The Medici – Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance

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Cosimo’s son Grand Duke Francesco preoccupied himself with the conquest of New World naturalia through gift giving and visual documentation. Flick to any page and you might find Giuliano de' Medici being stabbed to death by a rival banker in the Duomo in 1478, or Dianora de' Medici and Isabella de' Medici being strangled by their husbands within six days of each other in 1576 - the former, Hollingsworth notes, done in with "a dog leash". In truth, they were just as devious and immoral as the infamous Borgias, tyrants loathed in the city they illegally made their own and which they beggared in their lust for power. Her study reveals that the Medici of Florence not only received images from and about the New World but also incorporated these distant forms and iconographies into their own visual vocabulary.

Leonardo da Vinci does not make an appearance in the Medici series, but the real da Vinci certainly had dealings with members of the Medici family and was patronized by Lorenzo de’ Medici. The Florence bankers who suffered the most were the noble Bardi and Peruzzi families and their subsequent difficulties created an opportunity for the young rising star Cosimo Medici , a commoner by birth who took further advantage by marrying into the aristocratic Bardi family in 1415. In particular, this is one of the few Medici books that also details how the Medici family was deeply involved with the great scientists and painters during the era.

Pegasus have bought US rights in Mary Hollingsworth’s The Medici, a companion to her history of The Borgias. When a sixth member of their group, Lapaccia, goes missing and is rumored to have stolen a much- sought-after painting before she vanished, the women must venture out into the dangerous streets to find their friend.

So begins a tale of one of the art world’s most beloved paintings, La Primavera, as Sandro, a confirmed bachelor, and Floriana, a headstrong artist in her own right, enter into a turbulent relationship. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Cosimo and Eleonora acquired novelties and conquered new territories virtually by amassing American objects and by constructing Cosimo’s Guardaroba Nuova, a new collection space for these precious goods organized according to geographic provenance.In Portrait of a Conspiracy by Donna Russo Morin, the first novel in her Da Vinci Disciples series, the murder of a Medici ignites the powder keg that consumes a Florence under the iron rule of the powerful Medici family. The beauty of Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence is that Tim manages to make the book very enjoyable.

While scholarship of the Italian Renaissance tends to focus on the “colonization of time,” or the way in which early modern culture conquered antiquity and the medieval period, a colonization of space occurred as well; Florence looked beyond Europe, and the Medici engagement with the Americas precipitated an expansive system of representation in sixteenth-century Italy that significantly impacted the visual and cultural reception of the New World. Anthropologist Christian Feest has pointed out that actual participation in the conquest of the Americas did not necessarily imply an interest in goods from the New World—in fact, the most avid collectors were late sixteenth-century European rulers who were not participating in colonization, such as the Bavarian dukes in Munich, the Austrian Habsburgs, and especially the Medici grand dukes.The Medici series is billed as a fictionalized depiction of the powerful Medici family who ruled Florence for almost a century. In 1532, at the age of nineteen, backed by the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, he became Duke of Florence, facing down family rivals and oligarchs and inheriting the grandest dynasty of the Italian Renaissance. Featherwork and Aztec masks shared the same space as precious jewels and painted masterpieces, Vasari’s Lives was shelved in the same library as illustrated histories of Mexico, and Florentines costumed as Indians marched in public pageants alongside those dressed as mythological heroes. But overall, it is an important piece spanning from the budding Renaissance to the Baroque period, traversing the entire length of the Medici rule.

Once they reach the city, the Nazis will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Louvre’s art collection. Read on to discover more about the secrets, schemes and scandals of this fascinating family and their rule. It’s a book that almost feels as if you’re peering behind the curtain of the family and getting a deeper look at what it was like to come from a place of so much power just to lose your reputation. It demonstrates that transformations ensued as more information reached Florence but also makes clear that the process of integrating the novelty of the Americas was not consistent. When part-time model and full-time prostitute Luciana Vetra is asked by one of her most exalted clients to pose for a painter friend, she doesn’t mind serving as the model for the central figure of Flora in Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece, Primavera.Turning off the personalised advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. The novel entertains while it delves deeply into both the sacred and the profane in Florence, one of the Italian Renaissance’s most consequential cities.