“In the concise and beautifully illustrated Brunelleschi and the Moment of the Renaissance, Trachtenberg sets forth what we actually know and understand about the architect’s work. Along the way Trachtenberg . . . illuminates such well known but cloudy questions as Brunelleschi’s relationship with the sculptor Donatello, putting to rest the pervasive myth that the two traveled together to Rome. . . . While this book is nominally about a single architect’s career and accomplishments, readers will also learn a great deal about the wider Renaissance from this deft account, which wears its deep scholarship lightly.”

The Wall Street Journal, "Holiday Gift Books: Architecture"

"What more might be said about Brunelleschi after centuries of scholarship on him? Yet Trachtenberg offers a fresh, often surprising and challenging reading on a subject that seemed long exhausted. A lesson in asking unasked (and leading) questions and in looking hard at the works that yields a masterful artistic biography by one of the foremost scholars of Renaissance architecture."

Alina Payne, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies