Renaissance Lives

These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari, who invented the term "Renaissance", was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression through Giotto, Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael.

The Tudor period conjures up images of queens and noblewomen in elaborate court dress, of palace intrigue and dramatic politics. But if you were a woman, it was also a time when death during childbirth was rife, when marriage was usually a legal contract, not a matter for love, and the education you could hope to receive was minimal at best. Yet the Tudor century was also dominated by powerful and dynamic women in a way that no era had been before.

On the heels of her triumphant How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman travels even further back in English history to the era closest to her heart, the dramatic period from the crowning of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Tudor conditions, Goodman serves as our intrepid guide to 16th-century living. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of those who labored through the era.

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 of a world in transition. Impressively researched and brilliantly told, The History of the Renaissance World offers not just the names, dates, and facts but the memorable characters who illuminate the years between 1100 and 1453 - years that marked a sea change in mankind's perception of the world.

Some ladies who served at the Tudor court are only faceless silhouettes lost to the sands of time, but there are those who dedicated their lives to please their royal mistresses and left documentation, allowing us to piece their life stories together and link them to the stories of Tudor queens. These female attendants saw their queens and princesses up close and often used their intimate bonds to their own benefit. Some were beloved, others hated. This is the story of the ladies of the Tudor court like you've never heard it before.

Ramie Targoff's Renaissance Woman tells of the most remarkable woman of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara. Vittoria has long been celebrated by scholars of Michelangelo as the artist's best friend - the two of them exchanged beautiful letters, poems, and works of art that bear witness to their intimacy - but she also had close ties to Charles V, Pope Clement VII and Pope Paul III, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, Queen Marguerite de Navarre, Reginald Pole, and Isabella d'Este, among others.

Betrayed by the ruling families of Italy, Ezio Auditore embarks upon an epic quest for vengeance. To eradicate corruption and restore his family's honor, he will learn the art of the Assassins. Along the way, Ezio will call upon the wisdom of such great minds as Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli, knowing that survival is bound to the skills by which he must live.To his allies, he will become a force for change in his fight for freedom and justice.

However, a historical transformation of similar magnitude also took place in northern Europe at the same time. This "Other Renaissance" was initially centered on the city of Bruges in Flanders (modern Belgium), but its influence was soon being felt in France, the German states, London, and even in Italy itself.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

The very name Lucrezia Borgia conjures up everything that was sinister and corrupt about the Renaissance: incest, political assassination, papal sexual abuse, poisonous intrigue, unscrupulous power grabs. Yet, as best-selling biographer Sarah Bradford reveals in this breathtaking new portrait, the truth is far more fascinating than the myth.

Jacob Fugger lived in Germany at the turn of the 16th century, the grandson of a peasant. By the time he died, his fortune amounted to nearly 2 percent of European GDP. Not even John D. Rockefeller had that kind of wealth. Most people become rich by spotting opportunities, pioneering new technologies, or besting opponents in negotiations. Fugger did all that, but he had an extra quality that allowed him to rise even higher: nerve.

Alchemist, occultist, magician, astrologer, writer, physician, lawyer, theologian, philosopher, and mercenary soldier - Henry Cornelius Agrippa was the quintessential Renaissance Man. In this fresh translation of Joseph Orsier's concise 1911 biography of the mercurial author of Occult Philosophy we are given an overview of his tumultuous existence at a time when Europe was shaking off the long sleep of the Middle Ages and the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo were creating masterworks. At the same time that Erasmus was giving the Catholic Church a gentle nudge and Martin...

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a man of many talents - a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, and scholar - but he is best known for Lives of the Artists, which singlehandedly established the canon of Italian Renaissance art. Before Vasari's extraordinary book, art was considered a technical skill, and artists were mere decorators and craftsmen. It was through Vasari's visionary writings that Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came to be regarded as great masters of life as well as art, their creative genius celebrated as a divine gift.

How does a man change the world with laughter and love? Philip Neri, the Apostle of Joy, redefined holiness in the streets of Renaissance Rome, proving that humility and humor could be just as powerful as sermons and scripture. This book invites you into his extraordinary life, showing how one man’s joy transformed a city—and left a legacy that continues to inspire today. Step into the life of a saint who believed that faith should be lived with a smile. Philip’s charisma drew people from all walks of life, from beggars to scholars, uniting them in a shared love of God and neighbor. ...

This is the story of the life of Gracia Mendes Nasi, who was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1510. Gracia's family was Jewish and lived in Castile, Spain, for almost a century before being compelled to renounce their Jewish identity and convert to Catholicism due to the strict laws imposed by the Inquisition in 1478. The Mendes family, like many other Jewish converts known as conversos or new Christians, accepted the forced conversion but maintained their religious practices in secret due to the risk of death if discovered. Gracia's work undeniably and significantly impacted the lives of ...

Born into the English Wars of the Roses, educated in the European Renaissance, enthralled by the Age of Exploration and ultimately destroyed by Henry VIII, Thomas More is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Thomas More: A Life is the definitive biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure. Overturning many received interpretations of the sixteenth century, Joanne Paul shows Thomas More to have been an intellectual and political giant of his age, central to the making of modern Europe.

The history books have cast Katherine of Aragon, the first queen of King Henry VIII of England, as the ultimate symbol of the Betrayed Woman, cruelly tossed aside in favor of her husband’s seductive mistress, Anne Boleyn. Katherine’s sister, Juana of Castile, wife of Philip of Burgundy and mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, is portrayed as “Juana the Mad,” whose erratic behavior included keeping her beloved late husband’s coffin beside her for years.

Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realized portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, his advisors Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, his wives Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves, and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the age, Holbein was a multifaceted genius: a humanist, satirist, and political propagandist, and a deft man whose work was rich in layers of symbolism and allusion.

.“Here's a marvelous treat, the wittiest historical mystery … introducing the unlikely sleuthing team of Leonardo da Vinci and a young dwarf, this novel deftly intertwines fact and fiction in a deliciously clever tale”. Review from National Advertising A black banner flies from Leonardo’s tower room, warning everyone he is dissecting the latest victim in a series of murders. In the bustling halls of the Sforza Castle in Milan amidst the looming threat of French invasion in 1498, a series of gruesome murders shatter the façade of opulence and revelry. At the heart of the intrigue ...

Jane Popyncourt was brought to the court as a child to be ward of the king and a companion to his daughters - the princesses Margaret and Mary. With no money of her own, Jane could not hope for a powerful marriage, or perhaps even marriage at all. But as she grows into a lovely young woman, she still receives flattering attention from the young men flocking to serve the handsome new king, Henry VIII, who has recently married Catherine of Aragon. Then a dashing French prisoner of war, cousin to the king of France, is brought to London, and Jane finds she can't help giving her heart to a man she can never marry.