The rogues in this book contain a number of lightweights, like Donatello, whose first crime was throwing one of his creations, a bronze bust, from the top of a tower where he presented it, in the best possible light, to a client who found it excellent but wanted only to pay a laborer's wages for the month Donatello had spent creating it; his second, lesser crime, was his bronze David, a sissy with minimal male attributes who couldn't have overpowered Mighty Mouse, let alone Goliath. There are some middleweights like Caravaggio, a Renaissance hoodlum and murderer, and arguably the greatest painter who has ever lived, as well as martyred Beatrice Cenci who assassinated her father in retaliation for his incest with her and her brothers. And heavyweights, among whom we have psychopathic Ferrante of Naples who possessed a personal museum of the mummified cadavers of his enemies that he caged and starved to death before arraying them around a table as if participating in a banquet. And Cesare Borgia, accused of murdering, among others, his brother Juan and his sister Lucrezia's beloved husband Alfonso. The major players in the Renaissance were rogues: the popes and the cardinals; the dukes, lords, counts and kings; the artists like Cellini and Caravaggio who counted at least four murders between them; the poets, philosophers and writers like Aretino, Bembo, Ficino and Poliziano; the condottieri, Montefeltro, Grazzini, the Orsini and the Colonna; criminals like the artist Ribera and Pier Luigi Farnese; the murderers, Carlo Carafa and Gesualdo; and the victims, Astorre Manfredi, age 17, murdered at the end of an orgy, and the painter Guido Reni. In revealing the lives of the players we will be evoking, in its entirety, the history of the Renaissance. The Renaissance was an age of unbelievable violence and uncertainty, where even a peaceful hamlet could be wiped off the map in weeks by the plague or overnight by the descent of mercenary hoards led by Charles V or Louis XII, to name two of many conquerors, as well as cruel landsknechts, Swiss cutthroats or heathen Gascons. Lutherans raped Catholic nuns on altars and soldiers lined up before the spread thighs of the vanquished. Even the Countess Caterini Riario Sforza de' Medici was led away by the victors while a French captain, disrobing before the girl put aside for him, commented, ''Well, at least she won't be wanting for sex.'' (His unvarnished words are in the book.) This is their story, in the setting of glorious Italy--played out by wonders like Juan Borgia, supreme in his skin-tight trousers, billowing white shirt and black pearl-studded doublet, the garments he was wearing when brought up in a net from the depths of the Tiber--during the explosion of life and renewal that was the Renaissance.