The book examines a wide range of Victorian literary, visual and historical representations of the Italian Renaissance. It looks at the High Renaissance poetic forms, such as the sonnet, by Victorian poets as diverse as Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore; at the poems and novels set in Renaissance Italy by writers such as Rovert Browning and George Eliot; and at the different interpretations of the Renaissance put forward by cultural historians such as Ruskin, Pater and Symonds.