Eminent lives

The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli's handbook on power—how to get it and how to keep it—has been enormously influential in the centuries since it was written, garnering a heady mixture of admiration, fear, and contempt. Its author, born to an established middle-class family, was no prince himself. Machiavelli (1469-1527) worked as a courtier and diplomat for the Republic of Florence and enjoyed some small fame in his time as the author of bawdy plays and poems. Upon the Medici's return to power, however, he found himself summarily dismissed from the government he had served for decades and exiled from the city where he was born.In this discerning new biography, Ross King rescues Machiavelli's legacy from caricature, detailing the vibrant political and social context that influenced his thought and underscoring the humanity of one of history's finest political thinkers. Ross King's Machiavelli visits fortune-tellers, produces wine on his Tuscan estate, travels Europe tirelessly on horseback as a diplomatic envoy, and is a passionate scholar of antiquity—but above all, a keen observer of human nature.

"Of all the great Italian painters, Caravaggio speaks most clearly and powerfully to our time. Caravaggio's early paintings of cardsharps, musicians, and street vendors convey his familiarity and fascination with the Roman underworld; his stark and brilliant religious paintings represent, for the first time in European art, the world of the poor, the suffering, and the outcast, and they depict the religious experience of the individual with a directness our age can recognize."--BOOK JACKET. "Caravaggio lived hard and died young, having fled Rome for Sicily, apparently after killing another man in a dispute; his life, involving powerful patrons, sybaritic cardinals, and saints, as well as street boys, prostitutes, and rivalrous painters, is one of the most colorful of any artist's. This biography - the first in English in two generations - shows us Caravaggio's genius with the striking clarity of his own paintings."--BOOK JACKET.