The Golden Flower: Essays On The Renaissance

Originally written as introductory essays to Gobineau’s drama The Renaissance , but never published in his lifetime, the vignettes in The Golden Flower stand on their own as masterful and poetic tributes to a great age of European history. Each chapter, although named after a figure whom Gobineau considers representative or outstanding, is not a biography but a brilliant and erudite meditation on some aspect of Renaissance history.“For they are golden flowers, those splendid times … when all Italy was ablaze with life, with myriad colors, with wit, intelligence, with genius and with beauty. … I shall not go to the length of saying that there has never been anything equal to this; it would not be but the epoch that is called the Renaissance is inferior to no other whatsoever.”