Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her... (more)

Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy

Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso

by Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy , is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the infinite torment of Hell, up the arduous slopes of Purgatory, and on to the glorious realm of Paradise-the sphere of universal harmony and eternal salvation.

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

Each edition includes: • Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play • Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play • Scene-by-scene plot summaries • A key to famous lines and phrases • An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language • An essay by an outstanding scholar providing a modern perspective on the play • Illustrations from the Folger... (more)

The Agony and the Ecstasy

by Irving Stone

Fictional depiction of Michelangelo. Includes bibliography, glossary and a list of the artist's works.

In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment. Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan , Sarah Dunant’s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome... (more)

Machiavelli's The Prince

by Niccolo Machiavelli

Rufus Goodwin has made a new translation into modern English of Machiavelli's masterpiece, The Prince. Machiavelli, father of Social Sciences, continues to have relevance in our modern world, and his observations on the nature of human being and the political systems are as new today as they were during the Renaissance. In the Introduction, the adjective "Machiavellian" is analyzed.

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

by Ross King

In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel. With little experience as a painter (though famed for his sculpture David ), Michelangelo was reluctant to begin the massive project. Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling recounts the four extraordinary years Michelangelo spent laboring over the... (more)

Galileo's Daughter

A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

by Dava Sobel

Galileo Galilei's telescopes allowed him to discover a new reality in the heavens. But for publicly declaring his astounding argument--that the earth revolves around the sun--he was accused of heresy and put under house arrest by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Living a far different life, Galileo's daughter Virginia, a cloistered nun, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength through the difficult... (more)

The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

Recently rediscovered by art historians, and one of the few female post-Renaissance painters to achieve fame during her own era, Artemisia Gentileschi led a remarkably "modern" life. Susan Vreeland tells Artemisia's captivating story, beginning with her public humiliation in a rape trial at the age of eighteen, and continuing through her father's betrayal, her marriage of convenience, motherhood, and growing fame... (more)

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

by William Shakespeare

This complete and unabridged edition contains every word that Shakespeare wrote — all 37 tragedies, comedies, and histories, plus the sonnets. You’ll find such classics as The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew . This Library of Literary Classics edition is bound in padded leather with luxurious gold-stamping on the front and spine, satin ribbon marker and gilded edges. Other titles... (more)

The Borgia Bride

by Jeanne Kalogridis

Vivacious Sancha of Aragon arrives in Rome newly wed to a member of the notorious Borgia dynasty. Surrounded by the city's opulence and political corruption, she befriends her glamorous and deceitful sister-in-law, Lucrezia, whose jealousy is as legendary as her beauty. Some say Lucrezia has poisoned her rivals, particularly those to whom her handsome brother, Cesare, has given his heart. So when Sancha falls... (more)

The Merchant of Venice

by William Shakespeare

Folger Shakespeare Library The world's leading center for Shakespeare studies Each edition includes: • Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play • Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play • Scene-by-scene plot summaries • A key to famous lines and phrases • An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language • An essay by an... (more)

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

by Ross King

Ross King has a knack for explaining complicated processes in a manner that is not only lucid but downright intriguing. . . . Fascinating." (Los Angeles Times) By all accounts, Filippo Brunelleschi, goldsmith and clockmaker, was an unkempt, cantankerous, and suspicious man-even by the generous standards according to which artists were judged in fifteenth-century Florence. He also designed and erected a dome... (more)

I, Mona Lisa

by Jeanne Kalogridis

“My name is Lisa di Antonio Gherardini Giocondo, though to acquaintances, I am known simply as Madonna Lisa. My story begins not with my birth but a murder, committed the year before I was born…” Florence , April 1478: The handsome Giuliano de’ Medici is brutally assassinated in Florence’s magnificent Duomo. The shock of the murder ripples throughout the great city, from the most renowned artists like... (more)

Leonardo's Swans: A Novel

by Karen Essex

Isabelle d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, born into privilege and the political and artistic turbulence of Renaissance Italy, is a stunning black-eyed blond and an art lover and collector. Worldly and ambitious, she has never envied her less attractive sister, the spirited but naïve Beatrice, until, by a quirk of fate, Beatrice is betrothed to the future Duke of Milan. Although he is more than twice their... (more)

Girl with a Pearl Earring

by Tracy Chevalier

A Deluxe Edition of the National Bestseller with Over 2 Million Copies Sold: • Eight Pages of Full-Color Plates Include Every Vermeer Painting Discussed in the Book • French Flaps • Rough Front • Larger Trim Size • Premium Stock • With a New Foreword Celebrate Tracy Chevalier’s modern classic Girl With A Pearl Earring , featuring a gorgeous new edition illustrated with eight pages of... (more)

Othello

by William Shakespeare

Folger Shakespeare Library The world's leading center for Shakespeare studies Each edition includes: • Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play • Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play • Scene-by-scene plot summaries • A key to famous lines and phrases • An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language • An essay by an... (more)

Paradise Lost

by John Milton

Edited with an introduction and notes by John Leonard.

The Rossetti Letter

by Christi Phillips

In this captivating debut, Christi Phillips blends fact and fiction, suspense and sensuality into a vibrant, richly imagined novel in which a modern historian uncovers a courtesan's secret role in a shocking conspiracy of seventeenth-century Venice. Claire Donovan always dreamed of visiting Venice, though not as a chaperone for a surly teenager. But she can't pass up this chance to complete her Ph.D. thesis on... (more)

The SECRET BOOK OF GRAZIA DEI ROSSI

by Jacqueline Park

The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi is a sweeping tale of intrigue and romance set in a time rife with court politics, papal chicanery, religious intolerance, and inviolable social rules. Grazia, private secretary to the world-renowned Isabella d'Este, is the daughter of an eminent Jewish banker, the wife of the pope's Jewish physician, and the lover of a Christian prince. In a "secret book," written as a legacy... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: renaissance

by Sarah Dunant

Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso

by Dante Alighieri

by William Shakespeare

by Irving Stone

by Sarah Dunant

by Niccolo Machiavelli

by Ross King

A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love

by Dava Sobel

by Susan Vreeland

by William Shakespeare

by Jeanne Kalogridis

by William Shakespeare

by Ross King

by Jeanne Kalogridis

by Karen Essex

by Tracy Chevalier

by William Shakespeare

by John Milton

by Christi Phillips

by Jacqueline Park