Published March 24, 2022
12 min read
Artistic ferment bubbled in Italy in the late 1400s and early 1500s, but despite the later idealization of that period as the Renaissance, it was also a time of extreme violence. As the armies of Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire battled to control the peninsula, Machiavelli was devising his brutal ideas about political science, and Leonardo da Vinci was juggling his masterpieces with military designs for guns and cannons. War and patriarchal values kept women at home and ensured that the names of Renaissance lum
