Ross King

In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo....

While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amid scorn and derision from the...

The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings - the dazzling handiwork of the city's skilled artists and architects. But equally important for the centuries to follow were geniuses of a different sort: Florence's manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars...

Part of the acclaimed Eminent Lives series, Machiavelli is a superb portrait of the brilliant and revolutionary political philosopher history s most famous theorist of warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed and the age he embodied. Ross King, the New York Times bestselling author of...

"For who is so indifferent or indolent as not to wish to know by what means the Romans succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government―a thing unique in history?"―Polybius, second century BCE Ancient Rome gave rise to the Roman Empire, one of history's...

A concise, star-studded retelling of Italy's past, from Caesar and Augustus to da Vinci and Michelangelo, tracing the story of a country with prodigious global influence—from a foremost author of historic Italy. The calendar. The Senate. The university. The piano, the heliocentric model, and...

In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began what would become one of history’s most influential works of art—The Last Supper.

On August 19, 1418, a competition concerning Florence's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore was announced: "Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome...shall do so before the end of the month of September." The proposed dome was regarded far and...

We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings....

While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris: The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the...

After meeting the mysterious and beautiful Lady Beauclair at a society ball, George Cautley, a hapless young artist trying to make his way in the gilded world of 1770s London, paints her portrait while she tells him the scandalous story of Tristano, a castrato singer in Handel's opera company 50...