Weighing over four pounds, and 744 pages long, this recent catalogue of the Florentine paintings of the fourteenth through the sixteenth century at the Alte Pinakothek of Munich constitutes an important reference tool for anyone with an interest in this field—for a scholarly work of this type, with fifty-six catalogue entries, and numerous illustrations spread over more than 550 pages, is more often consulted than read from cover to cover. The group of Central Italian pictures in question includes works by artists who are of critical importance to the development of Italian Renaissance painting—including Giotto, Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Andrea del Sarto—and, thus, to the evolution of the taste for Western painting. (Significantly, among the ten copies after works by Florentine painters in Munich, six are after Andrea del Sarto, which speaks to that artist's popularity in the sixteenth and ensuing centuries.)

The catalogue opens with a series of essays examining subjects such as the foundation of the Florentine portion of the picture gallery in the early nineteenth century, the art historical background to the Florentine pictures, the techniques of painting of the Florentine masters, the binders used in Florentine painting, and the pigments deployed in the Florentine pictures of this period. I find these essays rather safe in their approach, and was hoping for greater conceptual risk taking, as this remains such rich territory for inquiry. Also, I would have liked to learn more about Crown Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria; the painter and curator Johann Georg von Dillis, who advised the prince; and Ludwig's agent in Florence, Johann Baptist Metzger, who together were so critical in assembling this collection, when so much material became available in the wake of the secularization of churches and monasteries in Italy. We are told that Ludwig I's exposure to Romanticism and, particularly, to the work of the Nazarenes steered him toward religious imagery. A deeper discussion of the vision—in great part inspired by the Musée Napoléon (Paris)—of Ludwig I and von Dillis would have been helpful, as it had an impact on the formation of the Florentine component, which was to occupy pride of place at the Munich gallery, Florentine art being central to Vasari's Lives of the Artists, a book that so deeply marks our thinking about Western art. I would also have appreciated finding among the many photographs some documenting the display of Florentine painting at this gallery over the past two centuries.

The individual catalogue entries cover much that we have come to expect from this type of scholarly endeavor, including provenance, attribution and date, patron, original setting, function, iconography, literary and artistic sources, impact, and technical information—written by another scholar and printed in a smaller font—covering the pictorial support, frame, painting technique, later interventions, and state of preservation. The entries, written by six different scholars (two of whom were in charge of technical analysis), do not follow an inflexible template, as far as what is covered in each entry, and how and when it is covered. It is correctly noted that many of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works are fragments of larger ensembles—such as predella panels, which were often sawn apart when pictures were removed from their altars—and thus, the reconstruction of the appearance of the lost whole is of capital importance, building upon previous scholarship. Significantly, outlines of the lives of the artists featured in the collection do not appear in this book, and the catalogue entries are arranged in the order in which the works were painted or are believed to have been painted. This leads to odd situations, such as sandwiching analyses of three pictures by three different artists between discussions of two works by Fra Filippo Lippi (e.g., between entries 14 and 18). It is best to turn to the table of contents on pages 4–5 in order to navigate smoothly through the entries. The quality of the reproductions of works from the collection, the details of those works, and comparative materials is very high throughout, though some images are small and will benefit from being examined with a magnifying glass.