Charles VIII of France, known as the Affable, was born at Château d'Amboise on the 30th of June 1470. He was the only surviving son of King Louis XI of France, called the Prudent and the Spider, and his second queen, Charlotte de Savoy. His four brothers were all either...
King François I’s Book of Hours!
King François I’s Book of Hours! It belonged to the art-loving Knight-King, the first Renaissance King of France! It appears in my novels from time to time as François uses it quite often for prayers. Purchased in the 1530s, François used it every day. It is a stunning masterpiece of...
The Château de Chenonceau: “Château des Dames” of the Loire Valley
The Château de Chenonceau is a magnificent castle spanning the River Cher. It is located close to the village of Chenonceaux in the Indre-et-Loire département of the Loire Valley in France. One of the most famous châteaux of the Loire valley, it is a unique Renaissance castle, a fairytale and...
Marriage of François d’Angoulême and Claude of France
On the 18th of May 1514, François d’Angoulême, the future King François I of France, married his distant cousin Claude, the eldest of the two surviving daughters of Queen Anne and King Louis XII. The quiet ceremony took place in the atmosphere of lament in a chapel at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which...
Golden Florentine Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli, born as Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, lived at the time when all things intellectual, humanistic, and progressive flourished in the Florentine Republic. The city was truly the cradle of the new era dawning. The artist belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de’...
Leonardo Da Vinci: a genius’s life in Italy and his last years in France
Leonardo Da Vinci was born on the 14 or 15th of April 1452 in the Tuscan town of Vinci, in the Republic of Florence. He was undoubtedly the quintessential Renaissance man, one who spent most of his life in Italy and his last years in France. Leonardo’s areas of interest...
Lavinia Fontana: a talented and lucky female painter
Do you know at least one female artist in Renaissance Europe? Sofonisba Anguissola, Fede Galizia, Artemisia Gentileschi, and so forth. However, so few of the many talented women accomplished a lot in a man-dominated world of the time. One of them is Lavinia Fontana, who was born in Bologna in...
Andrea del Sarto: ‘a faultless painter’ eclipsed by his contemporaries
On the 16th of July 1486, Andrea del Sarto was born in Florence. Sarto’s family name was likely to be Lanfranchi, and his father seems to have been a tailor. Little is known about his childhood perhaps because they were quite uneventful. With two short exceptions, he lived in Florence....
A Fabulous, yet Sad, Life: Giovanni Boccaccio
Giovanni Boccaccio! He is inextricably connected with the Renaissance, just as Petrarch is. Boccaccio was a man of the Renaissance in almost every sense. Born to a Tuscan merchant Boccaccio di Chellino, Giovanni came into the world in the summer of 1313. The exact date and place of Giovanni’s birth...