The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style

In this incisive study, Hellmut Wohl redefines style in the Italian Renaissance in light of contemporary testimony and close rereadings of seminal works. Through analysis of visual and textual evidence, he posits that Renaissance artists and their viewers conceived of art as decoration of surfaces. Offering a new approach to the issue of style, Wohl suggests that the scientific dimensions of early modern art works were less important to contemporaries than their function as ornamentation.