The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was an era of dramatic political, religious and cultural change in the Italian peninsula, witnessing major innovations in the visual arts, literature, music and science.

Princes of the Renaissance charts these developments in a sequence of eleven chapters, each of which is devoted to two or three main princely characters with a cast of minor ones — from Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino to Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Florence, and from Isabella d'Este of Mantua to Lucrezia Borgia. Many of these princes were related by blood or marriage, creating a web of alliances that held Renaissance society together but whose tensions could spark feuds that threatened to tear it apart.

Princes of the Renaissance is a vivid depiction of the lives and times of the aristocratic elite whose patronage created the art and architecture of the Renaissance. In a narrative that is as rigorous and closely researched as it is accessible and informative, Mary Hollingsworth sets their aesthetic achievements in the context of the volatile, ever-shifting politics of an age of change and innovation.