Italian Paintings, XIV-XVI Centuries, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houton, Rice University Press-Merrell Holberton, 1996

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has amassed an impressive array of Western European artworks since its 1924 opening. Notable among the collection's works are the Italian Pre-Renaissance and Renaissance paintings, many of which were generously donated by Samuel H. Kress, Sarah Campbell Blaffer, and Percy S. and Edith A. Straus.

The collection includes works by Fra Angelico, Giovanni di Paolo, Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto, Paolo Veronese, Bartolommeo Veneto, and others. Fifteen years of painstaking research have gone into Carolyn C. Wilson's catalogue of the complete collection.

Although several of the Renaissance pieces were catalogued in the early 1970s, most (specifically those works from the Straus Collection) have not been recorded since an anonymous 1945 publication. Carolyn C. Wilson's book fulfills a two-fold objective in that it offers to both scholars and connoisseurs an illuminating review of the Houston collection as well as current scholarship and bibliographic information on each work.

CAROLYN C. WILSON is an independent art historian with a distinguished bibliography. Her previous publications include European Terra Cottas from the Arthur M. Sackler Collection: A Checklist of the Exhibition, 1979, and Renaissance Small Bronze Sculpture and Associated Decorative Arts at the National Gallery of Art, 1983, both published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.