Sydney Freedberg, who retires this year from Harvard and will assume the position of Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Art in the fall, is one of America’s best-known art historians and the author of the standard English-language history of Italian High Renaissance and Mannerist painting. Here he publishes three lectures, originally given at Cornell, each devoted to one of the three great masters of the emerging Baroque style in Italy: Annibale Carracci, his cousin Ludovico Carracci, and Michelangelo da Caravaggio. The book is densely illustrated, and its text informed by an acute and consistent critical intelligence. Because it also represents in a lively and sophisticated way the current state of thought about its subject, it provides an ideal introduction to the painting of these extraordinarily interesting and complex masters. This is a timely accomplishment, for, although Caravaggio is certainly well known, Annibale Carracci is considerably less so, while Ludovico Carracci, about whom almost nothing has been written in English, is scarcely known at all except to specialists. And yet it is the Carracci who rose to one of the rarest of human achievements, comparable to those of Giotto and Leonardo da Vinci. They not only mastered their own styles, but also established the conventions and standards of a period style, the style we call Baroque, which was to dominate European painting for two centuries to come. Caravaggio was the first painter to create a personal style on the basis of their discoveries. And it was he who