The Medici!

Our book today is the latest from the prolific Paul Strathern: The Medici, subtitled somewhat predictably “Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance.” And the subtitle is hardly the only thing in the book that’s predictable; after all, G. F. Young did this kind of tour d’horizon over a century ago, laying out the biographies and the rise and fall of the Medici family and making sure to detour for every colorful anecdote from Vasari & co.

It’s a formula that works, which is why there are five books like The Medici for every one that might be more fine-grained or intensely scholarly. It’s likewise effective of course in books about Venice, and Strathern’s 2013 book The Venetians had a lot in common with The Medici: both are galleries of charged, colorful personalities connected by short narrative hallways. And as even casual readers of history will know, the saga of the Medici family offers a great many such personalities, since this one bare-knuckled family of Florentine bankers managed to work its way into every aspect of the city’s society during the most glorious years of the Italian Renaissance. Among other things, the Medici were industrious art patrons, which gives Strathern ample opportunities for relating some of the more lurid peccadilloes of the painterly and sculptorly set, not always, it must be admitted, with complete felicity:

Donatello made no secret of his homosexuality; and his behaviour was tolerated by his friends; certainly Cosimo is known to have played his part in patching up at least one lovers’ quarrel between Donatello and one of his young assistants. Attitudes to homosexuality in Florence appear to have been ambiguous. The passionate young Italian male found himself in a difficult situation, with girls marrying much younger than men and a high premium being placed on their virginity. As a result, any young blood who attempted to interfere with this was liable to find himself in serious trouble, not to say mortal danger, from the offended family: deflowering a virgin meant devaluing a considerable asset, to say nothing of dishonouring the family and any prospective groom.

“All this meant,” Strathern somewhat unhelpfully summarizes, “that sodomy amongst young men was covertly tolerated, despite the frequency of edicts expressly forbidding this practice.”

If readers look at this digression on the etiology of Renaissance homosexuality and suspect that the actual day-to-day granular reality might have been more complicated, they’ll probably encounter that same feeling elsewhere in the book. For instance, when Strathern turns inevitably to the Medici lodestar of the Renaissance, Lorenzo the Magnificent, he doesn’t always give the impression of stern reliability:

Yet Lorenzo’s education had extended to more than intellectual learning. He enjoyed hunting – on horseback and with falcons – as well as the boisterous rough-house of that early ‘no rules’ ball game, played between packs of boys, that was the precursor of modern football. He was strong, intelligent, energetic: a natural leader. Out riding, he enjoyed leading the group in facetious bawdy songs, which he often wittily embellished on the spur of the moment. All this is more than just the understandable hyperbole that so often accrues to the youth of a great figure …

Fortunately, as with The Venetians, Strathern is far more skeptical and readable on the comparative lesser lights of his story, the cadet members of the Medici family especially in its waning decades. The end result is an addition to the ranks of nonfiction Medici melodramas that’s neither boring nor eloquent, neither groundbreaking nor quite derivative. It’s a starting place for its subject, as surely its author intended it to be.