Florence
The staggering beauty of Fra Angelico
In 1982, Pope John Paul II surprised a few people by beatifying Fra Angelico, the 15th-century Dominican friar from near…
The true birthplace of the Renaissance
The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him.…
Flirting in 15th-century Florence
In his history of male-male sexual relations, Noel Malcolm describes how a man in Renaissance Italy would seduce a boy in the street by seizing his hat and holding it ransom
Always carry a little book with you, and preserve it with great care, said Leonardo da Vinci
Despite the digitisation of everything, many of us still choose to jot down thoughts and sketches on paper, and would be bereft without a notebook to hand
A farm in the Fells
‘Some days I feel like I’m drowning,’ admits Helen Rebanks, caught between cooking, housework, admin, tagging lambs and the school run at the Lake District family farm
A Tuscan gem
Siena, the jewel of Tuscan cities, was the mercantile and banking centre of medieval Europe. Bankers in Pre-Renaissance Siena preened…
Gothic glories
There can be no clearer illustration of the central role that great cathedrals continue to play in a nation’s life…
Keeping up with Jena set
Frances Wilson describes a group of self-obsessed intellectuals united by mutual loathing in a small university town in the 1790s
Mourning glory
The room is immersed in semi-darkness. Light filters down from above, glistening on polished marble as if it were flesh.…
Escape into reality
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an ambitious, passionate, determined woman – not the sad-eyed invalid of legend, says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Rare and precious
Martin Gayford explains why the Royal Academy would be wrong to sell Michelangelo’s ‘Taddei Tondo’
Foreign bodies galore: the best new crime fiction
Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more…
How to be a tourist in Europe
Last week, I was in the Florence Baptistery by 8.30 a.m. That used to be early enough to avoid the…
Dante’s egomania
Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even…
Black mischief among the Medicis
The life – and violent death – of a very unusual Renaissance prince has Alex von Tunzelmann enthralled
Florence
Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms.…
A love letter to Italy
Imagine you’re an unknown young writer whose first collection of stories wins the Pulitzer prize. Your first novel is filmed,…
Escaping the Inferno
I read this, Meg Rosoff’s first novel for adults (though her previous fiction, aimed at teenagers, is widely enjoyed by…
The Grand Tour
The Grand Tour usually culminated with Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, where Vesuvius offered a visual education in…
Florence
The British have always been in love with Florence. First visits cannot disappoint. One friend recalls being herded around as…
Toujours la politesse
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
Survivors
Martin Gayford visits two new surveys of Greek and Roman sculpture at the British Museum and Palazzo Strozzi. Reimagining what’s lost is as much of an inspiration as what remains
A great visual sermon
In 1439 Abraham of Souzdal, a Russian bishop visiting Florence, was in the audience in Santa Maria del Carmine for…
Weird and wonderful
In many respects the average art-lover remains a Victorian, and the Florentine Renaissance is one area in which that is…
Hidden presence
One of the paintings in Arturo Di Stefano’s impressive new show at Purdy Hicks Gallery is called ‘Santa Croce’ and…
