Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of...
Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful polit...
Machiavelli's highly influential treatise on political power The Prince shocked Europe on publication with its advocacy of ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. Niccolo Machiavelli drew on his own experience of office under the turbulent Florentine republic, rejecting traditional values of political theory and recognizing the complicated, transient nature of political life. Concerned not with lofty ideal but with a regime that would last, The Prince has become the bible of realpolitik, and it still retains its power to alarm and...
Machiavelli's highly influential treatise on political power The Prince shocked Europe on publication with its advocacy of ruthless tactic...
Much has been written about the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo, arguably the greatest artist of the Renaissance. But what about the man? In this revealing look at the Florentine genius, acclaimed author George Bull traces the life and spiritual quest of Michelangelo, drawing a fuller portrait of the man himself. In all his work, Michelangelo impressed his contemporaries as a forceful personality, a divine genius endowed with terrabilita, or intense emotional power. Often portrayed as a solitary and austere figure, he in fact enjoyed a wide range of friendships. And it is...
Much has been written about the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo, arguably the greatest artist of the Renaissance. But what about the man? ...