The Art of the Renaissance by Peter & Linda Murray.
 
The Renaissance began in Italy but it was not a purely Italian phenomenon. It grew out of European civilization, with roots in Antiquity, in Christian dogma, and in Byzantium. The authors follow this growth to the Florence of 1420 and the artistic ferment seething there, to the fascinating regional schools of Siena, Umbria, Mantua and Rome— the magnet for every creative ambition through the influence of the great patron-Popes. Architecture, sculpture, painting, book illustration and all the arts of design underwent the same transformation.
 
Meanwhile artists outside the Mediterranean world, like Dürer and Grünewald, grafted the new concepts on to their native and still vigorous Gothic, and the new ideas spread through France, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain and Portugal. At the turn of the century come the giants of the High Renaissance— Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. In telling the whole complex and absorbing story the authors make use of recent scholarship to provide the first complete and straight-forward survey of the arts of Europe during this period, while the illustrations prove that no age promised so much and brought forth such riches.
 
Includes 251 plates-51 in colour