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

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Cosimo de’ Medici became his patron and apparently locked Lippi up so he would continue painting instead of carousing around town.

They initially acquired information about the Americas from less direct sources and obtained New World objects via ambassadors or family members at other courts who had more contact with the Americas. As I mentioned before, since opinions run into facts the book is prone to biases and makes us see the events literally through the author’s eyes as against the neutrality that I firmly believe historical works should uphold. A family is made up of individuals, and the Medici dynasty is full of characters with interesting and extraordinary lives. If the art of Florence enjoys canonical status, the Medici collection of artifacts and images of the New World has been more peripheral, the subject of pioneering but outdated studies by Detlef Heikamp and Hugh Honour. As one of the most powerful and influential dynasties during the Renaissance period, ruling for over three centuries, you can be certain that there are plenty of great Medici books detailing the family’s rise and fall.Mary Hollingsworth's excellent study of the Medici… a careful, understated book, largely uninterested in the grand revisionist statements used to sell popular histories, and it is all the better for it…her book is never short on drama. But Catherine is now the powerful mother of kings, who will do anything to see her beloved second son, Henry, rule France.

It shows how the family rose to power in Florence, how they were often less than democratic, and how they dealt with fierce opposition from the Church who regarded interest as a sin. The Medici series is billed as a fictionalized depiction of the powerful Medici family who ruled Florence for almost a century. It’s a story of endless ambition, power and drama and is interesting particularly for the way it shows how the Medici family’s involvement with the great painters and scientists of the age. In spite of this, Ferdinando de’ Medici collected Mexican featherwork and codices and commissioned paintings representing the New World. This book therefore illuminates the reciprocal relationship between collection and art production in the early modern period.

Once they reach the city, the Nazis will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Louvre’s art collection.

Donatello is best known for his marvelous sculpture of David that is displayed in the Museo Bargello in Florence. Through unrest, church schisms, invasion by the Holy Roman Empire and France, the Medici flourished, none more so than the flamboyant Lorenzo. But such was the reputation and reach of the Florentine bankers, and none more so than the Medici with their branches strewn throughout Europe, that in the 15th century the Florin was a more dominant and more secure currency then the Euro is today.The author insists upon what Shakespeare already knew: that the Mediterranean world had opened to new places and people. In my opinion the features of the David could just be the accuracy of portraying a teenage David after defeating Goliath. When Catherine de' Medici was forced to marry Henry of Orleans, her's was not the only heart broken.