Painting in the Age of Giotto is a revisionist account of central Italian painting in the period 1260 to 1370. The study is the first to discuss Giorgio Vasari’s account of the "first age" of the Renaissance in his "Lives" and the character of the historiographical tradition that arose from that account. In opening the tradition to closer scrutiny, Hayden Maginnis explains the origins of many modern views regarding the period and the persistence of critical strategies and conventions that do not correspond to the historical realities.
Those realities are discussed in a return to the evidence of surviving works of art and in an exploration of stylistic trends that define regional currents in central Italian art. In an examination of the "new art" of the fourteenth century, Maginnis discovers not only that naturalism as an artistic ambition was remarkably short-lived but also that its chief exponents were the painters of Siena, rather than the painters of Florence. His detailed analysis of Giotto’s work demonstrates that his art belonged to quite another trend.
By the fourth decade of the Trecento, the character of central Italian painting was growing ever more diverse. Painters quite consciously began to explore artistic alternatives to naturalism, thereby introducing "notable disturbances in the classification of Tuscan Trecento painting" and providing a foundation for developments toward the mid-century. Through a reexamination of the historical and art-historical evidence related to painting immediately after the plague of 1348, Maginnis demonstrates that the central thesis of Millard Meiss's brilliant Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, until now the standard interpretation of this period, is untenable, and offers a new interpretation of painting at mid-century.

Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation

Arts & Photography

Maginnis, Hayden B. J.

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

The World of the Early Sienese Painter

Siena of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was one of the great cities of Europe and its artists—Duccio, Simone Martini, and Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti—were among those who reshaped the nature and place of painting first in Italy, then across Europe. Drawing on the extraordinary riches of Sienese archives, on early unpublished secondary sources, and on the recent work of historians, Hayden Maginnis situates early Sienese painters within their society and their city and provides the first comprehensive account of the economic, social, religious, and intellectual world of Siena’s artists. 
Where did painters live? How much were they paid? What was their social status? Were painters aware of the novel importance of thirteenth-century optics? Were the famous Sienese painters isolated figures, surrounded by a few secondary figures, or were they part of a larger community? These and a host of related questions structure Maginnis’s book, which demonstrates how firmly painters’ lives were embedded in the values and customs of their society and how important the particular character of their society was for the patronage artists received. The World of the Early Sienese Painter is the second volume of a trilogy Maginnis began with Painting in the Age of Giotto (1997). The third volume will turn from the broad social and cultural history of the present book to a history of early Sienese painting.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, one of the greatest of the early Italian painters, was the father of the Sienese school. This volume draws together all the contemporary documentation concerning his life and works, all the notices of the painter in the Sienese chronicles, and both published and unpublished secondary sources to the middle of the nineteenth century. Concluding with a rich bibliography, this book will become the foundation for further scholarship and a means for teaching students to handle original documentary notices.

Duccio Di Buoninsegna : The Documents (Issues in the History of Art)

Satkowski, Jane

Georgia Museum Of Art

Individual Artists

Univ of Georgia Georgia Museum

Forty-eight paintings produced in Tuscany from the early 13th to early 16th century were gathered for this exhibition and catalogue. Their original purpose was to serve as devotional objects, but modern audiences appreciate them for their aesthetic value. The paintings, which came from museums and universities in the South, provide a representative survey of regional styles, types, and themes.

Sacred Treasures: Early Italian Paintings from Southern Collections

COLE, Bruce

Roberts, Perri Lee

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Books by Maginnis, Hayden B. J.