Georgia Museum of Art Publishes Important Source on Early Italian Paintings

ATHENS, GA.- The Georgia Museum of Art announces the publication of the “Corpus of Early Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections: The South.” Conceived as a massive project that would catalogue and illustrate every Italian painting on panel and canvas dating between 1250 and 1500 in public collections across North America, the “Corpus” in its first part focuses on public collections in the American South. The author, Perri Lee Roberts of Miami University, discusses more than 400 paintings, each one represented by a high-quality reproduction.

Three volumes make up this publication, which covers early Italian paintings in public collections located in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Puerto Rico. In addition to a collection of 12 paintings in the Georgia Museum of Art, other collections included belong to the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Ala.; the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, S.C.; the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, La.; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, N.C.; and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla.

The “Corpus” compiles paintings by such illustrious artists as Giovanni Bellini, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna and Giotto as well as works by lesser-known names. Up-to-date scholarship, including provenance, iconography and bibliography, appears opposite each illustration in an easily accessible format. This resource is particularly valuable to scholars, educators and curators of early Italian art who are unable to travel between institutions.

Professor Bruce Cole of Indiana University and the late Professor Andrew Ladis of the University of Georgia initiated this project in 1993. At that time, only two publications might have rivaled a project as ambitious as this new fully illustrated “Corpus”: Richard Offner’s multi-volume “A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting” (College of Fine Arts, New York University, 1930) and Burton B. Fredericksen and Federico Zeri’s single-volume “Census of Pre-Nineteenth-Century Italian Paintings in North American Collections” (Harvard University Press, 1972). However, both of these publications are now out of date and limited in scope. The new publication covers works by artists from all regions in Italy and is likely to become a seminal compendium of early Italian art.

“With the publication of the ‘Corpus’ and the vigorous scholarship it contains by Professor Roberts, the Georgia Museum of Art continues its commitment to the arts of Europe, Italy in particular. We are indebted to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for providing financial encouragement as well as the 12 Italian paintings in the museum’s collection that are the inspiration for this impressive contribution to Italian studies,” said William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art.

Cynthia A. Payne, special assistant to the director of the Georgia Museum of Art, performed valuable work on the manuscript. The list price for the first three volumes is $200. Museums and libraries are eligible for wholesale discounts by calling the museum shop at 706.542.0450.

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