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"Publisdhed in conjuntion with the exhibition: Magnificenza! the Medici, Michelangelo, & the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (In Italy, L'Ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l'arte a Firenze, 1538-1631) ..."--Title page verso.
While a mother's life abruptly stops after receiving an emergency phone call from her son's preschool, a driven former Ivy League professor confronts the realities of his terminal diagnosis and helps a woman whose child has been missing for years.
The Medici: Citizens and Masters offers a novel, comparative approach to examining Medici power and influence in Florence. Contributors from diverse perspectives set Medici rule against princely states such as Milan and Ferrara, and they ask how much the Medici changed Florence, contrasting their supremacy with earlier Florentine regimes.
Uses Piero de' Medici's life as a prism to throw new light on the crisis in Renaissance Italy that revolutionised culture and political thinking.
A dazzling piece of Italian history of the infamous family that become one of the most powerful in Europe, weaving its history with Renaissance greats from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo Against the background of an age which saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, The Medici is a remarkably modern story of power, money and ambition. Strathern paints a vivid narrative of the dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Strathern also follows the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello; as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola; and the fortunes of those members of the Medici family who achieved success away from Florence, including the two Medici popes and Catherine de' Médicis, who became Queen of France and played a major role in that country through three turbulent reigns. ‘A great overview of one family's centuries-long role in changing the face of Europe’ Irish Independent
A review from The American Historical Review: The Medici and the Italian Renaissance, by Oliphant Smeaton [World's Epoch Makers], is an informal and popular presentation of Florentine history, with such Roman additions as are justified by the migration of the younger Medici into the Curia. Among the pleasing features of the book is the evidence it affords of the increasing number of readers who are interesting themselves in the Renaissance. Attractive as that period unquestionably is, it is no easy task to treat it in a popular manner, and Mr. Smeaton has chosen the best method, in making the Medici the central figures of his book, grouping about them the lights of the age, artistic and literary, and subordinating the interplay of political forces, French, Spanish, and German, which could only serve to complicate hopelessly the subject. ...and another from The London Quarterly Review: Mr. Smeaton's object has been to trace the continuity of aim which ran through the Renaissance patronage of the great house of Medici from the days of Cosimo to the time of Pope Clement VII., and he has done his task well. The record of shame and political betrayal associated with the Medici must not blind us to their devotion to literature. Throughout a whole century they proved themselves among the truest patrons of learning that the world has known. Lorenzo the Magnificent did more to place Florence in the forefront of the world's culture than any other of its citizens. "His influence was great because he was in sympathy so catholic with all the varied life of his age and circle. Truly a unique personality, at one and the same time the glorious creation and the splendid epitome of the spirit of the Renaissance!" In 1492, a month before his death, his son Giovanni, a youth of sixteen, was invested with the honours as cardinal, which his father's influence had secured for him three years earlier. He became pope in 1513, and gave full play to his humanistic bent. He drew around him such a vast and varied assemblage of talented and cultured men and women as has probably never been gathered together before or since in a single city. Mr. Smeaton shows us the glories of the age, and his picture is singularly impressive. Its darker sides must be added from other sources. Liberty and morality were sacrificed to a heathen ideal of culture. Art and literature flourished; religion seemed on its death-bed. Its resurrection was not due to the Medici, but to the son of a German peasant.
By the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo de' Medici they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances. In Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury, Savonarola's sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred medieval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events—invasions, trials by fire, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', terrible executions and mysterious deaths—featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.In an exhilaratingly rich and deeply researched story, Paul Strathern reveals the paradoxes, self-doubts, and political compromises that made the battle for the soul of the Renaissance city one of the most complex and important moments in Western history.
"Cosimo de'Medici (1389-1464), the fabulously wealthy banker who became the leading citizen of Florence in the fifteenth century, spent lavishly as the city's most important patron of art and literature. This book is the first comprehensive examination of the whole body of works of art and architecture commissioned by Cosimo and his sons. By looking closely at this spectacular group of commissions, we gain an entirely new picture of their patron, and of the patron's point of view. Recurrent themes in the commissions - from Fra Angelico's San Marco altarpiece to the Medici palace - indicate the main interests to which Cosimo's patronage gave visual expression. Dale Kent offers new insights and perspectives on the individual objects comprising the Medici oeuvre by setting them within the context of civic and popular culture in early Renaissance Florence, and of Cosimo's life as the leader of the Medici lineage and the dominant force in the governing elite." "From the wealth of available documentation illuminating Cosimo de'Medici's life, the author considers how his own experience influenced his patronage; how the culture of Renaissance Florence provided a common idiom for the patron, his artists, and his audience; what he preferred and intended as a patron; and how focussing on his patronage of art alters the image of him that is based on his roles as banker and politician. Cosimo was as much a product as a shaper of Florentine society, Kent concludes. She identifies civic patriotism and devotion as the main themes of his oeuvre and argues that religious imperatives may well have been more important than political ones in shaping the art for which he was responsible and its reception."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Medici Women is a study of the women of the famous Medici family of republican Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Natalie Tomas here examines critically the changing contribution of the women in the Medici family to the eventual success of the Medici regime and their exercise of power within it; and contributes to our historical understanding of how women were able to wield power in late medieval and early modern Italy and Europe. Tomas takes a feminist approach that examines the experience of the Medici women within a critical framework of gender analysis, rather than biography. Keeping the historiography to a minimum and explaining all unfamiliar Italian terms, Tomas makes her narrative clear and accessible to non-specialists; thus The Medici Women appeals to scholars of women's studies across disciplines and geographical boundaries.