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

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Ex-library book with stamps on the first page, it is also likely to have a small shelf number sticker on the spine. It pulls you inside the story and gives you an overview of how the Medici were influential in the Italian Renaissance. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.

Eventually a hundred and fifty European states and local coin-issuing authorities came out with their own copies of the florin.Personalised advertising may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have a right to opt out. From her childhood in Florence, to the marriage with the son of the King of France, then becoming the queen, and fighting to protect the throne for her sons’ birthrights.

The Medici are probably the best-known and most illustrious Italian family – one that produced two popes, two Queens of France and such a multi-faceted and extraordinary figure as Lorenzo the Magnificent. Finally, this first chapter turns to Rome and demonstrates how and why Medici popes were some of the first Italians to collect and represent the Americas.Chapter 5 then turns to Francesco’s stanzino, a room created to house his treasures, where paintings by Jacopo Zucchi and Alessandro Allori reference the global economic exchange of novelties from the Americas.

Revising the work of these predecessors, Markey shows how collectors and artists alike drew inspiration from a flood of new knowledge produced in the wake of discovery and colonization. This is one of the very few books that I have ever read cover to cover twice, separated by a gap of about 7 years.But at the same time that the New World was becoming a profitable reality for the Medici, representations of the Americas in Florence became more fantastical. While scholarship of the Italian Renaissance tends to focus on the “colonization of time,” or the way in which early modern culture conquered antiquity and the medieval period, a colonization of space occurred as well; Florence looked beyond Europe, and the Medici engagement with the Americas precipitated an expansive system of representation in sixteenth-century Italy that significantly impacted the visual and cultural reception of the New World. Through unrest, church schisms, invasion by the Holy Roman Empire and France, the Medici flourished, none more so than the flamboyant Lorenzo. Jeanne of Navarre once dreamed of marrying this same prince, but like Catherine, she must comply with King Francis's political needs. Markey demonstrates that Italian artists worked not to exoticize but to familiarize the new and, in doing so, engaged with America in complex and contradictory ways.