Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop Small Sale
Shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks. Don’t miss out—purchases support local bookstores.
Shop the sale
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayBotticelli's Secret
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreA true historical “detective story” full of insight about how we look at art―and the artists and eras that produced it
Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri.
A powerful encounter between poet and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never finished. Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity, and his illustrations went missing for four hundred years.
The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. Today, Botticelli’s Primavera adorns household objects of every kind.
This book is essential to explain not only how and why this artist became iconic but why we still need his work―and the spirit of the Renaissance―today.
Joseph Luzzi holds a doctorate from Yale and teaches at Bard. He is the author of My Two Italies, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which won the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“Brilliantly conceived and executed, Botticelli’s Secret is a riveting search for buried treasure.”
“I would recommend Botticelli’s Secret to anyone who loves art, who enjoys good storytelling, and who is interested in how the human spirit rediscovered itself.”
“Full of intimate and personal insights into the masters and masterpieces of Renaissance Italy and told with his unique blend of scholarship and superb storytelling."
“Brilliantly sets the operatic stage of vibrant, violent Renaissance Florence and brings to life the characters who helped resurrect Botticelli.”
“Replete with unexpected twists and dangling threads…a story about the force of art to shape lives.”
“[Luzzi] reads Botticelli’s drawings as ‘a “poem” in their own regard’ and as a crucial link in the ‘mapping of the human spirit’s transition’ from one era to the next."
“Anyone who wants a short dramatic book about Renaissance Florence should reach for this title first…a vivid portrait of culture, politics, and daily life in the city that has become the very image of Renaissance history.”
“Transferred to a Nazi bunker in the waning days of WWII, the drawings narrowly avoided a fire that destroyed hundreds of priceless artworks. Richly detailed and fluidly written, this is a master class in art history.”
“Presents a compelling brief…of coming face-to-face with transcendent human endeavor.”
Expand reviews
Stock up with our Shop Small Sale!
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks