A New History of Italian Renaissance Art

Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole present the second edition of their acclaimed survey of Italian Renaissance art.

The authors recount the history of Italian Renaissance art in the form of a decade-by-decade survey, one that highlights the achievements of the period’s great artists while also drawing connections between works produced in different places.

Illustrated with more than 850 carefully chosen images, many showing recent restorations, this thoroughly revised edition refines the original book’s presentation of the great cities of Rome, Florence and Venice while treating more of Southern Italy. It greatly expands coverage of the Trecento and includes a new appendix on materials and techniques.

A New History of Italian Renaissance Art surveys the canon of Renaissance painting and sculpture in full, while also looking at architecture, decorative and domestic arts and print media. Rather than emphasizing artists’ biographies, Campbell and Cole concentrate 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.

This influential account introduces Renaissance Italy in magnificent colour and detail. It shows that the ideas and works of artists working more than 500 years ago still have the power to move and astound.