Mary Hollingsworth (2) (1950–)

Mary Hollingsworth's latest book tells the history of the patrons of the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance, during the tumultuous period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is an excellent introduction for readers looking to learn about the famous Renaissance families of Italy whose names ring bells but details are sketchy, like Medici, Borgia, d’Este, Farnese, Visconti, Sforza, and Gritti.

Princes of the Renaissance is the kind of well-written “popular” history backed by substantive research that is a delight to read. It is also a beautiful book, filled with photographs and color prints of the of the places and art described.… (more)

TL;DR: Avoid this book: it merely presents an unstructured sequence of historical facts sorted by year, and is unwilling to engage in the kinds of selecting, telling, interpreting and presenting of information that I expect from a history book written by an expert.

I thought this book was disappointing, and a waste of money. Every section covers a single year or so, listing the things that happened around the scions of the Borgia family and what they did in those years. But that is as far as it goes: There is hardly any attempt at highlighting red threads or trends or anything else that would impose some structure on the lists of facts that Hollingsworth presents here. Which things are going to be important later? How do they impact each other? Which seemingly unrelated items would naturally go together in a culture that, to me, is both foreign and in the past? Figuring all that out is the kind of work that non-specialists are unable to do, work that a historian can rightly be expected to do for their readers. But Hollingsworth seems uninterested in structuring and presenting historical facts from a perspective that is a little wider than a yearly play-by-play.… (more)