Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) is the creator of world-famous works such as The Birth of Venus. Adored by the Pre-Raphaelites centuries later for his evident romanticism, Botticelli ...

On 2 and 3 March 1498, the 29-year-old aspirant civil servant Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was among a crowd that gathered at the Convent of San Marco in Florence to hear a fiery sermon given by ...

Explore the legacy of the Medici family through its most influential figures, from Cosimo the Elder to Catherine de' Medici.

The French had marched into Italy three years before and opponents of the city’s Medici oligarchs had seized the chance to expel them. Now Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar, dominated Florence ...

Pico’s obsession with the power of language explains his fascination with the enigmatic Savonarola, who urged his Florentine listeners to give up vanities and live purer spiritual lives. The friar’s ...

In January 1889, after a heated argument with his friend Paul Gauguin that led him to cut off part of his left ear, Vincent van Gogh painted one of the most iconic self-portraits in the history of art ...

such as Leonardo da Vinci ("The Portrait of a Musician"), Caravaggio ("The Basket of Fruit"), Raphael ("The Cartoon for the School of Athens"), Titian ("Adoration of Magi") and Botticelli ("The ...

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An illustration of a magnifying glass. An illustration of a magnifying glass.

Can photography ever be an art comparable with painting? The idea that art is the privilege of an elite group is an illusion. The proliferation of photography, be it analogue or digital, has made ...