Dates and Family Names of Renaissance Popes
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Renaissance Popes and Their See
I. Rome and Papal Policy, 1513-1559
II. The Economic Basis of Roman Life
III. The Roman People
IV. The Roman Court and the Papal Palace
V. The Noble Life
VI. The Face of Rome
VII. The Spirit of a City and the Spirit of an Age

Select Bibliography
Index

"An informative and lively survey of Rome in [a] notorious period of urban recovery and external disrepute."—Renaissance Quarterly

"The idea that Rome has such mundane features as sewers or a mayor is hard to keep in mind as we stare at the Coliseum or the horns of Michelangelo's Moses. How much more difficult, but doubly fascinating, then, to try to reconstruct the facts of real life in Renaissance Rome, where Michelangelo worked and Caesar Borgia schemed. Peter Partner...has managed this feat with graceful brevity. He shows that the Eternal City just before 1500 was a sorry, empty wreck...Upon this medieval midden, popes and contractors erected a new town and a new order. Partner's account of this vigorous urban revival is rich in detail of all sorts. He makes sense of the maze of papal and local politics, the invasions, the economics—all the forces that set in motion that we call the Renaissance. Partner's vision takes in everything from cardinals' salaries to the treatment of syphilis to the fashion of 'antiquing' modest houses with monochrome drawings on their facades. . . . His portrait is so persuasive that it almost starts one thinking of the Sistine ceiling as merely part of a public works program."—New York Times

"It has considerable merit. For one thing, it clearly labels as anachronistic a number of commonly accepted judgments about the prevalence of 'paganism' at the time, about the incompatibility of humanism and Christianity, and about the regressive character of 'mannerist' art. For another thing, it proposes some very promising methodological innovations. A 'portrait of a society,' Partner insists, must include all its elements—tanners, butchers, and innkeepers as well as cardinals—and it must not be broken down according to modern academic disciplines, in such a way, that is, as to separate the art-historical study of buildings from the sociological study to the people who inhabit them."—American Historical Review

"Will be useful and interesting to teachers and superior students, and even to well-educated tourists."—Historian