself in New York in the 1880s, after periods of work and study in Paris and Rome. His return to America coincided with the great age of Beaux-Arts architecture, and the sculptor's inspired association with Henry Hobson Richardson, Charles McKim, and Stanford White led to the creation of the works for which he is best known. The copper figure of Diana that Saint-Gaudens made to embellish the original Madison Square Garden is the work most strongly identified with the sculptor today. Saint-Gaudens's monuments to American heroes—to Lincoln in Chicago, to Farragut and Sherman in New York, and to Robert Gould Shaw in Boston—demonstrate the Beaux-Arts concern with decoration, but also display a particularly American mythologizing quality. In a sense, these great men of history live in the public consciousness through the aspect of their characters Saint-Gaudens chose to portray. In another mode, Saint-Gaudens created large-scale works of great intimacy, most notably the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C., whose solitary figure represents the emotion of grief. Throughout his career, while he was at work on monumental commissions, Saint-Gaudens also produced many relief portraits that show the delicacy of his draughtsmanship. Some of these are like sketches in bronze; others are fully developed portraits. In subject they range from a series of the sculptor's celebrated artist friends to distinguished personages and the children of wealthy patrons. Finally, late in his life, Saint-Gaudens was asked by Theodore Roosevelt to design coins. The figures of Liberty and the eagles that decorated these ten- and twenty-dollar gold pieces remain emblems of the federal identity—familiar and ideal. Copiously illustrated with photographs—those by Jerry L. Thompson taken especially for the book—Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor presents in dazzling array accounts of works described by John K. Howat in the book's preface as "possessing such superb qualities of line, form, color, and surface ... that they capture equally our mind and our eye with the illusive impact of great beauty found only in the finest art objects."

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519) stands as a supreme icon in Western consciousness—the very embodiment of the universal Renaissance genius. With much of his work lost or unfinished, the key to his legacy can be found in the enormous body of his extant drawings and manuscript notes. This publication offers a unified and fascinating portrait of Leonardo as a draftsman, integrating his diverse roles as an artist, scientist, inventor, theorist, and teacher. Essays written by the world's leading Leonardo scholars investigate the significant implications of Leonardo's left-handedness both for the connoisseurship of his drawings and for a reconstruction of his artistic personality; the relationship between word and image in Leonardo's drawings and manuscripts; problems of attribution and authenticity in the critical evaluation of Leonardo's graphic oeuvre; Leonardo's early drapery studies; the role of the artist's father; and the special role of drawn frames or boundaries in Leonardo's design process. Detailed descriptions of 138 individual works survey the wide variety of drawing types that Leonardo used, and also include a small group of works by artists critical to his artistic development in Florence and to his multifaceted activity in Milan. A chronological framework is also provided to shed light on his extraordinary life and career.

This study is an important new account of the life and work of the Flemish master Petrus Christus. It is the first volume to focus specifically on the physical characteristics of his works as criteria for judging attribution, dating, and the extent to which he was indebted to Jan van Eyck and other artists for the development of his technique and style. The author's aim is to examine how certain works were made in order to solve some rather traditional questions of connoisseurship. Recent technical and archival investigations, the result of which are published here together for the first time, form the basis of a sophisticated reassessment of Christus. His relationship with van Eyck's workshop is explored. There is a careful description of his working methods, including his use of underdrawings and his exploration perspective. The results of dendrochronological analyses of many of his panels are also given. As important as this technical and art-historical evaluation is the social and biographical background that is provided. Christus is placed in the context of fifteenth-century Bruges, a wealthy and powerful city under the rule of the dukes of Burgundy. Its status as a ducal seat fostered a lively cultural life, and patrons for artistic undertakings were also found in the relatively large number of well-to-do citizens and foreign merchants who lived there. The economic, social, and political forces that affected Bruges are described, as is their impact on the city's community of artists, which included Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling. Throughout, the authors draw on archival documents relating to citizenship, public celebrations, contracts, and confraternities to describe artistic activity in Bruges and to construct Christus's cultural biography. This publication accompanies the most important exhibition of early Netherlandish paintings in the United States in more than three decades. Each of the twenty-seven works is discussed in an extended entry with a complete provenance, and a selected bibliography is provided. The authors of this major study of Petrus Christus are Maryan W. Ainsworth, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Paintings Conservation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, Associate Professor, History of Medieval Art, University of Groningen.

Research Assistant John Byck discusses tonal nuances in the work of Master IAM of Zwolle, an early Netherlandish artist identifiable today only by his monogram.

Among glass craftsman active in the 1st century A.D., the most famous and gifted was Ennion, who hailed from the coastal city of Sidon in modern Lebanon. Ennion’s glass stood out for its quality and popularity. His products are distinguished by the fine detail and precision of their relief decoration, which imitates designs found on contemporaneous silverware. This compact, but thorough volume examines the most innovative and elegant known examples of Roman mold-blown glass, providing a uniquely comprehensive, up-to-date study of these exceptional works. Included are some twenty-six remarkably preserved examples of drinking cups, bowls, and jugs signed by Ennion himself, as well as fifteen additional vessels that were clearly influenced by him. The informative texts and illustrations effectively convey the lasting aesthetic appeal of Ennion’s vessels, and offer an accessible introduction to an ancient art form that reached its apogee in the early decades of the Roman Empire.

Praised in fifteenth-century humanist circles for his uncanny ability to create figures "so well that they seemed alive and missing only a soul," the great Quattrocento master Antonello da Messina was born Antonello di Giovanni d'Antonio in Messina, a small city on the periphery of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, about 1430. This catalogue accompanies a small, focused exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art centered around the loan by a trio of Sicilian museums of three masterpieces by Antonello, which will be seen for the first time in the United States. The recently rediscovered double-sided painting from Messina of the Madonna and Child, with a Praying Franciscan Donor, perhaps the artist's earliest extant work and with a poignant image of Christ Crowned with Thorns on the reverse, is joined by the Portrait of a Man from Cefalù, a psychological tour de force, and by the centerpiece of the group—the compelling and mysterious Virgin Annunciate from Palermo, whose haunting beauty and serenity have been compared to that of Leonardo's Mona Lisa. A handful of other works by Antonello—including the Metropolitan Museum's Christ Crowned with Thorns; a drawing attributed to the artist, in the Metropolitan's Robert Lehman Collection; and a panel of the Ecce Homo with a scene of Saint Jerome in the Desert on the reverse side, on loan from a private collection—as well as four related works by Antonello's contemporaries, from the Museum's own collection, complete the exhibition. The drawing and each of the paintings are reproduced in full color, some with fascinating details, and, in addition, several of the master's key iconic paintings are shown in comparative illustrations. Although details about Antonello's beginnings are scarce, clouded by legend and sometimes dubious information in the early sources, his artistic formation appears to have taken place in Naples, during the reign of Alfonso of Aragon, in a cultural climate open to French, Provençal, Spanish, and Netherlandish influences. Already an independent master by 1457, he received numerous local commissions and was the head of a thriving workshop. A possible first trip to Rome about 1460 may have afforded Antonello the opportunity to experience the work of Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca firsthand. However, the defining moment in his artistic development was to come later, in 1474–75, when Antonello made his first documented journey to Venice, a landmark occasion; it was there that he was commissioned to paint the principal altarpiece, his masterpiece, for the church of San Cassiano. This innovative work would leave a lasting imprint on the art of Giovanni Bellini and other Venetian masters, while the portraits Antonello painted in that city represent a new stage in the evolution of the genre in Italy. No greater artists would emerge from Southern Italy in the fifteenth century. The introductory essay by Keith Christiansen illuminates the high points of Antonello's achievements in the context of his time and his culture; the essay by Gioacchino Barbera offers a comprehensive study of Antonello's life, family background, artistic training, travels, expertise as a portraitist, preoccupation with the theme of the Ecce Homo, late career, and artistic legacy. Entries on the exhibited works, by Gioacchino Barbera and Andrea Bayer, precede a capsule biography of the artist, information about the three lending museums in Sicily, a checklist of the supplementary exhibited works, and a selected bibliography.