The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance
How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
About this listen
Joining the best sellers Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, a lively and intriguing tale of two artists whose competitive spirit brought to life one of the world’s most magnificent structures and ignited the Renaissance.
The dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral of Florence, is among the most enduring symbols of the Renaissance, an equal to the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Its designer was Filippo Brunelleschi, a temperamental architect and inventor who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. Yet the completion of the dome was not Brunelleschi’s glory alone. He was forced to share the commission with his archrival, the canny and gifted sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti.
In this lush, imaginative history - a fascinating true story of artistic genius and personal triumph - Paul Robert Walker breathes life into these two talented, passionate artists and the competitive drive that united and dived them. As it illuminates fascinating individuals from Donatello and Masaccio to Cosimo de’Medici and Leon Battista Alberti, The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance offers a glorious tour of 15th-century Florence, a bustling city on the verge of greatness in a time of flourishing creativity, rivalry, and genius.
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Story
Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering.
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Michelangelo, architect, urban designer, artist
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The Rise and Fall of Alexandria
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Founded by Alexander the Great and built by self-styled Greek pharaohs, the city of Alexandria at its height dwarfed both Athens and Rome. It was the marvel of its age, legendary for its vast palaces, safe harbors, and magnificent lighthouse. But it was most famous for the astonishing intellectual efflorescence it fostered and the library it produced. If the European Renaissance was the "rebirth" of Western culture, then Alexandria, Egypt, was its birthplace.
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The Medici
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- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
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Story
Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence as well as the Italian Renaissance, which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Interwoven into the narrative are the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola.
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Fun Story Bad History
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By: Paul Strathern
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What the Ermine Saw
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Performance
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Story
Five hundred and thirty years ago, a young woman sat before a Grecian-nosed artist known as Leonardo da Vinci. Her name was Cecilia Gallerani, and she was the young mistress of Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan. Sforza was a brutal and clever man who was mindful that Leonardo’s genius would not only capture Cecilia’s beguiling beauty but also reflect the grandeur of his title. But when the portrait was finished, Leonardo’s brush strokes had conveyed something deeper by revealing the essence of Cecilia’s soul.
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So Many Names
- By Sue Solomon on 12-13-22
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Paris Reborn
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Story
Traditionally known as a dirty, congested, and dangerous city, 19th Century Paris was transformed in an extraordinary period from 1848 to 1870, when the government launched a huge campaign to build streets, squares, parks, churches, and public buildings. The Louvre Palace was expanded, Notre-Dame Cathedral was restored and the French masterpiece of the Second Empire, the Opra Garnier, was built.
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Why Paris looks the way it does today
- By Neil Chisholm on 11-28-13
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Stealing the Mystic Lamb
- The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece
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Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is on any art historian's list of the 10 most important paintings ever made. Often referred to by the subject of its central panel, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it represents the fulcrum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also the most frequently stolen artwork of all time.
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Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
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The Florentines
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Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642, something happened that transformed the entire culture of Western civilization. Painting, sculpture, and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born - or emerge in an entirely new guise.
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Narrator ruins the narrative
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Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD
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Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.
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A learned, well-balanced postmodern history
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By: Peter Brown
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Descartes' Bones
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On a brutal winter's day in 1650 in Stockholm, Frenchman Rene Descartes, the most influential and controversial thinker of his time, was buried after a cold and lonely deathfar from home. Sixteen years later, the pious French Ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthed Descartes' bones and transported them to France. Why would this devoutly Catholic official care so much about the remains of a philosopher who washounded from country after country on charges of atheism?
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Philosophy of Modernity
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One of the world's leading historians provides a revolutionary tour of the Ancient World, dusting off the classics for the twenty-first century. Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, but also the common people - the millions of inhabitants of the Roman Empire, the slaves, soldiers, and women.
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Annoying narrator
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In SPQR, world-renowned classicist Mary Beard narrates the unprecedented rise of a civilization that even 2,000 years later still shapes many of our most fundamental assumptions about power, citizenship, responsibility, political violence, empire, luxury, and beauty.
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Shallow and unsatisfying
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Lost Enlightenment
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Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects.
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Subject worthwhile but repetative narrative
- By F-M on 04-10-14
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What listeners say about The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Zachary
- 03-20-23
Excellent
Amazing book, really enjoyed the contrast. The author creates between Brunelleschi and Ghiberti. Enjoy the different personalities that also I brought forth.
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- Richard McKown
- 09-17-23
Fabulous book, I’m headed to Florence and 15 days and I’m really glad for this background
Fabulous book, I’m headed to Florence and 15 days and I’m really glad for this background. I wish there were more art history books on audible. With the availability of images from so many different sources it’s really nice to be able to be working in the studio listening to the stories and then look up specific works during a break then back to the story. I’m really grateful for this audiobook.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-22-24
Coverage of florentine art and its creation, Fillipo- ‐Lorenzo competition
Liked it all, very helpful
discussion of creation of
a rt in Renaissance Florence. Rivalry between Brunelleschi and Giberti and how it fueled the Renaissance itself.
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- Roger
- 11-30-22
Detailed history of the early Italian Renaissance
This is a very well researched and cogently presented discussion of the artistic gifts and accomplishments of Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, their rivalry and their influence on later generations of artists. The argument that their feud sparked the Renaissance, however, is weak. The evidence presented seems to make the case that it was their visions and abilities and their willingness to incorporate Classical, as well as other, traditions that sparked the artistic Renaissance.
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2 people found this helpful