The Library Annex

After graduating college, a group of us left the country to visit Italy. Like an idiot, I had passed on opportunities to study abroad during my college career but decided to take advantage of this last chance to spend a month in Europe. Our professor had us read The Agony and The Ecstasy by Irving Stone and we visited Rome and Florence before travelling north to Vienna, Prague and Munich.

Sixteen years later, I have this obsessive urge to consume all I can about the Italian Renaissance – everything from the medieval godfathers planting seeds of humanism into Florentine culture to the close of the High Renaissance. Why now? No idea.

So I have a plan. After reading The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall by Christopher Hibbert and Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence by Tim Parks, I want to engage with the contemporary writers and historians. I know that this period is generally defined by the artistic masters of the time but I want the books.

Click the images above to read posts for those books. I’ve also listed unread titles below and would welcome any recommendations you might have! If you have favorite books by modern historians on the subject, I’d love to hear those as well. Of course, please also advise on any works before the renaissance time period which might shed light on understanding it.

• The History of Italy by Francesco Guicciardini
• The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione
• Maxims and Reflections: Ricordi by Francesco Guicciardini
• The Discourses by Niccolò Machiavelli
• Florentine Histories by Niccolò Machiavelli
• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
• Lives of the Artists Vol. 1 by Giorgio Vasari
• Lives of the Artists Vol. 2 by Giorgio Vasari