This 394-page book consists of three parts, an extensive bibliography, and indexes. After a few acknowledgments thanking the small world of Neo-Latin studies, an introduction sets out to define the purpose of this book on primitivism through the ages and especially at the turn of the Renaissance. Reassessing the myth of the Golden Ages and the question of barbarism, Gambino Longo presents her choices of texts and author: Poliziano, Beroaldo, and Pontano, but also Bembo and Pietro di Cosimo, readers of Lucretius. The book focuses on the history of the reception of Lucretius but does not forget the reception of the great texts of the Bible, such as Genesis or Flavius Josephus and Vitruvius for the reception of ars aedificatoria in the works of Leon Battista Alberti. For the story of iconography, Gambino Longo studies the reception of Ovid and his Metamorphoses in the Italian Renaissance as a first step to the construction of a new humanism. Finally, the reuse of antic myths, from Plato for Ficino, Aristotle for Alessandro Piccolomini, and Cicero and Livy for Machiavelli, acts as the basis of knowledge in moral and political treatises in the Italian Renaissance. Reading the ancients serves to construct new and less mythological origins, according to theses scholars, and gives them a historical dignity and reality. The last part of the book focuses on the invention, specifically Italian, of a European “noble savage,” after the observation of Northern peoples in the Quattrocento by the Italian humanists. Gambino Longo defines this as the beginnings of anthropology even if some Quattrocento scholars like Pope Pius II or Beatus Rhenanus, for instance, do not hesitate to direct their knowledge toward the glorification of the Italian civilizing process.

A rich collection of illustrations supplements the subject of this book and shows how iconography plays a part in the theoretical definitions of the early modern period. An extensive bibliography is followed by indexes, and includes primary sources and critical works. In sum, the book is very strongly structured across four research directions and stresses the very gradual construction of a genuine humanistic identity, as classical tradition helps scholars to build new discourses but also new sciences and myths in support of history. A great merit of this book also consists of bringing together so many texts from different authors in both languages, Italian and Latin, thereby reaching a wider audience of enlightened amateurs and of contextualizing Italian humanism within cultural studies of early modern Europe.