This glorious gallery of stunning architectural accents from Italy's Middle Ages has been assembled from a rare, early-twentieth-century publication: • Grotesques from carved panels of choir stalls • Breathtaking tombstone and ceiling ornaments • Sumptuous stone balcony panels ... and much more, all reproduced in sixty richly detailed illustrations. Designers and artists of every variety will revel in this modestly priced treasury of authentic Renaissance style.

In this paradigm changing study of art and thought from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, Clare Lapraik Guest re-evaluates the central role and theoretical dignity of ornament in pre-modern art and literature.

Magnificently illustrated throughout, and with a six-color gold-foil cover, this remarkable book provides an all-encompassing survey of the literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and decorative arts of the Renaissance.

You are what you own. So believed many of the elite men and women of Renaissance Italy. The notion that a person's belongings transmit something about their personal history, status, and "character" was renewed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Objects of Virtue explores the multiple meanings and values of the objects with which families like the Medici, Este, and Gonzaga surrounded themselves. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the complicated relationships between the so-called "fine arts"--painting and sculpture--and artifacts of other kinds for which artistry might be as important as utility-furniture, jewelry, and vessels made of gold, silver, and bronze, precious and semi-precious stone, glass, and ceramic. The works discussed were designed and made by artists as famous as Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as well as by lesser-known specialists--goldsmiths, gem-engravers, glassmakers, and maiolica painters.