Venice: Lion City The Religion of Empire

Garry Wills'sVenice: Lion Cityis a tour de force -- a rich, colorful, and provocative history of the world's most fascinating city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was at the peak of its glory. This was not the city of decadence, carnival, and nostalgia familiar to us from later centuries. It was a ruthless imperial city, with a shrewd commercial base, like ancient Athens, which it resembled in its combination of art and sea empire.Venice: Lion Citypresents a new way of relating the history of the city through its art and, in turn, illuminates the art through the city's history. It is illustrated with more than 130 works of art, 30 in full color. Garry Wills gives us a unique view of Venice's rulers, merchants, clerics, laborers, its Jews, and its women as they created a city that is the greatest art museum in the world, a city whose allure remains undiminished after centuries.Like Simon Schama'sThe Embarrassment of Riches,on the Dutch culture in the Golden Age,Venice: Lion Citywill take its place as a classic work of history and criticism.

Garry Wills is the author of twenty-one books, including the bestseller Lincoln at Gettysburg (winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award), John Wayne's America, Certain Trumpets, Under God, A Necessary Evil, and Venice: Lion City, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. A frequent contributor to many national publications, including The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books, he is also an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University and lives in Evanston, Illinois.