One of Europe's most celebrated historians, Carlo Ginzburg is best known for his ground-breaking microhistory The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic. Other works include The Night Battles, on European witch persecutions, and The Judge and the Historian. He has been instrumental in persuading the Vatican to open the Inquisition Archives to researchers.

Michael Baxandall was probably the most influential art historian of his generation. In books including Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, Patterns of Intention and Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (with Svetlana Alpers) he expanded the discipline's range of topics, approaches, and ways of writing. A professor at London's Warburg Institute and the University of California at Berkeley, he was also a member of the British Academy, and was awarded the Mitchell Prize, and prizes by the University of Hamburg, and the MacArthur Foundation. He died in 2008.