You’ll find out which artists they supported, their ailments, their politics within Europe, their first cautious steps into the Florentine Republic and the creation of the Gran Ducato with Cosimo I. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

In this book, facts run into opinions whether they are of the author or primary sources of the time, which in itself is hard to distinguish at times. 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. Letters from Spain and the Americas as well as both published and unpublished accounts informed the Medici about the land and people of the New World. Paul Strathern’s The Medici: Power, Money and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance, is a fast paced book which has much to merit its fame. Dozens of books have been written on the history of the Medici, and it can be hard to identify the best ones.

Botticelli immediately invites Simonetta, newly proclaimed the most beautiful woman in Florence, to pose for him. From their political machinations to their patronage of the arts to their influence on what we know as modern-day Italy, the Medici family left an undeniable mark on the history of the country and beyond. Once they reach the city, the Nazis will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Louvre’s art collection. In collecting New World objects such as featherwork, codices, turquoise, and live plants and animals, the Medici grand dukes undertook a “vicarious conquest” of the Americas. While Dacos refuted the notion that Aztec art had any effect on Renaissance art, she simultaneously indicated that American inspiration did exist, observing that Raphael studied and depicted the exotic New World animals that had been brought to the papal court when he produced frescoes in the papal apartments.

Mad with fear, Charles agrees to a massacre that will rid France of its 'pestilential Huguenots for ever'.

Chapter 1 therefore defines the initial response to the Americas on the Italian peninsula and introduces the reader to the most important textual sources about the New World that the Medici studied and that subsequently pervade this study. Several scholars have argued that the initial response to the New World represented Europe’s conception of its own identity more than any reality of the Americas themselves. In truth, she says, the Medici were as devious and immoral as the Borgias – tyrants loathed in the city they illegally made their own and which they beggared in their lust for power.

John L’Heureux’s novel delivers both a monumental and intimate narrative of the creative genius, Donatello, at the height of his powers. A family is made up of individuals, and the Medici dynasty is full of characters with interesting and extraordinary lives.It is under his tutelage that they will flourish as artists and with his access that they will infiltrate some of the highest, most secretive places in Florence, unraveling one conspiracy as they build another in its place.