Penguin Speakers Bureau

Ross King is the author of three bestselling books on Italian and French cultural history: Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (2000), Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (2002), and The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006). He has lectured widely in both America and Europe, including giving guided tours of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.

Born and raised in Canada, King has lived in England since 1992. His writing career began in 1995 with the publication of a historical novel, Domino, about the world of masquerades and opera in eighteenth-century London. Its successor, Ex-Libris, was a novel about bookselling, codes and spies in seventeenth-century Europe.

King is best known to American readers as the author of the nonfiction Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. The seed of the book was planted when King read a brief account of the building of Brunelleschi’s dome in Giorgio Vasari’s sixteenth-century Lives of the Artists. That, and a trip to Florence, piqued his interest in learning more about the dome. When he couldn’t find a book that told him what he wanted to know, he decided to write it. The book was an instant hit in the U.S.: a 2001 Book Sense Nonfiction Book of the Year and a New York Times bestseller.

In the category of criticism, King describes his nonfiction work Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003, as a companion piece to Brunelleschi’s Dome: “In the same way that Brunelleschi’s Dome is about Brunelleschi, but also about Florence at that time,” King says, “Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling is about Rome in the years 1508 to 1512—sort of an artisan’s-eye view of the Renaissance.” Once again it was Vasari who provided the starting point: “While I discovered that much of what Vasari wrote about Brunelleschi was true, the same can’t exactly be said for his account of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. What I wanted to do, therefore, was look through the legend to get a more accurate idea of the process of painting the fresco, and in doing so to bring a number of other characters, such as his assistants, into the picture. Michelangelo’s achievement is no less stunning, and the story is, I think, actually more interesting.”

King’s most recent work, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (2006), has also been widely acclaimed. According to The New York Times Book Review, King’s account is “in its broad outlines, a familiar story, but Mr. King…tells it with tremendous energy and skill. It is hard to imagine a more inviting account of the artistic civil war that raged around the Paris Salons of the 1860s and 70s, or of the outsize personalities who transformed the way the world looked at painting.”

King is currently working on a biography of Niccolò Machiavelli.

Anyone familiar with Ross King’s writing knows that he has an impressive knowledge of European cultural history. He originally planned a career in academia, earning his PhD in English literature and moving to England to assume a research position at the University of London. King lives near Oxford, England, in the historic town of Woodstock, the site of Blenheim Palace.