Promotional Information

The story of the Renaissance city and palace of Urbino, and the life of the extraordinary man who created it: Federico da Montefeltro.

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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*