Roberto Longhi (1890-1970) is regarded by Italins as their most important connoisseur, critic, and art historian; at the same time he is read and enjoyed for his great and magical gifts as a prose stylist. Little from Longhi's vast corpus has been translated into English. We have in this book three of his crucial essays: "Masolino and Masaccio", "Caravaggio and His Forerunners", and "Carlo Bracceso."

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/>On the Annunciation by Carlo Braccesco

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/>Apparition of gold and yellow-brown, azure and gray. The flesh-tones slightly dusky; almost a suspicion of mixed blood. On the brighter faces, slate-gray shadows. Saint Albert's Oriental slippers like black olives. Warm tones and cool tones (what does it matter?) that cannot be told apart. Gold, gold: but not flattened out by the light; instead, dazzling in the light, and burnt by the black feather of shadow. Feeling for gold. Cultivation of gold. Culture of Lombard gold (Monza, Treviglio, Lodi). Astute handling of form, such as would put many a Florentine to shame, yet not Florentine: confidential, intimate, not insolent and smug. The city in the torpid afternoon: an imaginary Pavia, a memory? And the angel, seemingly hammered out by some sculptor of the Charterhouse [of Pavia]. Violet as in Bergognone. The azures, on the other hand, are like a lake, pristine, as in Fouquet and Charonton. As for the rest, even the Madonna: "rustic." The choice of the rose-trellis setting, as in an old Provencal lay: the carnations trembling in the sultry heat within the vase, which is —alas!— "Renaissance." Ironically so, however, as is the too-beautiful, impeccable fragment of acanthus-leaf decoration. Everything written and everything painted; large and minute. A miniaturist of genius. A great painter of small things. The most elevated dialogue North and South, between van Eyck and Piero [della Francesca]. The pinnacle of fifteenth-century Lombard painting.