Book excerpt: The object of this publication is the Renaissance revival as a Pan-European phenomenon of critique, commentary and re-shaping of a nineteenth-century present perceived as deeply problematic. Sweeping the humanistic disciplines - history, literature, music, art, architecture, collecting etc. - it marked the oeuvre of as diverse a group of figures as Ingres and E M Forster, Geymüller and Hildebrand, Michelet and Burckhardt, HH Richardson and Rilke, Carducci and De Sanctis. Though some perceived it as a "Golden Age", a model for the present, some cast it as a negative example, thus showing that the triumphalist model had its detractors and that the reaction to the Renaissance was more complex than it may at first appear. This book then proposes to recover some of the multi-dimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of and commentary on the Italian Renaissance and its ties to nineteenthcentury modernity, as seen both from within (by Italians) and from without (by foreigners, expatriates, travelers etc.).