"In 1934 the Italian government lifted restrictions governing the fabled Barberini Collection in Rome, making it possible for two intriguing fifteenth-century paintings to be put on the international art market. Within just two years both had been sold - one to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Neither their authorship nor their subjects were certain, but their ambitious depiction of architecture no less than their discursive, anecdotal approach to narration made them unique among Early Renaissance paintings. Who was their author? What was their function? How to explain their mastery of perspective and their sophisticated architectural settings? Building on over a century of scholarship as well as completely new archival information, this catalogue proposes answers to all three questions. In doing so, it examines the art of Florence in the 1440s and the work of, among others, Fra Filippo Lippi, Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia, and Michelozzo."--BOOK JACKET.