Luca DI Tomm E

Sherwood A. Fehm, Jr., analyzes the paintings, provides ecclesiastical and communal documents pertaining to both the artist and his art, and presents a com-plete catalogue to re-create the life and to explicate the art of Luca di Tomme, the leading painter in Siena after the Black Plague of 1348. In this first full-length study of Luca di Tomme, Fehm revives a neglected yet important artist who flourished during a period previously overshadowed in art history. He identifies Luca's achieve-ments and relates them to the rich tradi-tion of Sienese painting. Placing Luca in the fourteenth-century Italian tradition, Fehm briefly outlines the careers of the four great Sienese painters of the first half of the century: Duccio di Boninsegna, Simone Martini, and the brothers Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, the art-ists who most influenced Luca. In addition to the detailed catalogue of Luca's works, which is divided into Ac-cepted Works, Doubtful Attributions and Shopworks, and Lost Works, Fehm estab-lishes for the first time an accurate chro-nology. The study is completed with photographs of all of Luca's paintings, many of them taken specifically for this book. For close investigation, specific de-tails from a number of the more impor-tant works are illustrated.