Books in the Renaissance Lives series

A revisionist biography of Andreas Vesalius--the father of modern anatomy--as deeply shaped by Renaissance culture. In 1543 the young and ambitious physician Andreas Vesalius published one of the most famous books in the history of medicine, On the Fabric of the Human Body. While we often think of dissection as destroying the body, Vesalius believed that it helped him understand how to construct the human body. In this book, Sachiko Kusukawa shows how Vesalius's publication emerged from the interplay of Renaissance art, printing technology, and classical tradition. She challenges the conventional view of Vesalius as a proto-modern, anti-authoritarian father of anatomy through a more nuanced account of how Vesalius exploited cultural and technological developments to create a big and beautiful book that propelled him into imperial circles and secured his enduring fame.

An original survey of the Renaissance painter's life and work. This book is a concise survey of the life of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522) within his social and cultural surroundings. Delving into the artist's deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how di Cosimo chose to live in squalor--eating nothing but boiled eggs cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. Sarah Blake McHam shows how the artist became a favorite among sophisticated patrons eager for pagan artworks featuring Greco-Roman mythological subjects as well as orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings. The result is a newly accessible introduction to the life of this important Renaissance artist.

Aldus Manutius is perhaps the greatest figure in the history of the printed book: in Venice, Europe's capital of printing, he invented the italic type and issued more first editions of the classics than anyone before or since, as well as Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the most beautiful and mysterious printed book of the Italian Renaissance.0This is the first monograph in English on Aldus Manutius in over forty years. It shows how Aldus redefined the role of a book printer, from mere manual labourer to learned publisher. As a consequence Aldus participated in the same debates as contemporaries such as Leonardo da Vinci and Erasmus of Rotterdam, making this book an insight into their world too.

The first popular biography in English in thirty years of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Niccolo Guicciardini's enlightening biography offers an accessible introduction to Newton's celebrated work in mathematics, optics and astronomy and to how Newton viewed these scientific fields in relation to his quest for the deepest secrets of the universe, matter theory and religion.