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.
"A solid, well-illustrated handbook in the modern, contextual mode, placing the arts in a temporal environment. The essays are clear, logically organized, and generally accessible [.] If forthcoming series volumes are produced to the same standard, together they will form a substantial and current scholarly survey of the Renaissance in Italy." Library Journal