Subscribe to The Spectator in our Flash sale until Monday only, and you'll not only get your first 12 weeks, in print and online, for £12, but you'll also get a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey, absolutely free.

To claim this offer, go to www.combe.combe.combeau.combe, forward slash whiskey. This offer is only available within the UK, and you must be 18 or older to claim it.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator. This week I'm joined by the art criticate historian Jonathan Jones, whose new book

is a sumptuously illustrated

and highly scholarly, earthly delights, a history of the Renaissance. Now Jonathan, you say in a

introduction that, you know, scholars don't like to talk about the Renaissance anymore. And it feels

like in some ways this is a bit of rehabilitation of the term. You say what gives the value of the Renaissance as an idea?

Well, I think without the Renaissance, there's a huge whole, not just in the story of art,

but in European history and the whole our understanding of Europe.

I mean, I did history at university, and I did a thing called early modern history. That's what you do. You do early modern history. Now, I was history at university and I did a thing called early modern history.

That's what you do.

You do early modern history.

Now, I was already at that age fascinated by this other thing called the Renaissance,

which I understood in a fairly naive way as a wonderful flowering of art and life, I suppose, in which people escaped from the gloom and doom of the Middle Ages into a new sunny spring, Botticelli's primavera. I'd been to Florence. That's where I got

all these ideas from. And this book really is trying to validate that same possibly, you know, old-fashioned Victorian idea of the Renaissance as a great liberating cultural moment.

And I think it did happen. That did happen. And it was, as I call it, a discovery of earthly delights.

The Swiss 19th century historian Jacob Burkart, who more or less invented the Renaissance,

the Italian Renaissance.

He wrote a book called The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.

And he talks about the discovery of the world and of man.

That's how he puts it, which obviously we would now say humanity rather than man.

...