Earthly Delights

Sunday Times Art Book of the Year: Written by one of the UK's foremost art critics, this new narrative history of the Renaissance embraces the entirety of Europe and its global context.

What was the 'Renaissance'? In the nineteenth century, this flourishing of creativity and thought was celebrated as the birth of the modern world. Today, many historians are sceptical about its very existence. Earthly Delights rekindles the Renaissance as a seismic change in European mentalities, presenting a panoramic history that encompasses Florence and Bruges, London and Nuremberg. Artists from both northern and southern Europe, including Leonardo, Bosch, Bruegel, and Titian, star in a captivating and beautifully illustrated narrative that sets their lives against a period of convulsive change across a continent that was finding itself as it 'discovered' the world.

Art critic and writer Jonathan Jones tells the story of Renaissance artists as pioneers, adventurers, and 'geniuses'—a Renaissance concept. Albrecht Dürer gazes with wonder at Aztec art in Brussels in 1520, Leonardo da Vinci tries to perfect a flying machine, Hieronymus Bosch finds inspiration in West African ivory carvings imported by the Portuguese to Antwerp. An unknown Netherlandish painter, Pieter Bruegel, arrives in 1550s Rome just as Michelangelo is striving in the same city to raise the new St Peter's Basilica towards heaven.

From Atlantic voyages to Germanic woods, Italian palazzi to the royal castle of Prague, this was an age when people dared to experiment with the occult and dabble in utopias: to think and create new worlds.