Antal’s book is one of the first attempts to trace the origins of an extended period of art in a contemporary social structure… Florentine Painting and Its Social Background raises new and important problems in the interpretation of Florentine painting, and the broad correlations which it proposes will extend its influence to the several fields of late mediaeval and Renaissance history.
-- Millard Meiss Art Bulletin
The whole work is readable, learned and brilliantly conceived; on no future excursions to the Spanish Chapel and Santa Croce shall we ever see exactly what we saw before.
-- New Statesman