Renaissance Italy Quotes

“Too much knowing is misery.”
― Lorenzo de' Medici

“Ambivalence and contradiction energize nearly every figure Michaelangelo carved, from the adolescent Madonna of the Stairs onward...But the four allegories atop the sarcophagi raise them to a symphonic crescendo. Each is a battleground of conflicting emotions and motives, in which will and paralysis battle for supremacy.”
― Eric Scigliano, Michelangelo's Mountain: The Quest For Perfection in the Marble Quarries of Carrara

“In Scappi's cookbook we see the first Italian recipes ever published that rely heavily on dairy, particularly butter and cheeses. There are also numerous recipes for pasta. Turkey makes its first appearance in an Italian cookbook. And many of us today are familiar with a recipe first found in L'Opera: zabaglione. The flavors that are prevalent in the cookbook are a little cloying to modern audiences, relying heavily on rosewater, sugar, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon. These flavors make sense in the variety of flaky pastries that are described in the book, but can be a little more off-putting when incorporated into a savory pasta dish.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime.”
― Gary Inbinder, Confessions of the Creature

“Six horses waited, adorned in the red and black of the Company of Cooks and harnessed to an open, canopied wagon festooned with ribbons. Upon it lay Bartolomeo's casket, draped with a cloth embroidered with the company's coat of arms. A bear was on the left side of the crest and a stag on the right. Below the central chevron and its two red stars were the tools of the company's trade, a crossed knife and a butcher's knife. The banner beneath bore a Latin phrase coined by Horace- ab ovo usque ad mala- embroidered in gold. From eggs to apples, beginning to end. Roman meals had always begun with eggs and ended with fruit.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“The arrival of the food snapped me out of my reverie. Like many chefs in Roma, the Farnese chef had taken much inspiration from Bartolomeo over the years. The first course included slices of Parmesan; olives from Tivoli; cherries in little gilded cups; a salad of sliced citron with sugar and rosewater; veal rolls dredged in coriander, spit-roasted, then topped with raisins soaked in wine; peas in the pod served with pepper and vinegar; salted buffalo tongue, cooked, then sliced and served cold with lemon; a delicate soup of cheese and egg yolks poured over roasted pigeon; blancmange white as snow and sprinkled with sugar; roasted artichokes and pine nut tourtes.”
― Crystal King, The Chef's Secret

“Tradesmen rarely pursued their rulers for payment, particularly one who could be as vicious in acquisition as Isabella D’Este.”
― Leonie Frieda, The Deadly Sisterhood: Eight Princesses of the Italian Renaissance