The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo.

Our picture of the Renaissance becomes clearer to us with time, as historians, ploughing through the documents, continually retouch and refresh it. This book is exemplary in doing just that, presenting an integrated view of the 15th and 16th centuries that would be an ideal introductory volume to Italian architecture of the period.

But as the picture becomes clearer we come to realize that it isn't the familia one we thought we knew so well. It emerges like one of those restored paintings the half we could see clearly turns out to be last century's overpainting, whil what was dark and murky background, lost beneath the varnish, now blinds us wit bright, strange colours.

The essays in this volume, edited by Henry Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, are bound with the catalogue to the exhibition under the same title currently at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (until 6 November 1994 -- see AR August, pp9-10). It turns out that the objects in the exhibition are illustrations to this book, the idea being, as the editors state, that exhibitions come and go but books go on forever. The book is indeed thoroughly illustrated, and the standard of reproduction of the plates is high (though one or two, for example S. Maria dei Miracoli, Venice, on p332, are printed back to front). There might have been more plans, but I imagine plans are a bore to the general reader. Those accompanying Frommel's essay on the early history of St Peter's are invaluable. The lack of a table of illustrations, and an index confined to names better than nothing but not ideal -- are in the mysterious Italian tradition of books without indexes.

The essays vary from the general and fascinating -- Adams and Nussdorfer on 'Th Italian City 1400-1600' -- to the particular and private speculations of Krautheimer. His essay on the ideal city panels of Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin is offered in expiation of his essay of 50 years ago on the same subject, which he now admits to have been badly misjudged. This reworking is perhaps more pedantically precise, but it is extremely cautious and utterly inconclusive. It would seem to be material for an academic journal.

The strongest link to our own era is forged by the realization that the Renaissance is the birthplace of modern good intentions. In Hubertus Gunther's wonderful essay, 'The Renaissance and Antiquity', we see disturbing premonition of our own times, with the monumentalization of cities at the expense of the quotidian urban fabric. Mapping the city became an exercise in identifying the plums in the pudding, as if the integral artefact were too complex for comprehension -- or simply didn't interest. The 16th century's progress towards absolutism, as seen in Leonardo's plans for a city which physically stratifies and separates the upper from the lower classes, is a development that seems inevitable given the overblown hopes attached to the classical revival. While theorists drew up these programmes of good intentions, the physical achievement was never likely to match up. In the following centuries the gap has only widened under our feet.

Gunther's essay is instructive in other ways, bringing us up against the sometimes comic Renaissance misconceptions of what the ruins they saw really represented. They got it wrong just about every time, mistaking public building for bridges, temples for houses, Greek buildings for Roman. Yet they made their mistaken reconstructions with adventurousness, imagination and intellect, and joined up the disparate bits into convincing patterns. Unable to give any satisfactory explanation for the great Roman baths -- mere entertainment was an inconceivable justification -- Alberti (without whom, as the editors might have said, this volume could never have been written) moralized: the great empty spaces could not have been purely for gossiping crowds -- the average Roman citizen must therefore have been a philosopher, earnestly debating the toss wit his fellows within the splendours of classical architecture.

Antiquity, for Renaissance man, was what he felt it should have been. Modern historians -- and who will blame them? -- beaver away to get it right at last. One's only regret is that antiquity, and indeed the Renaissance, now seem no better than they ought to have been.

ANTHONY MCINTYRE