Jonathan Jones

From one of Britain's most respected art historians, art critic of The Guardian--the galvanizing story of a sixteenth-century clash of titans, the two greatest minds of the Renaissance, working side by side in the same room in a fierce competition. In 1504, the informal rivalry between two of the most celebrated artists in Florence became a direct contest. Michelangelo was commissioned to paint a scene from the ancient battle of Cascina on a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio--in the same room where Leonardo da Vinci had already been commissioned to paint a scene from another great Florentine victory, the battle of Anghiari. As the paintings progressed, Michelangelo set out to prove that his work, not Leonardo's, embodied the future of art--but in fact, the influence of both would become visible in the works of subsequent generations of artists. The Lost Battles is a riveting look at one of history's most resonant exchanges of ideas and offers a whole new understanding of an age and those at its center.

Michelangelo and Leonardo lived five centuries ago, but their works still obsess our culture, with a popular and universal quality that nothing else matches. They have been equally revered and famous since their lifetimes, but our admiration for them exists mostly in isolation of each other. But in 1504 they competed with each other directly, to paint the walls of a room in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. It is remarkable enough that the same city had produced two such geniuses in the same century -- let alone that they met and exhibited together. But this competition, perhaps the most important event in the history of Renaissance art, the moment at which individual style came to command its own value, has been largely forgotten because the rival works did not survive. This great artistic clash, Jonathan Jones argues in this riveting account, marks the true beginning of the High Renaissance. Re-creating sixteenth-century Florence with astonishing verve and aplomb, THE LOST BATTLES not only sheds new light on the making of the modern world but, in its portrait of two cultural titans going toe to toe, rewires our understanding of the personalities of the Renaissance's greatest icons.

The 'boom' in foreign direct investment (FDI) since the mid-1980s, continues to be paramount in policy interest. This book reviews the literature on the nature of FDI and reports the recent results on the performance of FDI plants in order to show the implications for regional economic development. It presents new evidence on the nature and performance of these plants, using a unique dataset that has been constructed and rigorously analyzed by applying econometric techniques. The role of FDI in economic development has long been poorly understood and this book contributes to improving understanding, and is of direct policy relevance. An examination is made of the generation, theory and location of FDI, as well as its implications for regional and national development. In addition to this, analysis is made of the issues at the project and plant levels, related to investment, employment and firm survival.