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…

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979) is considered a seminal work because it reframed our understanding of the role of print in the development of modern society. Eisenstein’s arguments have had a profound and enduring impact on fields such as history, communication studies, sociology, and the history of science. However,…