Andrew Ladis

Richard Offner

A Discerning Eye is an anthology of some of the finest and most lasting essays by a great critic-historian of Early Italian painting, Richard Offner. Its contents span the Florentine fourteenth century and thus compose a kind of portrait album of some of its most notable painters between the Gothic and Renaissance eras, from the Magdalen Master in the thirteenth century to Masaccio in the early fifteenth. Each essay contains insights that are as incisive, fresh, and evocative today as when they were first written. The essays are illustrated using Offner&’s original photographs supplemented by new or additional photographs when dictated by the material or when the reader might be better helped to see the relationship between Offner&’s analytical prose and a given image. This book reintroduces Offner and places him in the wider context of art-historical writing to reassess his work and underscore what his writings have to offer art historians working today. Three interpretive essays approach Offner from distinct but complementary perspectives: historiographical, philosophical, and biographical. Reassessments of such figures as Erwin Panofsky and Millard Meiss aid the ongoing debate about what art history is and how it ought to be practiced. The reader is asked to reconsider not merely the value but also the philosophical foundation of connoisseurship as a method of investigation and its compatibility with other methods.

Essays on Early Italian Painting

A Discerning Eye

Klara Steinweg

The Fourteenth Century

A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting

A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: The fourteenth century. v. 1. The St. Cecilia Master and his circle

Miklós Boskovits

Martina Ingendaay Rodio

This new volume proposes, in similar format but with recent photographs, illustrating the painting in their present state, the new edition of the book dedicated by Richard Offner in 1947 to the workshop of Bernardo Daddi, artist very much in demand in the first half of the 14th century. To some 70 pictures catalogued by Offner with entries which are now updated with new data on state and history as well as with bibliography, ten further, hitherto unpublished or little known items are given in this edition. The survey offered here makes the circle of Daddi, where several of chief figures of the Florentine painting in the second half of the Trecento were formed, one of the better known areas of the history of Italian painting of the Middle Age and early Renaissance.

Bernardo Daddi and His Circle

St. Cecilia Master and his circle

Richard Offner

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