The Italian Renaissance is one of the most important eras in Western art. Painters including Masaccio, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Titian brought about a fundamental renewal that influenced all of Europe. More than 50 of the most important artists up to 1600 are presented in this book with more than 270 color illustrations.

Thomas Gainsborough was one of the great English portrait and landscape painters of the eighteenth century. His modern manner of painting based on emotions was criticized by contemporaries such as Joshua Reynolds, but it gave Gainsborough a special position in an art world dominated by academic rigor and earned him the greatest appreciation from English society.