COPYRIGHT, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
(For revised edition)
Made in the United States of America
PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION
Years have passed since the second edition of this book. But as most of this time has been taken up with the writing of my “Drawings of the Florentine Painters,” it has, in a sense, been spent in preparing me to make this new edition. Indeed, it is to that bigger work that I must refer the student who may wish to have the reasons for some of my attributions. There, for instance, he will find the intricate Carli question treated quite as fully as it deserves. Jacopo del Sellajo is inserted here for the first time. Ample accounts of this frequently entertaining tenth-rate painter may be found in articles by Hans Makowsky, Mary Logan, and Herbert Horne.
The most important event of the last ten years, in the study of Italian art, has been the rediscovery of an all but forgotten great master, Pietro Cavallini. The study of his fresco at S. Cecilia in Rome, and of the other works that readily group themselves with it, has illuminated with an unhoped-for light the problem of Giotto’s origin and development. I felt stimulated to a fresh consideration of the subject. The results will be noted here in the inclusion, for the first time, of Cimabue, and in the lists of paintings ascribed to Giotto and his immediate assistants.
B. B.
Boston, November, 1908.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The lists have been thoroughly revised, and some of them considerably increased. Botticini, Pier Francesco Fiorentino, and Amico di Sandro have been added, partly for the intrinsic value of their work, and partly because so many of their pictures are exposed to public admiration under greater names. Botticini sounds too much like Botticelli not to have been confounded with him, and Pier Francesco has similarly been confused with Piero della Francesca. Thus, Botticini’s famous “Assumption,” painted for Matteo Palmieri, and now in the National Gallery, already passed in Vasari’s time for a Botticelli, and the attribution at Karlsruhe of the quaint and winning “Nativity” to the sublime, unyielding Piero della Francesca is surely nothing more than the echo of the real author’s name.