During the 15th and 16th centuries, the Italian peninsula witnessed major innovations in the visual arts, literature, music, and science. Offering a vivid depiction of the lives and times of the aristocratic elite whose patronage made it all possible, Mary Hollingworth profiles such figures as Cosimo I de' Medici, Isabella d'Este of Mantua, Lucrezia Borgia. Many of these aristocrats were related by blood or marriage, creating a web of alliances that held Renaissance society together, but as Hollingworth also shows, their feuds sometimes threatened to tear it apart.