Botticelli's Primavera, his Venus, his lovely pensive Madonnas are famous and favorites all over the world. Less well-known are his illustrations for Dante, his stark painting of Calumny, of The Derelict, and The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, all painted after he came under the influence of Savonarola.

In writing the biography of one of the great Florentine painters, Elizabeth Ripley has given us a picture of the Renaissance: The Medici, Pope Sixtus, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Charles VIII of France, and, above all, the fanatic Savonarola appear in these pages as they touch the life of the artist.

As in her other successful biographies, Elizabeth Ripley has faced each page of text with an appropriate reproduction of one of the painter's works. We see the Renaissance through the eyes of a man who lived in its midst and we sense the color and turbulence of the period in the author's simple but vivid text.

From the dust jacket