Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture

In this rich and engaging book, Leonard Barkan tells the full cultural story of the emergence into daylight of the artworks of antiquity that had lain beneath Roman ground for more than a thousand years. As discovery and rebirth became literal daily narratives in the fifteenth century, Barkan shows, Renaissance conceptions of art, art history, aesthetics, and historiography were transformed.