Ross King has a PhD in eighteenth century English Literature from York University in Canada, yet he has made a name for himself as a popular historian and biographer of the Italian Renaissance. Over the past two decades, he has written lively biographical narratives of artist Michelangelo (2003), bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (2021), and architect…

Fifteenth century Florence was known primarily for its wool-making and its banking (and eventually its art). In “The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance” (2021) pop historian Ross King argues that handcrafted book–making was another valued and important skill the Florentines were renowned for. Vespasiano da Bisticci (1433-1498) was…

Ross King is one of the few writers who makes learning about the Italian Renaissance fun and easy. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (2003) tells the story of the most famous vaulted fresco on earth – Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling from 1508 to 1512. Michelangelo was not an easy man to get…

There aren’t many histories of the Italian Renaissance written for a lay audience, besides a few excellent examples by Ross King. Joseph Luzzi is a literature professor at Bard College in upstate New York. I get the sense that he wrote “Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance” (2022) just for…

“Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence” (1965) by Felix Gilbert examines the contrasting political philosophies and historical methodologies of two prominent Renaissance thinkers: Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540). Gilbert places both figures within the intellectual and political turmoil of Renaissance Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century,…

The Renaissance gave birth to individualism, nationalism, secularism, and capitalist entrepreneurism. It could also be argued that the Renaissance gave birth to the modern concept of art and the artist. “Art and Society in Italy, 1350-1500” (1997) by Evelyn Welch has a lot to say about this phenomenon without saying very much at all. Her…

The title of this book is a bit misleading. “Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy: 1300-1600” (1993) by Johns Hopkins history professor Richard Goldthwaite isn’t actually very much about art at all. It says nothing about individual artists or their patrons, nor does it attempt to interpret works of art or the functioning…

The first thing you should know about “A Short History of the Italian Renaissance” (2013) by Kenneth Bartlett of the University of Toronto is that it isn’t particularly short. With fifteen richly illustrated thematic chapters covering nearly 350 pages, this book feels more authoritative than the title would otherwise suggest. In fact, it is the…