In this course you experience supreme artworks created in Florence, Rome, Venice, and other Italian cities by masters Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and others. They are unequaled masterpieces that established a canon of beauty that pervades Western culture to this day. With Professor William Kloss as your guide, you enter a world that is incomparably rich, filled with emotion and drama that is palpable, though sometimes mysterious to our modern sensibility. You will penetrate that mystery to appreciate anew how these masterpieces were created and what they meant to the artists and people of their time.

The term "the Renaissance" is commonly associated with the artistic bounty of Italy—but the massive cultural transformations remaking the world were affecting art throughout northern Europe as well. Italian artists were very aware of innovations of artists to the North, and both traditions shared significant contact. Professor Catherine Scallen leads an intensely visual exploration using more than 300 images—paintings, woodcuts, engravings, etchings, sculptures, drawings—by well-known artists Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel, and others who may be less familiar but deserve to be better known, for the glorious art that resulted in the Northern Renaissance.