Stuff
Product Details
Washington Square Press, September 2002
Trade Paperback, 416 pages
ISBN-10: 0671047647
ISBN-13: 9780671047641
Description
Garry Wills's Venice: Lion City is a tour de force -- a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembled in its combination of art and sea empire.
Venice: Lion City presents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city's history. It is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color. Garry Wills gives us a unique view of Venice's rulers, merchants, clerics, laborers, its Jews, and its women as they created a city that is the greatest art museum in the world, a city whose allure remains undiminished after centuries.
Like Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches, on the Dutch culture in the Golden Age, Venice: Lion City will take its place as a classic work of history and criticism.
Read more:
Browse Inside Venice: Lion CityRona Goffen author of Titian's Women Garry Wills's book is as fascinating and multifaceted as Venice itself. A splendid cultural history, the book has much to teach scholars as well as newcomers to the Serenissima.
Edward Muir author of Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice Yet again Garry Wills demonstrates he is one of America's greatest historians in his new book on that most beautiful and yet mysterious of cities. The history of Venice is difficult to penetrate, not the least because the Venetians themselves expressed their most profound sentiments in visual rather than verbal terms. Judiciously navigating his way through the complex historiography of the republic of Venice and with a sharp eye for Venice's visual culture, Wills efficiently isolates the most vital questions and brings his own original insights to bear in answering them. Even those who have devoted years of study to Venice will learn much that is new and exciting, and those new to Venice will be delighted, page after page.
John W. O'Malley, S.J. author of Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome For understanding Renaissance Venice in all its mystery, no better book exists in any language than Wills's brilliant, beautifully written, and profoundly erudite tour de force. It will sweep you along with swift delight through art, politics, commerce, and religion to the heart and soul of an almost incomparably rich culture.
Ingrid D. Rowland author of The Culture of High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome Written with deep affection for its incomparable subject, Venice: Lion City presents a fully rounded portrait of Venice at the height of its political power, setting its gorgeous works of art and architecture firmly within the aggressive seafaring society that made them possible while exploring that society's workings at every level. As a seasoned political analyst, Wills subjects the "myth of Venice" and its famously republican governmental system to refreshingly critical scrutiny. Most of all, however, he offers his readers the sights, sounds, flavors, and colors of a city that was once a thriving capital as well as a cultural bazaar.
Garry Wills's Books
-
Lincoln at GettysburgIn a masterly work, Wills shows how Lincoln reached back to the Declaration of Independence to write the greatest speech in the nation’s history.Read More -
A Necessary EvilIn A Necessary Evil, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills shows that distrust of government is embedded deep in the American psyche. From the...Read More
-
John Wayne's AmericaThe Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg brings his eloquence, wit, and on-target perceptions of American life and politics to this...Read More
Displaying 1 of
