review: The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall
In some sense, this book is exactly as advertised: a relatively tight history of the Medici family, focusing on the individuals that held power within the government of Florence and Italy more broadly. This is a history of individuals, full of details of their character and relationships. More depth is afforded to those already deemed great, i.e. Cosimo, Lorenzo, Leo, and Clement, but also includes details on more obscure figures, progressing with births and deaths in the family linearly through time. I did find that Catherine was curiously absent, but this book has a very tight focus on Italy.
If this type of individual-centric history sounds interesting to you, you'll probably enjoy this book. I personally found myself wanting more information and context of Florence itself, and of its politics and economy. There is some treatment of these subjects at times - the nature of republican government of Florence and Cosimo's development of soft defacto power within it, the complexity of Italian diplomacy under Lorenzo, the corruption and machinations of the Papacy - but other seemingly relevant context was skipped over entirely. I don't necessarily fault the book for this, since it is a narrowly focused history of the Medici, but I expected more information about the world they shaped and lived in - the development of the renaissance, the workings of the Medici bank, the ultimate decline in economic and cultural activity of Florence and Italy more broadly relative to northern Europe.
Some of the things I'm thinking about after reading this book:
The early Medici took the concepts of Ancient Roman munificence to an extreme, through the funding of public buildings, festivals, scientific research, and works of art, in addition to commission and support of artists, architects, and scientists in a private capacity. Even the latter contributed to the overall cultural and scientific development of Florence, as patronage allowed these individuals to further their work. This reminded me of the expectation of the Roman nobility to donate generously to support their community in order to establish themselves as worthy of glory - public buildings, festivals, and "state" functions in Roman cities were often funded exclusively via private donation at the local level. I wonder to what degree the early Medici were directly aware of and influenced by these ancient ideals with the increasing attention and reverence paid to the classics with the development of the renaissance. An additional dimension to this is the fact that Cosimo and Lorenzo were tasteful and knowledgeable about the work that they choose to enable, and the book is full of anecdotes about them overlooking the personal and moral failings of the individuals they supported in name of enabling their work. From this, one can assume that to an extent their support was self serving - they weren't issuing public donations exclusively for the sake of some idealized public glory or benefit, but because they were personally interested in developing particular kinds of art and ideas.
The Medici really were instrumental in the early development of the Renaissance. A shocking number of the names you associate with the early Renaissance came through Florence and were directly supported by the Medici.
Cosimo and Lorenzo, probably the two most well-known Medici, for the most part did not execute formal power within Florence, and instead co-opted an existing republican system and ruled it through the control of appointments, elections, and cultivating soft power.
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