THE BEAUTY AND THE TERROR

A noted scholar of pre-modern Italy recounts a golden age whose effects extend into the present.

In a memoir written in 1575, writes historian Fletcher, an Italian doctor and mathematician named three innovations that had changed the world in his lifetime: “firearms, the compass, and printing.” The first two helped lead the discovery of the world and conquest of parts of it. Italy should have been in a perfect spot to undertake that work, but it was bound up in damaging in-fighting between city-states and principalities and, eventually, in conflicts between larger powers—the Holy Roman Empire versus the Papal States, for instance. Aspects of those conflicts fueled great achievements of the Renaissance, a term that means “rebirth” but in the sense of “raising the dead”: Machiavelli’s The Prince, for example, which “should be read…in the context of the ongoing wars.” Leonardo da Vinci professed to not like war but had no qualms about selling designs for military technology to the Ottomans, the scourge of the Mediterranean. Fletcher employs a large cast of characters, seeking to “arrange them into their galaxy” as she recounts the lives and accomplishments of great men and women and ordinary people alike, the latter of whom were perhaps less scientifically inclined than we might like. When plague struck, leading to the brilliance that was the Decameron, Italian cities expelled their prostitutes not as a direct health measure but because by chasing sin out they might be saved from the worst excesses of avenging angels. Fletcher’s colorful pages are peppered with stories of anti-Semitic cruelty, religious and political reform, “senior managers” like Rodrigo Borgia, and of course Michelangelo. The author constructs a deft portrait of a country and time whose “importance has been defined by culture and ideas more than by wealth and power.”

Densely detailed but highly readable—a fine one-volume survey of the Italian Renaissance.