Description

pp. 648, b/w illustrations. previous owners stamped details on half title page. paperback edition. “Hale examines the myth of Europa’s rape by a bullheaded Zeus, discusses the intensity of map making that placed Europe at the center of the world, and then sets forth to capture the entire, vast panorama of European civilization. His text reflects lifelong scholarship, yet Hale carries his gravitas lightly, with a buoyant absence of pedantry. In those passages keyed to his 200-odd illustrations, Hale goes beyond art history to convey what the images say about the changes occurring in day-to-day life. The new paintings by Titian, Raphael, and Hans Holbein, for all their aesthetic exquisiteness, signaled a new continental sensibility and that sensibility was also rising in the proto-capitalism of trade and in intellectual life. In the everyday world of social control, prejudices, disease, and death, Hale navigates just as steadily, showing that though this was not a humanitarian age, a new definition of civilized life developed that the world retrospectively acknowledges was revolutionary. A brilliant guide to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”