num_pages: 309
description: From her long years of immersion in Renaissance history, painting, culture, and writing—and her extensive travels throughout Italy—Kate Simon has written a book about the Gonzaga family of Mantua that brings that dynasty and its era fully to life.Many of the great names of the Renaissance stride through these pages—Alberti, Mantegna, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Rubens, and others just as important though not as well known. The “Tapestry” of the title bespeaks the number of different strands Kate Simon has woven into a large canvas which gives us the Renaissance at its most exuberant and even grandiose. We have corrupt popes, wheeling and dealing like modern captains of industry (while frequently fathering illegitimate children), and the dynastic marriages among Europe’s ruling nobility, which so often led to tragedy for the unfortunate couples. We have an apparently inexhaustible appetite for food, wine, and all the other pleasures of the senses, side by side with a deep appreciation for art and literature, for the masque, for architecture and philosophy. The tangled politics of warring families and factions of the several states of Renaissance Italy, often comical in their complications, are lovingly detailed in Kate Simon’s elegant prose. It was a time of excess in everything, and A Renaissance Tapestry gives a vivid portrait of a family that lived life as fully as any in history.
language: English
title: A Renaissance Tapestry: The Gonzaga of Mantua
publisher: Harper & Row