The Cambridge Companion to Giotto serves as an introduction to one of the most important masters of early Italian art. Providing an overview of his life and career, this volume offers essays by leading authorities on the critical reception of the artist, an analysis of workshop practices of the period, the complexities of religious and secular patronage, Giotto's innovations in painting and architecture, and close readings of his most celebrated work, the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua. Designed to serve as an essential resource for students of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, The Cambridge Companion to Giotto also provides a chronology of the artist's life and a select but comprehensive bibliography.

This Companion volume brings together commissioned essays by an international team of scholars on Giovanni Bellini, the dominant painter of Early Renaissance Venice. Among the topics and themes to be discussed are Bellini's position in the social and professional life of early modern Venice; his artistic relationships with his brother-in-law Mantegna, with Flemish painting, and with the 'modern style' that emerged in Italy around 1500; and the connections between Bellini's paintings and the sister arts of architecture and sculpture. Further essays reassess the artist's approaches to landscape and color, elements that have always been recognized as central to his pictorial genius.

The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez offers a synthetic overview of one of the greatest painters of Golden Age Spain and seventeenth century Europe as a whole. With contributions from art historians and those working in other disciplines, this book offers fresh approaches to the vast literature on this artist. Velázquez's portraits of his patron, King Philip IV, and his wives are examined by two historians in an effort to reconstruct their reception and readings by contemporaries. Two historians of Golden Age Spanish literature provide an interdisciplinary account of the relationships between poetry, theater, and the visual arts at the Spanish court, as practiced by Velázquez, the poet Francisco de Quevedo and the dramatist, Calderón de la Barca. An expert on the history of Spanish music offers an unprecedented examination of how instruments 'play' in Velázquez's compositions.