Rome

In the period under study here, Rome lived up to its epithet 'The Eternal City'. This is a comprehensive history of the art of Rome in the Renaissance studies; the architecture, sculpture, painting, and decorative arts together in their social, religious, and historical context. Organized around the patronage of the popes, it tells the story of three centuries, in which the eternal city rose from the ashes of its decline in the fourteenth century, when the papal court was transferred to France and then endured the Great Schism of absent and ascending popes. Miraculously, by the first decade of the sixteenth century, under the visionary guidance of Pope Julius II, the artists he commissioned - Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo - and the humanists of the papal court with whom he surrounded himself, Rome had established itself as the Christian reembodiment of the Roman Empire.

• There is nothing else like it: no comprehensive history of Roman Renaissance art is in print
• Photographs include many monuments that are not readily available, or available at all: it includes a lot of new photography
• The approach is contextual, particularly from the point of view of the history of the papal patronage