This is a revised and greatly expanded edition of a book first published in 1964 by Phaidon Press, and it catalogues in detail over 350 pictures painted since c. 1600. It thus complements The Early Italian Pictures by John Shearman which was published by Cambridge in 1983. The catalogue includes the work of many great painters - Domenichino, Guercino, Guido Reni, Batoni, the two Ricci, Annibale Carracci, Zuccarelli and a famous, unrivalled group of paintings by Canaletto, most of which were commissioned directly from the artist by Joseph Smith and subsequently bought with the rest of his collection by George III. A long introduction traces the history from Charles I onwards of English royal interest in Italian pictures of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries.

Berlinde De Bruyckere's work prompts the viewer to respond. That is why it has a particular appeal for writers of literature: they are fascinated by the compositions of distorted parts of humans and horses that refer to horror and comfort, to a cruel death and the sublime. De Bruyckere empties the bodies. Through holes, the public notices the darkness of a world inside that both appeals and repels. There is space around her work that resonates and in which writers can indulge in creativity -not by writing about objects, but by juxtaposing the work with creative texts. The author does not remove meanings of the work by trying to explain it, but rather adds to its meaning by responding to art with art. Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee rises to this challenge: together with De Bruyckere he has chosen fragments from his impassioned and unsettling novels that are full of great beauty. Thus, the two present a composition of texts and images that from inside illuminates the dark world of their work.

"The preeminent collector Norton Simon amassed more than 100 Italian paintings during his 35-year career, and today they stand among the treasures of the Norton Simon Museum. In this catalogue noted art historian Sir Nicholas Penny pairs 47 paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries with in-depth commentary, skillfully interweaving tales from the artists' lives, observations on the artists' influences and patronage, and technical notes"--

William Hazlitt is England's greatest essayist. He was also a philosopher, a painter, a controversialist and a radical, whose critical writings about literature, the theatre and art were ardently admired in his day. He is the author of the first confessional autobiography of sexual passion, a biographer of Napoleon, a friend of, and profound influence upon, Keats, Stendhal, and Charles Lamb, a friend and later enemy of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and De Quincy, and a key figure in the intellectual life of Regency England. His life was lived against the backdrop of the French Revolution and subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with their associated political and literary radicalism in England.