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

In this absorbing follow-up to his beautiful Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonorola, and the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City, Strathern chronicles the legendarily farsighted banking family, offering a cautionary tale of arrogant and greedy heirs who bankrupted themselves and their city, thus destroying a largely symbiotic relationship. Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance, with the clever and powerful de Medici family serving as its midwives through various acts of patronage and their elevation of artists such as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Sandro Botticelli. Strathern opens with a thrilling account of an assassination attempt on Lorenzo the Magnificent, allowing this fast-paced vignette of skill, luck, and treachery to color the family's astonishing rise and fall. Many historians concentrate on the figures of Cosimo and Lorenzo; both are well rendered here, as are the viewpoints of Pope Leo X, the family's unlikely war hero, and his relative and successor, Clement VII, who wrestled with Henry VIII's "great matter." Most of Strathern's portrayals are sympathetic in their context, though odd suggestions occur, particularly the implication that strong female influences led to several Medici men being gay. Nevertheless, this gratifying and comprehensive family saga sheds light on both the internal workings of a remarkable family and on how a singular family irrevocably influenced Western civilization. (Mar.)