Book excerpt: Why did Renaissance art come to matter so much, so widely, and for so long? Patricia Emison's answer depends on a recalibrated view of the long Renaissance - from 1300 to 1600 - synthesizing the considerable evolution in our understanding of the epoch since the foundational 19th-century studies of Burckhardt and Wölfflin. Demonstrating that the imitation of nature and of antiquity must no longer define its limits, she exposes Renaissance style's self-consciously modern aspect. She sets the art against the literary and political interests of the time, and analyzes works both of very familiar artists - Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael - and of lesser-known figures, including Cima and Barocci. An understanding emerges of both the period's long-standing fame and its various historical debts. Moving beyond the Renaissance, Emison unfolds the varying and layered significance it has held from the Old Master era through Impressionism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism.