Volume 44, Number 17 · November 6, 1997
The Renaissance Revealed
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Renaissance
by George Holmes
St. Martin's, 272 pp., $35.00
Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance
by Lisa Jardine
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 470 pp., $32.50
Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past
by Patricia Fortini Brown
Yale University Press, 361 pp., $60.00
Art and Life in Renaissance Venice
by Patricia Fortini Brown
Abrams, 176 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600
by Dennis Romano
Johns Hopkins University Press, 333 pp., $45.00
Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto
by James S. Grubb
Johns Hopkins University Press, 344 pp., $45.00
Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays
by Antonia Pulci, annotated and translated by James Wyatt Cook, edited by James Wyatt Cook, by Barbara Collier Cook
University of Chicago Press, 281 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Autobiography of An Aspiring Saint
by Cecilia Ferrazzi, transcribed, translated, and edited by Anne Jacobson Schutte
University of Chicago Press, 101 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence
by Michael Rocke
Oxford University Press, 371 pp., $35.00
Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power
by Roger D. Masters
University of Notre Dame Press, 366 pp., $32.95
What caused the outburst of mental energy known as the Renaissance? This is the question that is being freshly considered in many of the current books on the period. The historian George Holmes's new book, Renaissance, argues that the most important catalyst was the city, specifically the great European commercial centers that were expanded and governed by a rising merchant class in the aftermath of the plague of 1348. Rather than concluding that life was cheap, the survivors seem instead to have been drawn to formulate ideas about an inherent human dignity, with vast repercussions for every aspect of their culture, from the striking precision of Renaissance art to the neoclassical philosophies expounded in Renaissance literary texts. Carefully constructed spaces and imposingly physical figures create a world in which a version of individualism is played out in every interior, on every street corner and piazza we see, whether in the Florence of Leonardo, the Venice of Bellini, or the Rome of Raphael. Holmes's Renaissance interprets its title broadly; it is both a picture book and historical study, a work that seeks to reconcile the Northern Renaissance of the Burgundian dukes, Bosch, and Dürer with the Southern Renaissance in Italy. 'My aim,' he states at the outset, 'is to place the Renaissance in the context of the expanding and prosperous life of the European cities. I see the commercial city as the heart of modern European life.'
Review, 5918 words
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