Lorenzo the Magnificent

Book Club Associates, London, 1974 reprint edition. Cloth, 4to, 26 cm,. 237 pp, numerous ills (many in colour). Lorenzo de Medici was twenty-one when he took over the government of Florence in 1469. He had been an able diplomat at the age of sixteen, following the example and training of his father and grandfather, and he became a first-class party chief as well as the most princely patron of art and thought in Christendom. Although he had virtually no physical charm, he had immense influence over people, and at the crisis of his career saved both the Florentine state and himself by a master-stroke of personal diplomacy. He survived an assassination attempt in which his brother died, only to grow old with gout before he was thirty-eight, and crippled by the time of his death, five years later. The grief of the people of Florence was almost hysterical when the news was broken to them. The author, Maurice Rowdon, looks anew at Lorenzo the man, and situates him in the Italy and Europe of his day. Using his own translations of letters and documents, he plots the Medici rise to wealth and fame, against the intricate web of Florentine politics and the shattering explosion in thought and learning. The Renaissance brought with it immense hopes for man's potential, and yet at the same time bore within itself a deadly contradiction - enlightenment did not abolish wars or make men intrinsically any better. It was at this time that the foundations of capitalist society were being laid, in which the Medici family of Florence played a major role. Their importance lay not so much in the fact that they were great bankers, but that they understood and exploited the new role of money at a crucial time. Nor were they simply a family, but a political party with its own highly organised machinery. In the Florence of the time money and politics were synonymous, and the political history of Florence was one of the most violent in Europe. Amongst the characters who fill the pages of this book are the men and women who made the Europe of today and helped forge the civilization we know. In Lorenzo's own circle were such brilliant artists as Michelangelo and Botticelli; writers and thinkers, Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano and Ficino; and casting his shadow over all, the curiously forbidding figure of Savonarola." - from the blurb. Slightly agetoned, otherwise Very Good in Very Good dustwrapper.