by Catherine Fletcher
The Italian Renaissance played a key role in shaping Western culture, yet its story is much more complex and shadowed than most people realize.
The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance provides an enthralling alternative narrative to what most of us know about the Renaissance. Author Catherine Fletcher delves into the lives of forgotten women writers, Jewish merchants, mercenaries, prostitutes, farmers and citizens who lived the Renaissance every day. Filled with vivid detail that both terrifies and fascinates, The Beauty & The Terror takes us closer than ever before to the reality of this astonishing era, and its meaning for today.
While the Mona Lisa is famous for her smile, few know she was married to a slave trader. Leonardo da Vinci is admired for his art, yet his innovative weapon designs are often overlooked. Visitors to Florence admire Michelangelo's David but rarely learn about the massacre that led to the republic's fall. Many of the Renaissance’s most renowned artists and thinkers actually rose to prominence not during the celebrated fifteenth-century 'rebirth' but amid the later turmoil and devastation of the sixteenth century.
About the author
Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe and a Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University who broadcasts regularly for the BBC. She is interested in the communication of history to wider publics, via fiction and non-fiction, on radio and TV, at heritage sites and beyond.
Paperback
Book contains 432 pages
Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.7 x 19.8 cm
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