Groundwork: A History of the Renaissance Picture

An illuminating look at a fundamental yet understudied aspect of Italian Renaissance painting The Italian Renaissance picture is renowned for its depiction of the human figure, from the dramatic foreshortening of the body to create depth to the subtle blending of tones and colors to achieve greater naturalism. Yet these techniques rely on a powerful compositional element that often goes overlooked. Groundwork provides the first in-depth examination of the complex relationship between figure and ground in Renaissance painting. "Ground" can refer to the preparation of a work's surface, the fictive floor or plane, or the background on which figuration occurs. In laying the material foundation, artists perform groundwork, opening the ground as a zone that can precede, penetrate, or fracture the figure. David Young Kim looks at the work of Gentile da Fabriano, Giovanni Bellini, Giovanni Battista Moroni, and Caravaggio, reconstructing each painter's methods to demonstrate the intricacies involved in laying ground layers whose translucency and polychromy permeate the surface. He charts significant transitions from gold ground painting in the Trecento to the darkened grounds in Baroque tenebrism, and offers close readings of period texts to shed new light on the significance of ground forms such as rock face, wall, and cave. This beautifully illustrated book reconceives the Renaissance picture, revealing the passion and mystery of groundwork and discovering figuration beyond the human figure.

About the Author :
David Young Kim is associate professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting lecturer at the University of Zurich. He is the author of The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style and the editor of Matters of Weight: Force, Gravity, and Aesthetics in the Early Modern Period.

Review :
"An Apollo Book of the Year" "David Young Kim takes familiar paintings (Bellini's Saint Francis in the Desert; Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus) and surprises us with new ways of looking at them. Combining intellectual ingenuity with close-looking, the book defines 'ground' in three ways and works out the consequences of doing so in a manner that owes as much to historical treatises as to technical study."-- "Apollo Magazine" "Clever and erudite.... David Young Kim invites his reader into the deeper recesses of Renaissance art-making and provides profound multilayered insights into an oft-neglected subject. The book is an intellectual tour de force. - Elizabeth Lisot-Nelson, Comptes Rendus" "Groundwork fuses traditional formal analysis of a superior and detailed order with a provocative discussion of how the various meanings of "ground" . . . are a critical determinant of the painting's spatial order and meaning."-- "Choice" "A splendidly expansive work that successfully unites material with metaphor. Beautifully illustrated and playful in tone, this book should be celebrated for its originality and, above all, as an invitation to ever closer looking."---Imogen Tedbury, Apollo Magazine "A tour de force analysis."---Yve-Alain Bois, Artforum