Overwhelmed by the Renaissance

A not-quite reading success…

“Every day of our lives we’re targeted by at least one lie about history.” (p. 25)

“The plague is as important as the Mona Lisa to our effort to understand this Renaissance, both terrible and great.” (p. 193)

“When you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women.” (p. 234)

“If you know only one thing about Savonarola it’s the Bonfire of the Vanities, the Renaissance’s darkest hour (nope), a mass book burning (nope) and art burning (nope), invented by Savonarola (nope) to exert the stifling force of Church and Faith against the broadening of art, science, and thought that he hated (still nope).” (p. 291)

“ I’ve looked through one of Galileo’s telescopes, it’s in Florence, and realizing it’s less powerful than the plastic Hamburglar binoculars I once got in a McDonald’s Happy Meal filled me with new awe that a cunning mind armed with the right questions can get a long, long way with simple tools.” (p. 570)

My Reading

I only managed to sort-of-carefully read the first 500 pages of Ada Palmer’s tome Inventing the Renaissance. I scanned the rest. It’s much much too long, and it has a number of flaws, the main one being that it is precious in the sense of being affected and self-congratulatory. Worse yet, it’s constantly offering rather ordinary and boring  bits of the author’s autobiography — mainly about her experience as a graduate student and her students’ reactions to the subject matter.

Inventing the Renaissance manages to cover several hundred years of humanist thought, to define many concepts, and to provide sketches of the accomplishments of dozens of thinkers of the age and many patrons of these thinkers. I’m a fan of Leonardo da Vinci, Isabella d’Este, Michelangelo, Lucrezia Borgia, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli, several members of the Medici family, Benvenuto Cellini (“the Florentine goldsmith-sculptor-assassin-jailbreaker-necromancer”), and so on. It’s interesting to read a not-so-critical view of Savonarola. But eventually the level of detail seems brutal, especially when one’s boredom is amplified by details of the author’s academic career.

Of course the book provides a huge dose of historic narrative, character studies of many Renaissance figures, summaries of philosophical narratives, introductions to the major thinkers and interests of the age (both famous ones and obscure ones), a bit about the politics of art works like Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, and much more. At the end, there’s even a brief history of printing — which in my opinion deserves more prominence: the author characterizes the introduction of printed books as “an information revolution: not new technology (we’re on the Gutenberg-type press until the nineteenth century) but a distribution network revolution.” (p. 587) I felt that her view was weak.

Unless you are a glutton for an extreme level of detail about obscure points, and unless you are a fan of the author’s fascination with her own life and academic achievements, I strongly doubt that you would enjoy reading this book. And although I have in the past immersed myself in some of the biographies of the same individuals featured here, I found it horrendously dense and challenging to follow, which is not a compliment. I say: leave the reading of this academic stuff to the professionals!

Thinking of Famous Art in the Renaissance

I enjoyed the art history, such as discussion of Michelangelo’s slaves.

Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel. One of the most amazing mural paintings in history:
the book has interesting historical info about this art work and its creator.

Leonardo’s portrait of Cecelia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan was painted when Leonardo was “sent there by Lorenzo de Medici as something between an ambassador and a gift for his Sforza allies.” (p. 326)

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Photos of art works from Wikipedia