Giulio Dalvit

This monumental book is the first monograph devoted to the Sienese artist Lorenzo di Pietro, known as Vecchietta (1410–1480) Included is a wealth of new scholarship and archival material, as well as stunning new photography. A painter, sculptor, architect, and goldsmith, Vecchietta is a towering figure in the history of Quattrocento Siena and, as the book brilliantly demonstrates, a central protagonist of Italian art of the so-called Early Renaissance. Vecchietta’s long life and diverse oeuvre across multiple media provide a prism through which to re-evaluate the art of Quattrocento Siena, traditionally misinterpreted as ancillary to Florence. Vecchietta’s immensely successful practice—in Siena, Lombardy and Rome—included painting, sculpture, architecture and goldsmithery, and among his patrons were such eminent figures as Cardinal Branda Castiglioni and Pope Pius II. Vecchietta was one of the few Italian artists of the period to paint an independent self-portrait and the first to design a funerary chapel for himself. He signed and dated most of his work, presenting himself as a sculptor on his paintings and a painter on his sculptures. He is credited with innovations in style and technique that paved the way for the accomplishments of the next generation of Sienese artists (most of whom trained in his workshop), among them, Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Nonetheless, there has been no publication devoted to Vecchietta since a 1937 booklet by Giorgio Vigni, whose preoccupation was to locate consistency in Vecchietta’s stylistically inconsistent output. Dalvit contends that the criteria of traditional art history are insufficient to explain Vecchietta’s complexity and that the best way to do justice to him as an artist is to subvert traditional expectations about the monograph itself. Among the questions Dalvit addresses are the following: How was art made in places other than Florence before art had a history before Vasari set new criteria to interpret it? How did a polymath artist work outside the Florentine tradition of disegno? A monographic focus on Vecchietta represents an opportunity to tackle these questions, and many more, whose answers have significance beyond the locality of fifteenth-century Siena. Published by Paul Holberton Publishing Exhibition Schedule: Santa Maria della Scala, Siena (25 October 2025–29 March 2026)

An informative guide to the most iconic works in The Frick Collection honoring the museum's reopening post-renovation. From paintings and sculpture to decorative arts, this publication encapsulates the range and depth of Henry Clay Frick's collection. Organized chronologically and by geographic school, The Frick Collection is designed to offer a sense of the connections between, and diversity among, contemporaneous artistic production across different fields, genres, and media in early modern Europe. When American industrialist Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) built his New York home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he intended for it to one day become a public art museum for the "use and benefit of all persons whomsoever." After his death and that of his wife, Adelaide, in 1931, the house was transformed into a museum and was opened to the public in December 1935. The Frick's daughter Helen Clay Frick (1888–1984), along with a board of trustees, was instrumental in the continuance of her father's legacy and the care of his bequest. Over the years, the collection grew and the number of visitors increased, requiring renovation campaigns in the 1970s and 2020s to accommodate these changes, the latest giving access to the public for the first time to a suite of rooms on the second floor. Originally the Frick family's private quarters, these rooms are now galleries for works of art, providing space for more objects to be on view. The scope of the collection, which spans from about 1300 to 1900, was never intended to be encyclopedic and reflects the taste of the founder, who chose to acquire works for his home that were "pleasing to live with."

Various identities for the richly dressed, contemplative young man in this portrait have been proposed but none with any certainty. The mood of the subject and the diffused, gentle play of light over the broadly painted surfaces are strongly reminiscent of Titian’s Venetian contemporary Giorgione. In many ways, the Frick portrait epitomizes a new tendency in Italian Renaissance portraiture in which the depiction is intended less as a description of the sitter than as an encounter with them. A rich contribution by artist Elizabeth Peyton accompanies an illuminating essay by Giulio Dalvit which addresses the many questions of provenance, chronology, attribution and of who this mysterious young man might be.

This beautiful publication presents for the first time the Eveillard Gift of drawings to The Frick Collection, the most important gift of drawings and pastels in its history. It accompanies an exhibition at the Frick and includes a catalogue of the works and commentaries by noted scholars. Twenty-six works of art promised to The Frick Collection by Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard dramatically advance the museum’s commitment to the research and display of European drawings. Included in this transformative gift from two longtime supporters of the Frick are exquisite drawings, pastels, prints, and one oil sketch by François Boucher, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Thomas Lawrence, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, John Singer Sargent, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others. The works include figurative sketches, independent studies, portraits, and landscape scenes, each either deepening the museum’s celebrated holdings or bringing the work of an artist who is not – but should be – represented in the collection. This lavishly illustrated publication, which accompanies an exhibition at the Frick, includes a catalogue of the works, as well as comprehensive commentaries on each of promised gifts written by noted scholars in their field.

A major figure in the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s, the renowned Italian artist Giuseppe Penone is known for his exploration of the relationship between art and the natural world in a body of work that includes sculpture, performance, works on paper, and even garden design. His first works in porcelain, the exquisite disks presented here draw attention to the moment of touch—the convergence of surface and skin—that underpins so much of his work. Published to accompany The Frick Collection, New York’s temporary installation of works by Penone, this new volume comprises eleven porcelain disks that the artist made during his 2013 residency at the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, the influential porcelain factory founded in the 18th century. A continuation of his Propagazioni (Propagations) series, begun in 1995, which includes various media, each disk bears the imprint of one of the artist’s fingertips. One of them is in gold, its imprint a variation on the artist’s index finger. Never before presented to the public, the installation of the disks in a gallery adjacent to the Frick’s early Italian paintings on gold grounds and the porcelain room kindles a rich artistic dialogue with both porcelain and gold.