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.

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