Renaissance

Tristram Hunt finds inspiration for his study of civic consciousness in Tuscany and the lecture halls of Cambridge.

Jon Cook identifies the mix of factors that helps explain the Florentine Renaissance.

Stewart MacDonald introduces the humanist scholar whose writings made him one of the most significant figures of 16th-century Europe.  

Valery Rees looks at the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino and finds a man whose work still speaks to us today.

Robert Hole examines the often misunderstood careers of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, whose power in Renaissance Florence was wielded with great subtlety and skill.

The social, sexual and demonic power of women was an important theme in the popular print of Germany and the Low Countries in the 16th century, as Julia Nurse shows.

Renaissance Venetians developed a sophisticated technology for keeping the city’s vital waterways free from silt and in the process, as Joseph Black explains, created a unique landscape that inspired travellers and painters.

Richard Hodges wanders through the medieval village of Rocca in Tuscany.

Lois Banner looks at coded messages of gender, sexuality and domination that preceded baggy trousers.

Luke Syson examines how artifice, art and political calculation combined to produce medal portraits by Sperandio of Mantua for two of Renaissance Italy's "warhorses", Giovanni Bentivoglio and Federico da Montelfeltro.