German painting from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, under the influence first of Netherlandish art and next of the Italian Renaissance, attained a high point unsurpassed in later times. Nearly all the most important artists of the period are represented here, from Albrecht Durer and Lucas Cranach the Elder to Hans Maler. Ninety-one works are featured in total.

A wide range of artistic production is covered: panels from altarpieces large and small, devotional pictures, mythological allegories, royal and burgher portraits, painted in most major centres from Saxony to the Rhine, Hamburg to the Tyrol. Each painting is reproduced in colour, with paintings on reverses and details also shown in colour.

Almost all the most important artists of the period are represented in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection by work of their own or at least of their circle, among them Master Bertram, Johann Koerbecke, Derick Baegert, Michael Wolgemut, Albrecht Durer, and his leading followers Hans Baldung Grien and Hans Suess von Kulmbach, Hans Holbein the Elder and the Younger, Lucas Cranach the Elder and his sons, Bernhard Strigel and Christoph Amberger.

Detailed bibliographies and lists of exhibitions of each painting and artists' biographies complete the volume, which will be welcomed not only by all museum and reference libraries, but by everyone involved in study of the subject at all levels.