A Rebirth of Wonders

Between Petrarch and Shakespeare, a civilization remade itself. It recovered the lost learning of antiquity, learned to paint the world as the eye truly sees it, printed the book by the thousand, mapped a globe, dissected a body, imagined the earth in motion around the sun, and asked, with a new and dangerous boldness, what a human being might become.

This is the whole sweep of the Renaissance in a single volume: the wealthy, quarrelsome city-states of Italy and the Black Death that cleared the ground; the humanists who hunted lost manuscripts and fell in love with the dead; Florence and the Medici bank; Brunelleschi raising a dome the experts said could not be raised; Leonardo and his notebooks, Michelangelo on his back beneath the Sistine ceiling, Raphael and the School of Athens; Gutenberg's press and the Republic of Letters; the Northern masters and the glowing color of Venice; Machiavelli's cold mirror of power, Savonarola's bonfire, the Sack of Rome; the new science of Copernicus and Vesalius, the new worlds across the ocean, and Luther's revolt that shattered the Church.

Vivid, sourced, and clear-eyed, this is a popular history that gives the genius its due while telling the truth about the legend — the myth-making and the "dark ages" slander, the deep continuity with the medieval world, the people the rebirth left out, and the slavery, war, and conquest on which the splendor was built. It is the story of the age that invented the modern idea of what a person might be, told in the conviction that to understand the Renaissance is to understand a crucial part of ourselves.