Cosmè Tura: Painting And Design In Renaissance Ferrara

by Stephen J. Campbell

This beautifully produced volume explores the work of one of the most original artists of the Renaissance across a wide range of media, including paintings, manuscript illuminations drawings, tapestries, sculpture, and metalwork. Known during his lifetime as one of the principal artistic personalities of the quattrocento, Cosmè Tura (ca. 1430-1495) suffered the distaste or incomprehension of generations of scholars who were conditioned to think of Renaissance art as the emergence of a classical and naturalistic style centered in Florence and Venice. Tura, who spent his entire career in his native city of Ferrara, was among the first Italian artists to recognize the potential of the Netherlandish techniques of oil painting. Aware of the Renaissance developments in Florence and Padua, he consciously departed from these models to develop his own provocative, and occasionally disturbing pictorial style. The six essays in this volume-"Cosmè Tura and Court Culture" by Stephen J. Campbell, "Tura and the 'Minor Arts': The School of Ferrara" by Luke Syson, "Cosmè Tura and Netherlandish Art" by Lorne Campbell, "Cosmè Tura's Painting Technique" by Jill Dunkerton, "Cosmè Tura: Painting and its Pictorial Complements" by Marcello Toffanello, and "Victorians and the Art of Ferrara" by Alan Chong-builds on a decade of renewed interest in the artist and his cultural context.

294 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2002