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Historian Alexander Lee says the smile of the Mona Lisa hides a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity and corruption . The Renaissance is renowned as an age of beauty and artistic brilliance, but it was an age populated by corrupt bankers, greedy politicians, sex-crazed priests, extravagance, excess and disease. Lee says that the sublime works of the Renaissance were not the product of high-minded ideals but were created by flawed artists who lived in an age of bigotry and hatred.

Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. He has written many studies on the Italian Renaissance including Petrarch and St Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology, and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy.