A comprehensive guide to the collected works of this unique museum

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, was built in Sarasota to house John Ringling's art collection, and officially opened to the public in 1931. Designed by the architect John H. Phillips, this pink palace built in the Renaissance style using architectural elements brought to Florida from Europe contains 21 galleries housing masterpieces by Rubens, Van Dyck, Veronese, Velázquez, El Greco, Tiepolo and Gainsborough. It is also home to period rooms moved from the Gilded Age Astor Mansion in New York City and a villa in the Tuscan countryside. The galleries encircle a courtyard punctuated by early 20th-century bronze and stone casts of iconic Classical, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures, including Michelangelo's David from Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. This beautifully designed book celebrates the remarkable masterworks of John Ringling's collection, their magical Italianate yet tropical setting and Ringling's philanthropic legacy, which sought to bring a glimpse of the world's great cultural treasures to the people of Florida. AUTHOR: Virginia Brilliant is Associate Curator of European Art at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. 81 colour illustrations

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is the legacy of the art collector, circus entrepreneur and financier John Ringling and his wife Mable. At the heart of the Ringling's 66-acre Sarasota, Florida, estate is the Museum of Art, built by John Ringling to house his outstanding collections of European art. Featuring grand and often impressively scaled paintings by the Old Masters, including Rubens, Velázquez, Titian, Veronese, Gainsborough and Poussin, as well as antiquities, sculpture and decorative arts, the collection's scope and magnitude is an overwhelming achievement, not least because it was amassed in less than a dozen years.Curator Virginia Brilliant offers her own personal insight into the significance of her favourite works in one of the most important collections of Old Masters in the United States. AUTHOR: Virginia Brilliant obtained her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and before joining the Ringling she held positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Cleveland Museum of Art. 37 colour illustrations

The dazzling palatial mansion of circus tycoon John Ringling in Sarasota, Florida, is a tribute to the American Dream and reflects the splendour and romance of Italy. Described as 'the last of the Gilded Age mansions' to be built in America, Cà d'Zan has 56 incredible rooms filled with art and original furnishings. With its Venetian Gothic architecture, the mansion is a combination of the grandeur of Venice's Doge's Palace combined with the Gothic grace of Cà d'Oro, with Sarasota Bay serving as its Grand Canal. Today, this amazing house is open to the public as part of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. This book is the first of a series of five Art Spaces books coming from the Ringling Museum, which will also include books on the Circus Museum, The Circus Rail Car, The Museum of Art and the Museum's extensive gardens. 73 colour illustrations

John Nicholas Ringling's years in Sarasota spanned the final quarter-century of his life. On Florida's west coast, as the Ringling's Circus became "the greatest show on earth," he collected Baroque paintings, European decorative art, and Italian statuary, built the ostentatious mansion Ca'd'Zan, developed and marketed most of the barrier islands around Sarasota Bay, and became the focus of a confusing pastiche of acclaim, misconception, and suspicion. Sarasota's Ringling Museum is his priceless cultural legacy to the people of Florida and the world of art--an inheritance at risk for the ten years that Ringling's estate was in probate. The author of this first intensive look at Ringling's presence in Sarasota sets the man against the backdrop of Florida from World War I through the land boom and the turbulent twenties into the depression years and Ringling's lapse into obscurity. Illustrated with nearly fifty black-and-white photographs, many never before published, this is the chronicle of a man, as the foreword claims, "who was not afraid to think or live on a grand scale, who knew what he wanted from life, and from art."