Invitation to Renaissance Italy

1930. With a Preface by Gilbert Murray. The Renaissance is often seen as an age of melodrama and villainy. This book makes you see with new intensity the light bearers who were neither melodramatic nor villainous, but men of virtue and therefore interesting: such, for instance, as Vittorio da Feltre among the children at La Giocosa, or the school of educators whose aim lay in communicating to youth the beauty of the past; or, most characteristic of all, the people of Castiglione's Courtier, a group which might have walked out of the pages of Plutarch or St. Augustine, seekers by the lamp of Plato for that unattainable perfection which should at last give peace to the soul. Contents: The Mediaeval Dream and the Renaissance Morning; Social and Political Conditions; Intellectual Contrasts and Reconciliations; The Scholar; The Artist; The Courtier; Women of the Renaissance; Florence 1434-1494-1530; The Papacy and the Renaissance; The End of the Italian Renaissance; and The Renaissance Ferment.