From Library Journal
Students of art history deep in the throes of research on Masolino, Masaccio, Carlo Braccesco, or Caravaggio's prototypes may see this book as a great discovery. Readers with more mundane or general interest in art history will find themselves puzzled by its obscurity. Longhi (1890-1970) is renowned throughout Italy as one of the greatest art historians of all time but never became popular elsewhere because of the difficulty of translating his colloquial prose. To Italian Renaissance scholars of his day, he was famous for a decades-long feud with art history legend Bernard Berenson as well as for his distinctive writing style. Typically, in these three essays, Longhi continuously corrects the alleged errors of his contemporaries in extensive and personally charged footnotes, which today read like so much gossip. To better effect, Longhi's unusual approach shows in his description of the relationship between Masolino and Masaccio illustrated via the portrayal of the two characters having a conversation. Most importantly, the Braccesco essay is full of the sort of descriptive passages that are Longhi's true legacy. Though dedicated readers will enjoy his elegant and beautiful descriptions, this is recommended only for comprehensive art history collections.?Jennie Raab, New YorkCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

John Ashbery
It is wonderful to have in English these three essays by Roberto Longhi. With the exception of Walter Pater, it is difficult to think of a critic whose work is so close to the art it embraces that it becomes itself a kind of art. Yet Pater's criticism is always on the verge of metamorphosing into poetry. With Longhi, the scholar and the poet are seamlessly fused, resulting in prose that is palpable and radiant as the Renaissance paintings he describes so meticulously: an object of rare beauty indeed.

Francis Haskell, New York Review of Books
Roberto Longhi ... the most brilliant Italian art historian of our century and a stylist of intoxicating powers. Apart from his monograph on Piero della Francesca, few of Longhi's very idiosyncratic works have been translated into English; but, thanks to the enterprise of The Sheep Meadow Press, this situation is at last being remedied, and one must welcome the appearance of Three Studies.

Book Description
A new English version of the third edition (1963) of Longhi's seminal work on the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca.

From the Publisher
7 x 10 trim. 69 illus. (14 color). LC 96-16974

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A new English version of the third edition (1963) of Longhi's seminal work on the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca.

SYNOPSIS

A new English version of the third edition (1963) of Longhi's seminal work on the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal