This title provides a view of the development of the literature on art in Italy during the Cinquecento. The selections bring out the close relationship between art theories and the actuality of art and chart a trend from a humanistic orientation to a more technical and professorial one. Together, the documents and the commentary reveal the effects that humanistic circles, the courts, and the Church (during the High Renaissance as well as the Counter-Reformation) had on the way people thought and wrote about art in that splendid century.