This exhibition, being held at the musée du Louvre in Paris, and its catalogue follow those dedicated to Florentine sculpture in the early Renaissance, 1400-1460, that took place in 2013-14 (Le Printemps de la Renaissance). The period scrutinised is 1460-1520 but the geographical coordinates are widened to include Northern Italy (Venice, Milan, Pavia, Padua, Bologna) and Rome as the artistic landscape of Italy becomes more complex. Some of the great sculptors, in fact, travelled and their style and their ideas influenced pre-existing local tradition.

These new artistic languages share a common characteristic: the relationship to Greco-Roman Antiquity, especially in the representation of grace and passion: the expression of pathos and the theatrical quality of religious works, the symbolic richness of profane works and finally the development of a new and refined style which will find its highest expression in Roman classicism and in the work of Michelangelo.

The catalogue includes the works of, among others, Donatello, Antonio Pollaiolo, Bertoldo di Giovanni, Giovanfrancesco Rustici, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Guido Mazzoni, Bartolomeo Bellano, Cristoforo Solari, Tullio Lombardo, Andrea Riccio, and Bambaia, Sansovino, and Michelangelo.

Text in Italian.