Sandro Landi's latest book on Machiavelli—a series of elegant essays on different moments in Machiavelli's life and writings—declares that it offers a new and programmatic approach to intellectual biography. Rather than show how knowledge of Machiavelli's life and career enables us better to interpret what is important in his writing, or conversely, use an established understanding of Machiavelli's formal writing to look for ways in which the life may have influenced the works, Landi steps back, pretends to have no certain personal interpretation of Machiavelli, and studies how, over time, Machiavelli observed and subsequently interpreted the world around him in the hope of establishing patterns. His title, which translates as “Machiavelli's glance,” plays off the title of Maurizio Viroli's well-known Machiavelli's Smile. Where Viroli assumed a consistently ironic attitude, native to his hero regardless of circumstances, Landi treats his subject as a tabula rasa whose ideas were continually evolving in response to sensory impressions and particular circumstances. Thus he argues, with an intelligent nod to Lucretius, that the ideas expressed in Machiavelli's writings were fixed by forceful impressions rather than resulting from systematic or causal reasoning.

Central to Landi's method is his examination of verbs of observation and cognition as they appear in Machiavelli's writing throughout his life. Landi puts the Florentine Secretary's major literary and theoretical works on an evidentiary plane with his correspondence and minor writings, noting carefully the instances in which Machiavelli says that he has seen, understood, or known something. Material so distinguished is then examined with great care in order to show a Machiavelli who was observing and reacting to what happened around him. An especially fine chapter—the best in the book—regards Machiavelli's response to the discoveries of lands and peoples across the Atlantic Ocean. Yet even here it must be said that Landi's input-output model somewhat diminishes Machiavelli's originality. In the “Proemio” to the Discourses Machiavelli presented himself as a bold trailblazer, the discoverer of “new manners and orders.” Landi has no desire to strip him of these titles, but the overall effect is to put brackets about Machiavelli—to turn him into a black box, as opposed to the resident of a Skinner box—so that he seems more enigmatic than perhaps he really was. Landi begins with Machiavelli's school days and continues down through his relations with Guicciardini and the composition of the Florentine Histories in his last years, when, as Landi shows, Machiavelli was still perceiving and learning. Carlo Ginzburg once wrote an important essay titled “Becoming Machiavelli.” Landi's Machiavelli, characterized by his “glance,” remains a moving target. The final chapters show him still becoming Machiavelli, his thought seeming more like a series of thoughts, even as his writing career wound down.

Landi's work over the previous decade on issues of censorship and public opinion pays off in frequent suggestions of passages in the printed writings of contemporary and classical authors that Machiavelli is likely to have known. The book does important work in restoring Machiavelli to his intellectual context, breaking forcefully with the interpretations of Roberto Ridolfi and Mario Martelli, according to whom Machiavelli was largely self-taught and a poor reader of Latin. Scholars who work on Machiavelli will find this a rich and suggestive book, brimming with ideas and suggestions for further research.