The Light of Italy

Sumptuous illustrations... Jane Stevenson's loving biography [is] the perfect tour guide to the past' * Literary Review * An insight into one of Renaissance Italy's most glamorous courts. The lords of Urbino are not nearly so well-known as the Medici or Borgias, but their architectural and art patronage, and book-collecting, deserve to be recognised as do their military skills and bloodthirsty intrigues -- Catherine Fletcher In a narrative matching her book's sumptuous illustrations, Jane Stevenson celebrates Urbino as an essential place of pilgrimage for all lovers of Italian art and literature -- Jonathan Keates Jane Stevenson shows us the man warts, battle scars, collapsed vertebrae and all behind the myth of one of the most fascinating characters in Renaissance Italy... Painstakingly researched and yet unfailingly readable' -- Ross King A fabulous merging of seductive design with bravura scholarship -- Alexandra Harris A revelatory study of Federico da Montefeltro * Choice Magazine * A fascinating account of the patrons and artists behind the creation of one of Italy's hidden treasures -- Mary Hollingsworth Stevenson conjures the marvellous, intoxicating, brutal and beautiful world of Renaissance Italy with a lightness of touch and an eye for complexity and contradiction, bringing to life the battered, potent and panegyricised figure of a Christian prince, Renaissance patron and ruthless mercenary * Tablet * A splendid series of illustrations ... A superior study packed with detail * TLS *

Jane Stevenson has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, Warwick and Aberdeen, and is now a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford. She is the author of Baroque Between the Wars, a study of alternative currents in the interwar arts, and Edward Burra: Twentieth Century Eye.