John Hale was formerly Professor of Italian History at University College London. He had been a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, Oxford; the founding Professor of History at the University of Warwick; a visiting fellow at the Harvard Centre for Renaissance Studies, I Tatti, Florence; and Professor of Italian at University College London. He was a fellow of the British Academy, a former chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery and was knighted for 'services to learning and the arts' in 1984. His books include England and the Italian Renaissance (1954), Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy (1961), Renaissance Exploration (1968), Renaissance War Studies (1983), War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450-1620 (1985) and The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (1993). Professor Hale died in 1999.

Edward Chaney is Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts and founding Chair of the History of Collecting Research Centre at the Southampton Solent University. He is the author or editor of several book on Anglo-Italian relations, including The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (1998) and The Evolution of English Collecting: Receptions of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods (2003).