Dimensions
155 x 240 x 22mm
This short history of the origins and course of the Renaissance celebrates the intellectual liberation and artistic achievements which were to make this era probably the most influential - and certainly the most dazzling - 150 years in European civilisation.
The development of the first universities from the twelfth century onwards, growing wealth and patronage in certain cities, and above all the invention of printing and cheap paper, provided essential conditions for the Renaissance. And it was literature and scholarship that saw the first stirrings of the humanism, individualism and scepticism and the rebirth of classical culture that loosened the Church's iron grip on visual art - Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, even Chaucer playing a role in this.
Paul Johnson tells the story, in turn, of Renaissance literature, sculpture, building and painting. He locates the Renaissance firmly in Italy and in Florence above all, between 1400 and 1560. He provides brilliant sketches of the key figures - Donatello, Verrochio, Michelangelo, Cellini, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Palladio, Bellini, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael and others. The final part of the book charts the spread and decline of the Renaissance, as the Catholic Church repositioned itself to counter the Reformation.
