THE BEAUTY AND THE TERROR

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

CATHERINE FLETCHER

Bodley Head, 432pp, £25

The 16th century in Italy was one of constant, brutal warfare – the backdrop to the Renaissance – and Fletcher’s premise is that this should change our view of it. As Michael Prodger wrote in the Times, ‘As her impressive and lucid “alternative history” makes clear, for its citizens, the period 1494–1571 was less a time of high art than high danger.’

‘This is a powerful book,’ wrote Charles Nicholl in the Guardian, ‘but it is also one with an argument or agenda to pursue, and in this aspect it is less satisfactory ... she intends to highlight “the brutal realities behind Renaissance works of art”’, yet, as Ian Garrick Mason decided in the

Spectator, she ‘doesn’t sail very far from the ports built by her predecessors’. It’s ‘an ambitious, multifocal book’, Mary Wellesley wrote in the Sunday Times, with a large cast of characters. She has ‘added a wealth of information that will be new to most of us,’ Noel Malcolm noted in the Telegraph.

Baptismal records in Florence indicate that the husband of Mona

Lisa was a slave-dealer – a ‘backstory’, the author believes, that puts a new and very negative perspective ‘on the Mona Lisa’s famous smile’. The Guardian refuted this: ‘to call [him] a “slave-trader” on the basis of 11 baptisms in 13 years seems more like a soundbite than a genuine argument.’

‘But if the book is more oldfashioned than the author seems to believe ... it has all the old-fashioned virtues: it is richly well-informed and well-written, containing material of real interest on every page,’ Malcolm concluded. ‘That sort of history book is good enough for me. Better, dare I say, than the alternative.’