Book Description

Stephen Campbell and Michael Cole introduce Italian Renaissance art in this easy-to-follow chronological survey. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, their book makes new approaches accessible to students and non-specialist readers, telling the story of art in the great centres of Rome, Florence and Venice while profiling a range of other cities and sites throughout Italy. The book uses a novel decade-by-decade structure, which allows students to follow the chronology easily, as well as enabling collaborative works to be discussed in their entirety, and ensuring that discussion of 'minor centres' can be brought in as needed. It presents the classic canon of Renaissance painting and sculpture in full, while expanding the scope of conventional surveys by offering a more thorough coverage of architecture, decorative and domestic arts, and print media. Rather than emphasizing artists' biographies, this new account concentrates on the works, discussing means of production, the places for which images were made, the concerns of patrons, and the expectations and responses of the works' first viewers. Renaissance art is seen as decidedly new, a moment in the history of art whose concerns persist in the present. 'Dazzlingly ambitious and fiercely intelligent, this is very much a book of today, which seems destined to remain the survey of choice for years to come' - David Ekserdjian, Leicester University 'A fine and original new introduction to Italian Renaissance art ... [it] generates new perspectives on the progress and parameters of an entire visual tradition' - Tom Nichols, University of Aberdeen