-
Botticelli's Secret
- The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance
- Narrated by: Keith Szarabajka
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
A true historical “detective story” full of insight about how we look at art―and the artists and eras that produced it.
Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri. A powerful encounter between poet and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never finished. Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity, and his illustrations went missing for 400 years.
The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. Today, Botticelli’s Primavera adorns household objects of every kind. This book is essential to explain not only how and why this artist became iconic, but why we need still need his work―and the spirit of the Renaissance―today.
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Early in 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began work in Milan on what would become one of history's most influential and beloved works of art - The Last Supper. After a dozen years at the court of Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Leonardo was at a low point personally and professionally: at 43, in an era when he had almost reached the average life expectancy, he had failed, despite a number of prestigious commissions, to complete anything that truly fulfilled his astonishing promise.
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Informative yet creative
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The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance
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The dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral of Florence, is among the most enduring symbols of the Renaissance, an equal to the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Its designer was Filippo Brunelleschi, a temperamental architect and inventor who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. Yet the completion of the dome was not Brunelleschi’s glory alone. He was forced to share the commission with his archrival, the canny and gifted sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti.
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Detailed history of the early Italian Renaissance
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Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a man of many talents - a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, and scholar - but he is best known for Lives of the Artists, which singlehandedly established the canon of Italian Renaissance art. Before Vasari's extraordinary book, art was considered a technical skill, and artists were mere decorators and craftsmen. It was through Vasari's visionary writings that Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came to be regarded as great masters of life as well as art, their creative genius celebrated as a divine gift.
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Outstanding!
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The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world's greatest art museum.
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Enlightening
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In a Dark Wood
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In the aftermath of a heartbreaking tragedy, a scholar and writer uses Dante's Divine Comedy to shepherd him through the dark wood of grief and mourning - a rich and emotionally resonant memoir of suffering, hope, love, and the power of literature to inspire and heal the most devastating loss.
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The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior
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Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia - three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man's perceptions - and the course of Western history.
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A Very Good Book (Just Not As Good As Others)
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Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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lifelong coverage of his life.
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The Modern Scholar: In Michelangelo’s Shadow
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The director of Italian studies at Bard College, Professor Joseph Luzzi leads a comprehensive overview of Italian culture. Beginning in the fabled realm of Renaissance art and concluding with the sweeping transformations of present-day Italy, Professor Luzzi examines the Italian mystique and answers a number of intriguing questions: Is there a distinctly “Italian” way of looking at the world? To whom do Italian Renaissance treasures truly belong? Could the United States as known today exist without the contributions of Italian culture?
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Disappointing delivery
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The House of Medici
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This enthralling book charts the family's huge influence on the political, economic, and cultural history of Florence. Beginning in the early 1430s with the rise of the dynasty under the near-legendary Cosimo de Medici, it moves through their golden era as patrons of some of the most remarkable artists and architects of the Renaissance, to the era of the Medici Popes and Grand Dukes, Florence's slide into decay and bankruptcy, and the end, in 1737, of the Medici line.
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Laundry list of names
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Michelangelo, God's Architect
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Michelangelo, God's Architect is the first book to tell the full story of Michelangelo's final two decades, when the peerless artist refashioned himself into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica and other major buildings. When the Pope handed Michelangelo control of the St. Peter’s project in 1546, it was a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design and faulty engineering.
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Michelangelo, architect, urban designer, artist
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The Medici
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Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence as well as the Italian Renaissance, which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Interwoven into the narrative are the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Donatello as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola.
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Fun Story Bad History
- By Elizabeth Barrett on 05-09-16
By: Paul Strathern
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What listeners say about Botticelli's Secret
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lina
- 05-13-23
Interesting
The story is really interesting, but naration trying to make accents is really unnecesary and irritating sometimes.
Overall, I learned new things about Dante and Botticelli
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- James R. Modrall
- 06-07-23
Not so secret
The two halves of the book are very different - the first is an entertaining but not especially original intro to Renaissance Florence in which Botticelli doesn't play a very prominent role. The second is an overview of Western attitudes towards Renaissance art. Many interesting characters appear, including Burckhardt, Pater, Ruskin, Horne and Berenson. This would be a great topic for a standalone book but the effort to tie everything back to Botticelli in general and his Dante drawings especially is unconvincing. The reader is generally fine but his habit of putting on fake accents for translated quotations is annoying.
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- JR from Dallas
- 12-09-22
Highly Recommend
Great book by an outstanding author. Serves both as an overview of the time period and in-depth look at Botticelli, his art and his illustrations of Dante's wondrous poem, La Divina Commedia.
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9 people found this helpful
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- w.l.
- 04-04-23
Unevenly interesting
I found the beginning of the book interesting, after that, the author dug into side roads to trace the provenance of Botticelli. When he placed things in the Florentine Renaissance, offering up tales of people that were part of the scene around Botticelli, I was interested. When he traced the scholars, I was not interested and could barely pay attention.
I guess it depends on what you are looking for.
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- B. Thompson
- 04-11-23
Loved it!
Really enjoyed this. Art history is a hobby and learned a great deal. Might be a bit dry but still very enjoyable.
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- giovani
- 08-03-23
Disappointing
There are some jewels here. However they are embedded within a sea of trivialities. The writing is good but full of sloppy redundancy. Above all the phony accents are pathetic and distracting.
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- Monhegan Monarch
- 05-02-23
The reader doesn’t get it…
Content is interesting so I listened to the end. The reader used a variety of accents to evidently add interest, and or credibility to the text. It became very annoying because his accents are not that great, and it interrupted the flow of the story. It may be that he assumed the listeners were novices to this type of story?
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ellen Nicole Allen
- 04-04-23
Dry style. Except for the epilogue
Interesting and well researched information but presented in a fairly dry way. Until I got to the epilogue. It made me wish he had written the entire book with a more personal style. Really made it come alive like a majority of the book did not. But it’s still worth the listen I think.
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- Robert W. Ross Jr.
- 03-06-23
Excellent story& beautifully researched. Delivery??
Amazing and wonderful, deeply researched material. Some of the reading with fake accents is pretty shaky. Please edit that if you can!
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32 people found this helpful
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- Anita N. Nichols
- 02-01-23
An education in one short volume . I listened twice as it is so tightly packed with information.
An education in one short volume. I listened twice because it is so tightly packed with information. I have heard Professor Luzzi speak, so I knew it would be great.
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13 people found this helpful