If you want a book from which you can learn art history as well as the reality of the times in which it happened, this book is for you. A rich, amusing, astonishing book with a lot of stories about the most important, and also the least important, artists of their times, about their vices, their idiosyncrasies, and their addictions. Michelangelo, Raffaello, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Rubens, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Dürer —under a different light, the light of their demons and weaknesses – or strengths. It also illuminates how artists have been perceived by society in various times and environments, how corporations and later academies developed, how artists’ singularities persisted, and why. Written by two eminent art historians, this book is never academic, nor overly technical. A pleasure to read – and to learn from.