remember the renaissance?

Managed to finish reading another book, this one a brief but pithy tome on the Renaissance by Paul Johnson. Only 160 pages or so, it focuses almost entirely on Italy, most notably the cities of Florence, Rome and Venice. The author makes a good case, to this lay reader, for focussing on Italy as the cradle of the Renaissance, perhaps especially in the visual arts and in architecture, though the introductory pages emphasise the revolutionary nature of a non-Italian invention, the printing press, in disseminating some of the new ideas throughout Europe at a rate hitherto undreamt of.
Among its many fascinations, the book introduced me to the work and character of artists who had only been names to me, such as Donatello, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Corregio and Palladio. A difficult task in a short unillustrated volume, but the point is to whet the appetite. I also learned things about the Big Names like Michelangelo that I didn’t know about, eg that he had virtually no interest in landscape (though admittedly anyone with the slightest observational power would’ve noticed this), being intensely focused on the human (male) figure – almost symbolic of the energy and shortcomings of humanism, you might say. Also, both he and Leonardo were notorious for not finishing their commissions – too many things on the go, I know the feeling boys.
Anyway, a useful little tome to carry with me on my grand tour, one day, full of buildings and frescoes and public sculptures and such to look out for.