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Renaissance People: Lives that Shaped the Modern Age
The Renaissance burst forth in all its glory around 1500 and spread throughout Europe. This period of great creativity and productivity in the arts and sciences is illuminated in this book through the lives of more than ninety of its illustrious intellectuals, artists, literary figures, scientists, and rulers. Included are such major figures as Lorenzo and Catherine de’ Medici, Leonardo da Vinci, Charles V, Luther, Columbus, Copernicus, and St. Teresa of Ávila, as well as lesser-known characters such as Antonio Rinaldeschi, “gambler and blasphemer”; Louise Labé, “the jousting poetess”; Dick Tarlton, “the queen’s comedian”; Veronica Franco, “courtesan and wordsmith”; and Catena, “rustler, robber, and bandit chief.”
Each section in this volume marks a chronological stage in Europe’s rebirth, tying the period’s intellectual currents to its political and social concerns and setting the context for the individual biographies.
Each section in this volume marks a chronological stage in Europe’s rebirth, tying the period’s intellectual currents to its political and social concerns and setting the context for the individual biographies.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2011
About the author
Robert C. Davis
35 books10 followersRobert C. Davis is professor emeritus of Italian Renaissance and pre-modern Mediterranean history at Ohio State University. He has studied Naples, Rome, Palermo, Venice, the Vatican, and Perugia, and mostly works on the lives of ordinary people and the values they cherished. His subjects have ranged from shipbuilders, bull fighters, and amateur boxers in Venice to the corsairs who terrorized the Mediterranean everywhere else. He has co-authored studies of Venice as the world's most touristed city and of Renaissance men and women. He has also been in a number of television documentaries, on shipbuilding, Carnival, and the Mediterranean slave trade, and is currently writing a textbook on the history of modern Europe.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 1, 2015
Davis and Lindsmith have posted in the pages of this book 94 biographies of various personalities from the Renaissance, one short of the 95 theses that Martin Luther, one of their chosen personalities, posted on the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg on the 31st of October in 1917.
If not as momentous as Luther’s theses, these lives are certainly very entertaining to read. More readable than wiki entries, beautifully and aptly illustrated, they offer a perfect captivating pastime to be tackled in short reading spans, and a great deal more edificatory than reading the box of cereals during breakfast.
They have grouped them chronologically in seven sections covering the two centuries in frames of either 50 or 25 years each. A unifying theme has also been developed for each the chapters, which has made the reading more engaging and coherent.
Nonetheless, I felt somewhat overwhelmed with all the information. I found that even with the familiar names, I knew only the one fact that had made them famous and that the many aspects of their lives were new to me. So, I conducted a tally, counting the women, the writers, the artists (painters, sculptors, weavers, architects and musicians), the thinkers (and this wide category was often shared with another one), the dignitaries (ditto), the religious figures, the explorers and travelers, and then the mix bag with cooks, prostitutes, blasphemers, bankers, acrobats and jesters, .. and editors and publishers.
Only sixteen women feature, but this should be of no surprise. Nor should it be surprising that it was thanks to their writing that they have entered the pantheon. As writing is usually done in private, it was an endeavor that women were more likely to undertake. Some however, also made their living and social position out of it, such as the admirable Christine de Pizan. There were others who already had a position but who knew how to use it, such as Marguerite de Navarre. Writing could be easily incorporated into one’s life, as even the courtesan Veronica Franco and the nun Teresa de Avila, proved. Two of the selected women were just ‘wives-of ‘ but they dedicated themselves to patronage and promotion of artists and left their own print in history, such as Lucrecia Tornabuoni, Isabel de Este, and Leonor de Toledo.
The widest category is the one I called ‘Thinkers’, since it overlapped with several professions. Thinkers could have kept themselves busy with religious dogmas, or have experimented with lenses, or observed stars and measured distances, or built edifices and fiddled with numbers, or pondered about varying political systems, or observed the way languages function. Many of them wrote also their findings. Their pervasive questioning certify the new mode of thinking that developed through this so called Renaissance.
Promulgators of religion are also numerous. It was still a mode of thinking based on beliefs. Some of these figures have passed to posterity as infamous, such as Pope Paul IV--the most hated Pope, or Heinrich Kramer with a penchant to burn people. Some have assuaged their infamy thanks to their support of learning, such as Cardinal Cisneros, the Inquisitor who founded a University and published the first polyglot Bible.
All the artists form a considerable crowd: twenty five of them. But in spite of being numerous, this is just a timid array of what a fuller selection would have entailed: an encyclopedia. Many of the usual suspects figure in this collection. But I was glad to see Holbein, even if the way he forgot about previous friends like Thomas More once the political tide turned, is not as admirable as are his paintings and drawings. It also pleased me to see that out of the three Bellinis, it was Gentile the one selected. If now Giovanni is more famous, at the time his elder brother Gentile was more so. He was the official painter of the Venetian Doge and was sent on diplomatic services to Turkey. And it has felt gratifying to see Sofonisba Arguinsola, the only female painter and the only female who was a painter, to figure not only in the pages, but also in the cover of my edition(*). She was a brilliant artist and not sufficiently well known.
Amongst the most entertaining lives were several of the more idiosyncratic choices. The GR community would be interested in William Caxton and Aldus Manutius. The first opened the first publishing house in London, giving a great impetus to books published in English; the second, through his Aldine Press, invented the italic type, the ancestor of the ‘paperback’ or ‘livre de poche’, and promoted the modern usage of the semicolon.
For adding a bit of humor Davis and Lindsmith have included the life Antonio Rinaldeschi of whom little would be known if it were not for the survival of a painted panel that narrates a story of Crime and Punishment—for Antonio blasphemed, threw dung to a statue of the Virgin, and was severely punished for this.
And since the back of every coin is its financing, we also have a couple of bankers: Cosme de Medicis (although four Medicis made it into the book) who funded the Popes and Jakob Fugger who financed the Emperor.
I enjoyed the book so much, that I only wished it had contained more personalities. I missed not reading about the humanist Pico della Mirandola, Piero della Francesca the mathematician who also painted; or Ottaviano Petrucci who developed the printing of music; or Fernado II of Aragón (whom I think was more of a model for Machiavelli than the chosen Cesare Borgia – after all Fernando checkmated Cesare); or…..
Even if Davis and Lindsmith have set themselves an impossible task in wanting to honor the innumerable gallery of notable personalities from the Renaissance, their album succeeds in evoking what an extraordinary period these two hundred years were.
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(*) I read the Spanish edition, which I found at an attractive price in the bookstore of the Prado Museum.
October 23, 2015
Brilliant breakfast treat for weeks- one chapter, one life. Learned so much about so many fascinating human beings I had or had never heard of! Thank you to the authors!
April 12, 2012
Very basic information, but enjoyable. Each person was its own little chapter. It's a good springboard book, almost textbooky, for people who want a basic overview of the era. I didn't read all of it, just the parts that interested me. Overall, ok for a casual reader, but I think this is probably geared more toward a college history course.
September 7, 2019
Goede - maar heel beknopte - kennismaking met honderd bekende en minder bekende mensen uit de Renaissance. Geeft zin om meer over hen te lezen.
June 6, 2021
'Renaissance People' comprises 100 very short and readable biographies of individuals who lived between (roughly) 1350 and 1600 and who contributed in some way to Renaissance culture in the broadest sense.
A joint effort by Robert Davis and Beth Lindsmith, the latter's influence can be seen in the inclusion of women who still only (and reasonably given the realities of cultural power in the period) make up under 15% of the whole but who are welcome inclusions nevertheless.
Sometimes, in the effort to be 'feminist', history can be stretched (as it is with the inclusion of 'Africans') to make space for 'discoveries' who turn out to be less important, influential or interesting than their sponsors claim but this is not the case here.
Partly this is because the editorial approach is soundly based not on just offering us the usual suspects (say Botticelli, Copernicus and Calvin although these are present) but on giving us a more rounded picture of the era and a more rounded picture makes legitimate space for women.
This is, therefore, a model of re-balancing history without becoming a-historical and even manages to include a Greek (Manuel Chrysolas), a Turk (Mehmet II), a Moor (Hayreddin Barbarossa) and an 'African' (Leo Africanus), actually another 'Moor'.
All these are very important figures in understanding the period and so are inquisitors, a pilgrim, a hanged villain, a bandit chief, an actor, a watchmaker, a master chef, a comedian and an acrobat alongside the expected line-up of artists, condottiere, dynasts, prelates and humanists.
There are short and neat introductions to the seven periods into which the authors have divided the Renaissance and, naturally enough, Italy dominates the list with well over half the entries but then that's the Renaissance for you.
Best read sequentially to build a sense of change over time, nevertheless individual stories stand up well for the magpie mind. There is also a good 'further reading' appendix at the end if you decide you really want to know more about, say, Alessandra Strozzi and her letters.
February 25, 2024
I picked this book up at the gift shop of the Uffizi Museum in Florence and appropriately read it throughout my trip in Italy and after getting home. I enjoyed the variety of lives it captured. I knew very little about the different stages of the Renaissance, so I appreciated that the book was divided into smaller epochs with cultural context throughout all of Europe. I felt it was an enjoyable read because of the short size of the sections, I could enjoy it little by little and never lose my place.
June 23, 2019
A very nice book if you're starting to read into the Renaissance period; it's witty, to the point and amusing overall. Of course you will find that some people are missing or should replace people that are in the book. Also, because the account of every character is never longer than three pages, it can be superficial and even slightly erroneous - but all those things can hardly be avoided in a work like this... again, as an introduction to the Renaissance, it's a useful book to have.
June 4, 2019
Beautifully illustrated and a simple but effective introduction to Western Civilisation as an overview of mostly well known but significantly less well-known figures of the Renaissance. A reader cannot fail to learn from. Brief bios and a decent bibliography although some bios felt disjointed (Martin Luther, for example) and some themes in bios were curious or short.
April 11, 2019
Great short reference book. Includes many of the people you would expect to read about, but also many I have never heard of and yet were clearly interesting and important people in this period. I will keep it close to hand
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July 26, 2020This was really fun and informative. I would recommend it if you're looking for a broad survey on key figures of the period, plus a reading list of where to go next. The chronological structure was a great choice, too!
April 28, 2021
An okay read but the 'pen portraits just left one wanting more depth, maybe if they had reduced the number of lives it would have been a more interesting read. Im sure a lot of people will love this book, but sadly i didn't.
December 31, 2023
Bought this at a museum gift shop in Florence. It's 2-3 page bios of seemingly every important figure during the Renaissance. Really enhanced the trip!
January 5, 2014
Picked up in a sale on a whim because I liked the pictures, this is a collection of entertainingly-written, nicely illustrated 2-page biographies, well produced on decent paper. Simplistic? Of course - it's an introductory overview, designed to spark an interest, with suggestions for further reading on each entry included towards the back. But it's a good one.
In trying to spark an interest it succeeds admirably - intriguing illustrations catch the eye while flipping through, and entries are written in such a way that you soon find yourself reading the whole thing, getting a decent overview, and planning to hunt down more info on people you're less familiar with. Found I'd read pretty much the whole thing in a couple of sittings without even really meaning to.
In trying to spark an interest it succeeds admirably - intriguing illustrations catch the eye while flipping through, and entries are written in such a way that you soon find yourself reading the whole thing, getting a decent overview, and planning to hunt down more info on people you're less familiar with. Found I'd read pretty much the whole thing in a couple of sittings without even really meaning to.
May 4, 2017
Great short biographies of people of note from this age. A good read to acquaint yourself with important names before delving into the history of the Renaissance.
November 3, 2017
Too many people for one book because it summarizes the information to the point of becoming a blur. The Catherine de Medici story does not even mention Mary I (who Medici forced to return to her native land when Francois died, making Medici regent) and that's when I lost interest.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews