Search results for ""Author Paolo Giovio""

The most complete translation available of these brief biographies of great European figures, written by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century.Portraits of Learned Men provides a fascinating synopsis of the contours, mentality, and trajectory of humanistic culture in Italy and Europe by one of the leading historians of the sixteenth century, Paolo Giovio (1483–1552). These brief biographies of 146 men of learning—from Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century to Erasmus, Thomas More, and Juan Luis Vives in the sixteenth—were meant to accompany accurate portrait paintings commemorating great figures in modern history. Presented together with the literary portraits in this volume, these paintings would be located in a purpose-built villa on Lake Como that would be open to the public. Giovio called this his musaeum, or home of the Muses, one of the first such institutions in European history. His museum would not only serve the traditional function of inspiring virtuous emulation but also provide a comprehensive, candid, and personal overview of the Republic of Letters as it had taken shape and flourished in Italy and Europe during the Renaissance.This volume contains a fresh edition of the Latin text and a new, more complete translation than any now available in English.

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For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge, and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo, is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.

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