Category: Italian Renaissance

I was fully prepared to love this book. Michael Baxandall’s “Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A primer in the social history of pictorial style” (1972) is considered a classic in the field and shaped an entire generation of Renaissance scholars in their appreciation and understanding of period art. Unfortunately, this slender little volume lacks…

For most people the Renaissance is synonymous with art; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Duerer are the names that define the age. Lisa Jardine, the late Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University, argues in “Worldly Goods” (1996) that the art-objects associated with the Renaissance were, in fact, the fabulous by-products of an increasingly…

The city of Constantinople was the greatest defensive structure of the medieval world. In the course of its 1,123 year history up to the year 1453 it had been besieged 23 times, and only once successfully, ironically by the Christian knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Muslim armies made only a handful of attempts,…

In 1417, at a remote monastery in what is today southern Germany, Poggio Bracciolini – a former apostolic secretary to the disgraced Pope John XXIII and a man renowned for his exquisite handwriting and command of classical Latin – pulled a dusty manuscript from the shelf of the monastic library. It was a long forgotten…

There is a theme to Walter Isaacson’s award-winning biographies: from Einstein and Jobs to Franklin and Leonardo, he focuses on men “who make connections across disciplines – arts and sciences, humanities and technology – as a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.” This 2017 biography of Leonardo da Vinci is every bit as good as…

William Manchester (1922-2004) had an unusual career. He was seriously wounded in battle on Okinawa and went on to earn a master’s degree in English from the University of Missouri. From there he went to work for the famed journalist H.L. Mencken at the Baltimore Sun in 1947. In 1951 he became an editor and…

I’ve recently learned that there aren’t many stellar and readable general overviews of the Renaissance. This one, “The Italian Renaissance” by J.H. Plumb (1961), was first published over half a century ago. However, the fact that a new edition was printed in 2001 speaks volumes for the book’s quality, accessibility, and enduring relevance. “The Italian…

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, theologian, scholar, and writer. He is perhaps the most important and influential scholar and philosopher of the entire Renaissance period, yet he remains today more written about than read, and that’s because his writing is quite abstruse. “Erasmus: A Critical Biography” (1993) by Leon-E Halkin…

“The Renaissance movement was a systematic attempt to go forward by going back.” So writes Peter Burke in his classic analysis of cultural and social dynamics in Renaissance Italy, “The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy” (1964). Burke takes as his point of departure “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” (1860) by Jocob…