Renaissance category: 1000 books

From one of Britain’s most respected and acclaimed art historians, art critic of The Guardian—the galvanizing story of a sixteenth-century clash of titans, the two greatest minds of the Renaissance, working side by side in the same room in a fierce competition: the master Leonardo da Vinci, commissioned...

Available for the first time in English, these thirteen selections from André Thevets Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres offer a glimpse of France during a time of great upheaval. Originally published in 1584, Thevets collection contains over two hundred biographical sketches, detailing...

Here, award-winning historian Charles L. Mee Jr. explores life in Renaissance Italy - from the ascendancy of Florence and the Medicis to the genius of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Through wars and violence to festivals and feasts, Mee examines the people - artists, clergy, courtiers, merchants, scholars, and women - who fashioned the cradle for the rebirth of the Western world.

A fresh, revelatory, and shockingly revisionist narrative of the rise and fall of the House of Medici, by the acclaimed author of The Cardinal’s Hat and The Borgias. Having founded the bank that became the most powerful in Europe in the fifteenth century, the Medici gained massive political...

Painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, 28 years after Michelangelo completed the glorious and hopeful ceiling, The Last Judgment is full of stark images depicting the End of Days. James Connor uses the famous fresco as the lens by which to view the end of the Renaissance, arguing that Michelangelo's...

A groundbreaking critic who also made a name for herself as a writer of supernatural fiction, Violet Paget, writing under the name Vernon Lee, applied her unique analytical lens to the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities of numerous eras over the course of her career. This collection brings together...

A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved. The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing...

This is a sequel to Richard Viladesau's well-received study, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance. It continues his project of presenting theological history by using art as both an independent religious or theological...

Durant plus de deux siècles, il a été de mode chez nous de considérer comme une époque d’impuissance et de barbarie la période plus que millénaire qui sépare la chute de l’art gréco-romain, à la suite des invasions, de son rétablissement...

 Le mouvement scientifique, artistique et littéraire qui marque, pour l’Europe occidentale, la fin du moyen âge et le commencement de l’ère moderne, s’est manifesté tout d’abord au delà des Alpes, c’est-à-dire là où existaient des...

The Renaissance Faire—a 50 year-long party, communal ritual, political challenge and cultural wellspring—receives its first sustained historical attention with Well Met. Beginning with the chaotic communal moment of its founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a...

A lively and fascinating narrative history about the birth of the modern world. Beginning in the heady days just after the First Crusade, this volume—the third in the series that began with The History of the Ancient World and The History of the Medieval World—chronicles the contradictions...

Seeking a more natural and balanced life for their two young children, in 2010 Eamon and Tanya O’Hara set out on a journey to begin a new life. Rural France seemed to be the answer to all their dreams. However, starting a new life in rural France is not some romantic idyll. Aiming to tell their...

The Renaissance was one of the greatest moments in Western cultural history. It was the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; architects such as Brunelleschi and Palladio; composers such as Palestrina and Tallis; as well as innovative writers and philosophers. It was a time of great social change...