The Great Masters of Italian Art

by Elena Capretti

http://amazon.com/dp/0760771464

A highly condensed overview of the art that flourished in Italy between the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 19th: five centuries during which great master followed after great master, producing masterpiece upon masterpiece. Archeological sites, churches and monasteries, civic monuments of architecture and statuary, museums, public and private art collections, historic gardens, landscapes shaped by centuries of human labor: all these and more form a network of high-quality art that covers not only the great urban centers but the whole of the territory. Admiring a work of art in an Italian museum or church, where the work itself still holds a dialogue, beyond the walls that enclose it, with the urban or rural environment of which it is an expression and reflection, is always a quite different thing from looking at it in the often impeccable but inevitably aseptic surroundings of a great museum in Europe, America or any other part of the world.