The Alexander Story in the Renaissance and Down to the Present Day

Abstract

This chapter examines how Renaissance scholars and artists were taken with Alexander, and were not altogether dependent on the Romances. For instance, the thirteenth-century Catholic saint Albertus Magnus somehow knew of Alexander's discovery of the caladrius, a white bird that could foretell the future and whether the sick would survive. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese Vasco da Lucena translated Quintus Curtius' Deeds of Alexander. Moreover, the Renaissance artists had behind them a rich tradition of mediaeval illustration of Alexander, but they had their own preferences, for artistic or sometimes political purposes, and some episodes proved to be especially favoured. These include attempts to depict whole stories as a sequence of scenes as well as in the well-known episodes.