The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance - Rilegato

Fletcher, Catherine

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 184792509X ISBN 13: 9781847925091

Casa editrice: The Bodley Head Ltd, 2020

Riassunto

'Brilliant and gripping, here is the full true Renaissance in a history of compelling originality and freshness' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

The Italian Renaissance shaped western culture - but it was far stranger and darker than many of us realise.

We revere Leonardo da Vinci for his art but few now appreciate his ingenious designs for weaponry. We know the Mona Lisa for her smile but not that she was married to a slave-trader. We visit Florence to see Michelangelo's David but hear nothing of the massacre that forced the republic's surrender. In focusing on the Medici in Florence and the Borgias in Rome, we miss the vital importance of the Genoese and Neapolitans, the courts of Urbino and Mantua. Rarely do we hear of the women writers, Jewish merchants, the mercenaries, engineers, prostitutes, farmers and citizens who lived the Renaissance every day.

In fact, many of the most celebrated artists and thinkers that have come to define the Renaissance - Leonardo and Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, Machiavelli and Castiglione - emerged not during the celebrated 'rebirth' of the fifteenth century but amidst the death and destruction of the sixteenth century. For decades, a series of savage wars dominated Italy's political, economic and daily life, generating fortunes and new technologies, but also ravaging populations with famine, disease and slaughter. In this same short time, the birth of Protestantism, Spain's colonisation of the Americas and the rise of the Ottoman Empire all posed grave threats to Italian power, while sparking debates about the ethics of government and enslavement, religious belief and sexual morality.

In The Beauty and the Terror, Catherine Fletcher provides an enrapturing narrative history that brings all of this and more into view. Brimming with life, it takes us closer than ever before to the lived reality of this astonishing era and its meaning for today.

'An enthralling account of how Italy was brought low at a time when culture went high' The Times, History Books of the Year 2020

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull'autore

Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her previous books include The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de' Medici and The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story. Catherine is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University and broadcasts regularly for the BBC.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: The Bodley Head Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2020
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 184792509X
• ISBN 13: 9781847925091
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 432
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile