Me Fecit

As a sign not only of burgeoning self-awareness, but also of a certain level of excellence long maintained by the medieval craft tradition, early Renaissance artists began to inscribe their paintings along with the declaration “Me fecit”.

This series, which takes its inspiration from this phrase, features paintings produced by artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that are deemed autograph owing to inscriptions, to reliable documentary evidence, or to self-portraiture within the work or works. The aim is to explore such paintings in an interdisciplinary manner from all points of view: the nature of the documentation, the physical characteristics and the working procedure evident, the place of the painting(s) within the oeuvre of the artist, the iconographic problems, and the unique manner by which the artist solved the challenges of individual commission.

Each book in the series will attempt to unite the results of the technical investigation of paintings with art historical concerns in order to provide the most fully integrated study possible of documented works by a number of well-known artists. In turn, it is hoped that in-depth views of artistic production will provide the foundation for the investigation of other works or oeuvres. These publications may be the product of one or several authors, or enriched by collaborations among specialists in different fields of expertise.