The Montefeltro Conspiracy - Marcello Simonetta

For anyone interested in Renaissance Italy, add this beauty to your bookshelf - The Montefeltro Consiracy.

I'd read quite a lot about Renaissance Florence before I came across Federico da Montefeltro - it was actually a portrait by Pedro Berrugete that I saw of him (first image below) that caught my eye (...a pun for later). I'd seen Piero della Francesca's painting (second image below) long ago and knew very little about it. I assumed it was of some Italian scholar or another, never knowing he was actually a battle-hardened condottiere. Seeing Berruguete's portrait, I'd managed to make the link back to della Francesca's work and saw it in a totally new light. For instance, if the man's face was depicted from the other side, we would find him missing an eye - the result of a jousting accident and the reason why the bridge of his nose is almost horizontal (a little DIY to his face improved his vision with that lonely left eye).

The book itself is a beautiful one - embossed lettering on the cover and the inner pages left untrimmed. The literature surrounds the assassination attempt upon Lorenzo 'Il Magnifico' de Medici; it includes lots of images that I've seen in no other books on the subject and, although they're in black and white to conform to the book's design, they really offer a valuable resource on a quite specialised subject.