Renaissance
Sneers and jeers over Lears
In the 18th century, as Shakespeare began to take on classic status, editors began to notice differences between the texts…
Botticelli’s jokes and the quarrelsome, creative spirit of Florence
Once, it seems, Sandro Botticelli played a trick on a neighbour. Next door was a weaver who possessed eight looms.…
V&A's Botticelli Reimagined has too many desperate pretenders
When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it…
On the trail of Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca is today acknowledged as one of the foundational artists of the Renaissance. Aldous Huxley thought his ‘Resurrection’…
Renaissance master? Rascal? Thief? In search of Giorgione
Question-marks over attribution are at the heart of a forthcoming Giorgione exhibition. Martin Gayford sifts through the evidence
John Dee thought he could talk to angels using medieval computer technology
John Dee liked to talk to spirits but he was no loony witch, says Christopher Howse
Is this the greatest sculpted version of the Easter story? It's certainly the strangest
In April 1501, about the time Michelangelo was returning from Rome to Florence to compete for the commission to carve…
The mathematical revolution behind ‘the greatest picture in the world’
The Indian inspiration with which Piero della Francesca created ‘the greatest picture in the world’
Clarissa Tan's Notebook: Why I stopped drinking petrol
Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though…
How honest was Bernard Berenson?
Sam Leith suspects that even such a distinguished connoisseur as Bernard Berenson did not always play a straight bat
A life of Michelangelo on the grand scale
Early on in this dazzling new biography, Martin Gayford compares Michelangelo, with his daunting artistic tasks, to Hercules, the subject…
Niccolo Machiavelli, by Corrado Vivanti; The Garments of Court and Palace, by Philip Bobbitt
One more anniversary, one more cache of commemorative books. This time we are celebrating the half-millennium since Niccolò Machiavelli produced…
