Lorenzo Monaco

Princeton, 1989, Princeton University Press. Cm. 29×22, pp. 242, ill. 337 in nero f.t., ril. con sovrac.

Marvin Eisenberg examines the art of Lorenzo Monaco, the Camaldolese monk who was the preeminent Florentine painter during the two decades before the advent of Masaccio and Fra Angelico. In Don Lorenzo’s works, which are among the most expressively beautiful images in late medieval European art, traditional Christian themes and elegant Late Gothic forms were infused with a fervent monastic devotion. His earliest panels and miniatures, of the 1390s, reflect various stylistic trends in later fourteenth-century Florentine painting and sculpture; in his maturity he assimilated elements of the International Style into an essentially Tuscan idiom; the final works, from the early 1420s, convey a degree of recognition of the emergent Renaissance.

This is the first comprehensive book on the art of Lorenzo Monaco since 1905, including an essay on his principal works, an extensive catalogue of the altarpieces, crucifixes, choir book miniatures, and frescoes by Don Lorenzo and his prolific shop, and a catalogue of other works ascribed to him. The book is lavishly illustrated, and numerous comparative illustrations provide the artist’s work with a visual context.