Published in two volumes, this major work provides a history of Italian art from antiquity to the present day.
A distinguished group of cultural historians provides a comprehensive account of Italian "art" in the wider sense: as well as painting and sculpture, they examine photography and iconography, restorations and fakes, landscapes and writing. They focus not only on individual artists and epochs, but on the conditions under which Italian art was and is created: its principles, intentions and effects.


Together the books represent a radical break with the compendium of facts and works found in conventional books on art history, exploring the mentalities and the institutions, the typography and the geography which have determined the main characteristics of Italian art over a thousand years.


Volume One includes contributions from Peter Burke on the history of the Italian artist from the twelfth to the twentieth century, Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg on regional art outside the traditional centres, Nicole Dacos on antique art, Francis Haskell on the "dispersal" and conservation of artistic works, and Anna Maria Mura on the public reception of art.


Volume Two includes contributions from Giovanni Previtali on the periodization of Italian art history, Giovanni Romero on art and everyday life in the Renaissance court, Salvadore Settis on iconography in the Middle Ages; Bruno Toscano on art and the church in the seventeenth century, and Federico Zeri on the concept of the Renaissance and the conflict between historical and art-historical periods.