![]() ![]() ![]() As King puts it, he came to see them as 'the light that failed', and to see that it is not what you know but what you are that matters. ![]() Yet, as King’s spectacular book shows, Vespasiano deserves to be remembered, if only because shortly before his death, aged 76 in 1498, he lost faith in the ability of the classics to illuminate the world. The other Renaissance figures he has written about - Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Leonardo - created artworks known to every tourist, and Vespasiano’s dusty manuscripts cannot compete in that league. This has nothing to do with Vespasiano, and such spiced-up digressions suggest that King fears his subject is not interesting enough. He devotes a whole chapter, for example, to the loopy sage Ficino, who believed he had found a treatise (a fake, of course) by a seer more ancient than Moses, called Hermes. A persistent fault of King’s book is irrelevance. Anyone who has set up a page using moveable metal type will be impressed by the vividness and precision of his account. The author is equally circumstantial when describing the rival process of printing. The Bookseller of Florence, by Ross King, tells the history of Renaissance bookmaking through the story of Vespasiano da Bisticci, who rose from humble roots to dominate the trade. They are at their most enticing when they relate to physical processes such as the details of Vespasiano’s manuscript production. 1422), Europes premier bookmaker and bookseller, whose client list included. The scope of King’s knowledge is staggering and his book bulges with facts. Bestselling author King returns with the story of Vespasiano da Bisticci (b. ![]()
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