The Renaissance in 50 shades of grey

The Mediterranean-centred era spanning a century or so either side of 1492 is filled to the brim with stories. There was the discovery of the Americas by a bold Genoese navigator; power struggles between wealthy Italian families, waged through conspiracies, poisonings and stabbings; a radical Dominican monk who managed to impose near-theocratic rule on a republican city before being burned at the stake; the advent of humanism and, subsequently, of a modern, power-focused theory of politics; and the maturing of the visual arts to a new level of sophistication, realism and emotional power. Such stories make up a significant part of the cultural inheritance of the West.  Histories, biographies, novels, plays and films, not to mention the visual and physical experience of Renaissance art and architecture, maintain a bridge between our own time and one of Europe’s most turbulent and productive ages.

Catherine Fletcher, however, is worried that this bridge connects us to an illusion. She feels that what we’ve been telling ourselves about the period focuses too much on the good (Michelangelo and da Vinci, for instance) while ignoring its dark underside — ‘the brutal realities behind Renaissance works of art’. At the same time she complains that when we do highlight the period’s violence and greed we tend to over-dramatise and distort them.

To punch all of this lumpy cultural baggage back into shape, she sets out to give us an ‘alternative’ history of the Italian Renaissance — the contemporary academic euphemism for ‘corrected’. If traditional sources excluded certain themes, events and people, she will fix this by being systematically inclusive. No historical fact will be left behind.

But few publishers are keen on multi-volume histories these days, so Fletcher has to limit herself to only a few hundred pages.