It is an iron law of art history that any critic who has a book or two in them will sooner or later wind up writing about the Renaissance. Moody, hard-living Jackson Pollock is all very well, and let’s hear it for the formidable Tracey Emin. But at art’s palace of varieties, it’s Leonardo and Michelangelo that the people come to see. If you only know Jonathan Jones from these pages, it may surprise you to find him tripping down this primrose path with his own book on the era, almost as big as a Domino’s box. Do the contents prove to be similarly comforting and carby? Fear not. This is the Jones you know and love, the man who went to Frieze London a few weeks ago and dared to say what the other critics were merely thinking, calling it a “graveyard of creativity” and leaving the site in Regent’s Park a smoking ruin.
The Renaissance is the Disneyland of art, with its much-loved characters and magical stories, the castles and princes and the guys from the sticks with seemingly supernatural powers in their fingertips. Earthly Delights duly gives us the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo toiling away in the Sistine Chapel with dollops of paint on his chin, and the dastardly Medicis twirling their moustaches and plotting world domination as their pet artists churn out flattery and propaganda. But Jones is a genuine authority on this period and he takes us beyond the cliches.
