Download or read book The Medici written by Paul Strathern and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling piece of Italian history of the infamous family that become one of the most powerful in Europe, weaving its history with Renaissance greats from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo 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. Strathern paints a vivid narrative of the dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Strathern also follows the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists with whom the Medici had dealings, including Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello; as well as scientists like Galileo and Pico della Mirandola; and the fortunes of those members of the Medici family who achieved success away from Florence, including the two Medici popes and Catherine de' Médicis, who became Queen of France and played a major role in that country through three turbulent reigns. ‘A great overview of one family's centuries-long role in changing the face of Europe’ Irish Independent
Download or read book Summary of Paul Strathern s The Medici written by Everest Media, and published by Everest Media LLC. This book was released on 2022-06-22T22:59:00Z with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Medici family was descended from a knight called Averardo, who fought for Charlemagne during his conquest of Lombardy in the eighth century. They came to Florence in the thirteenth century. #2 The first Medici to be mentioned in the records of Florence is one Chiarissimo, who appears on a legal document dated 1201. The family became money-changers and gradually prospered. By the end of the thirteenth century, they had become one of the better-known business families in the city. #3 The city of Florence was the main economic power in Europe in the thirteenth century, due to the new growth industry of banking. The setting up of banks in the main trading centers greatly facilitated this burgeoning international trade, and in the process merchant bankers accumulated large assets. #4 During the fourteenth century, Florence became known for its banking supremacy and the trustworthiness of its bankers. The city’s currency, the florin, became an institution.
Download or read book Death in Florence written by Paul Strathern and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the fifteenth century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo de' Medici they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances. In Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. Filled with Old Testament fury, Savonarola's sermons reverberated among a disenfranchised population, who preferred medieval Biblical certainties to the philosophical interrogations and intoxicating surface glitter of the Renaissance. The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events—invasions, trials by fire, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', terrible executions and mysterious deaths—featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.In an exhilaratingly rich and deeply researched story, Paul Strathern reveals the paradoxes, self-doubts, and political compromises that made the battle for the soul of the Renaissance city one of the most complex and important moments in Western history.
Download or read book The Florentines written by Paul Strathern and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping and magisterial four-hundred-year history of both the city and the people who gave birth to the Renaissance. Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642, something happened that transformed the entire culture of western civilization. Painting, sculpture, and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born—or emerge in an entirely new guise. The ideas that broke this mold began, and continued to flourish, in the city of Florence in northern central Italy. These ideas, which placed an increasing emphasis on the development of our common humanity—rather than other-worldly spirituality—coalesced in what came to be known as humanism. This philosophy and its new ideas would eventually spread across Italy, yet wherever they took hold they would retain an element essential to their origin. And as they spread further across Europe, this element would remain. Transformations of human culture throughout western history have remained indelibly stamped by their origins. The Reformation would always retain something of central and northern Germany. The Industrial Revolution soon outgrew its British origins, yet also retained something of its original template. Closer to the present, the IT revolution that began in Silicon Valley remains indelibly colored by its Californian origins. Paul Strathern shows how Florence, and the Florentines themselves, played a similarly unique and transformative role in the Renaissance.
Download or read book The Medici written by George Frederick Young and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Medici Money written by Tim Parks and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Medici are famous as the rulers of Florence at the high point of the Renaissance. Their power derived from the family bank, and this book tells the fascinating, frequently bloody story of the family and the dramatic development and collapse of their bank (from Cosimo who took it over in 1419 to his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent who presided over its precipitous decline). The Medici faced two apparently insuperable problems: how did a banker deal with the fact that the Church regarded interest as a sin and had made it illegal? How in a small republic like Florence could he avoid having his wealth taken away by taxation? But the bank became indispensable to the Church. And the family completely subverted Florence's claims to being democratic. They ran the city. Medici Money explores a crucial moment in the passage from the Middle Ages to the Modern world, a moment when our own attitudes to money and morals were being formed. To read this book is to understand how much the Renaissance has to tell us about our own world. Medici Money is one of the launch titles in a new series, Atlas Books, edited by James Atlas. Atlas Books pairs fine writers with stories of the economic forces that have shaped the world, in a new genre - the business book as literature.
Download or read book The Forgetting Time written by Sharon Guskin and published by . This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While a mother's life abruptly stops after receiving an emergency phone call from her son's preschool, a driven former Ivy League professor confronts the realities of his terminal diagnosis and helps a woman whose child has been missing for years.
Download or read book The Borgias written by Paul Strathern and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A wickedly entertaining read' The Times A Daily Mail Book of the Week The sensational story of the rise and fall of one of the most notorious families in history, by the author of The Medici. The Borgias have become a byword for evil. Corruption, incest, ruthless megalomania, avarice and vicious cruelty - all have been associated with their name. But the story of this remarkable family is far more than a tale of sensational depravities, it also marks a decisive turning point in European history. The rise and fall of the Borgias held centre stage during the golden age of the Italian Renaissance and they were the leading players at the very moment when our modern world was creating itself. Within this context the Renaissance itself takes on a very different aspect. Was the corruption part of this creation, or vice versa? Would one have been possible without the other? From the family's Spanish roots and the papacy of Rodrigo Borgia, to the lives of his infamous offspring, Lucrezia and Cesare - the hero who dazzled Machiavelli, but also the man who befriended Leonardo da Vinci - Paul Strathern relates this influential family to their time, together with the world which enabled them to flourish, and tells the story of this great dynasty as never before.
Download or read book Magnifico written by Miles Unger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miles Unger's biography of this complex figure draws on primary research in Italian sources and on his intimate knowledge of Florence, where he lived for several years."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Artist the Philosopher and the Warrior written by Paul Strathern and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia—three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man’s perceptions—and the course of Western history. In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering Leonardo to be Borgia’s chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages, and hill towns of the Italian Romagna—the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli’s frequent dispatches and Leonardo’s meticulous notebooks. Superbly written and thoroughly researched, The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior is a work of narrative genius—whose subject is the nature of genius itself.
Download or read book The Venetians written by Paul Strathern and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world. After winning the struggle for ascendency in the late 13th century, the Republic enjoyed centuries of unprecedented glory and built a trading empire which at its apogee reached as far afield as China, Syria, and West Africa. This golden period only drew to an end with the Republic’s eventual surrender to Napoleon. The Venetians illuminates the character of the Republic during these illustrious years by shining a light on some of the most celebrated personalities of European history—Petrarch, Marco Polo, Galileo, Titian, Vivaldi, Casanova... Frequently, though, these emblems of the city found themselves at odds with the Venetian authorities, who prized stability above all else and were notoriously suspicious of any "cult of personality." Was this very tension perhaps the engine for the Republic’s unprecedented rise? Rich with biographies of some of the most exalted characters who have ever lived, The Venetians is a refreshing and authoritative new look at the history of the most evocative of city-states.
Download or read book The Medici Michelangelo the Art of Late Renaissance Florence written by Cristina Acidini and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Publisdhed in conjuntion with the exhibition: Magnificenza! the Medici, Michelangelo, & the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (In Italy, L'Ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l'arte a Firenze, 1538-1631) ..."--Title page verso.
Download or read book Jews and Magic in Medici Florence written by Edward L. Goldberg and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanisa businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynastysought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truthespecially historical truthcan be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.
Download or read book The Family Medici written by Mary Hollingsworth and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having founded the bank that became the most powerful in Europe in the fifteenth century, the Medici gained massive political power in Florence, raising the city to a peak of cultural achievement and becoming its hereditary dukes. Among their number were no fewer than three popes and a powerful and influential queen of France. Their influence brought about an explosion of Florentine art and architecture. Michelangelo, Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Leonardo were among the artists with whom they were socialized and patronized.Thus runs the "accepted view” of the Medici. However, Mary Hollingsworth argues that this is a fiction that has now acquired the status of historical fact. In truth, the Medici were as devious and immoral as the Borgias. In this dynamic new history, Hollingsworth argues that past narratives have focused on a sanitized view of the Medici—wise rulers, enlightened patrons of the arts, and fathers of the Renaissance—and their story was reinvented in the sixteenth century, mythologized by later generations of Medici who used this as a central prop for their legacy.Hollingsworth's revelatory re-telling of the story of the family Medici brings a fresh and exhilarating new perspective to the story behind the most powerful family of the Italian Renaissance.
Download or read book Filippo Strozzi and the Medici written by Melissa Meriam Bullard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filippo Strozzi (1489-1538), the Florentine aristocrat and banker, is usually remembered for the dramatic exploits at the end of his life. Forced into exile, he became an outspoken defender of the last Florentine Republic against the tyranny of the city's new dukes. His place in Florentine history, however, changes drastically when we focus not on his final years but on his extensive career as a Medici favourite and loyal financier. At the courts of the Medici popes he furthered the grandiose schemes of Leo X and Clement VII and accumulated a personal fortune of legendary size. Dr Bullard's study reassesses Strozzi's place in Renaissance history and considers the more general problems of paper economy and war finance, and Florentine political life, in the early sixteenth century. It documents the intricate financial ties between Florence and the papal court, and Strozzi's key role as a manipulator of the city's public funds to pay for papal wars.
Download or read book Lucrezia Tornabuoni De Medici and the Medici Family in the Fifteenth Century written by Maria Grazia Pernis and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici and the Medici Family in the Fifteenth Century is a fresh, new biography of a Renaissance woman who lived during the heyday of Medici power. A remarkable person in her own right, the author of religious poems and sacred narratives, as well as an accomplished businesswoman, Lucrezia was the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the grandmother of two popes, and the great-great grandmother of Catherine de' Medici, Queen of France. This glimpse of her life and times is a window onto the political intrigues and intellectual achievements of Medici Florence.
Download or read book Rise and Fall written by Paul Strathern and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rise and Fall opens with the Akkadian Empire, which ruled over a vast expanse of the region of ancient Mesopotamia, then turns to the immense Roman Empire, where we trace back our western and eastern roots. Next Strathern describes how a great deal of western classical culture was developed in the Abbasid and Umayyid Caliphates. Then, while Europe was beginning to emerge from a period of cultural stagnation, it almost fell to a whirlwind invasion from the East, at which point we meet the Emperors of the Mongol Empire . . . Combining breathtaking scope with masterful concision, Paul Strathern traces connections across four millennia and sheds new light on these major civilizations - from the Mongol Empire and the Yuan Dynasty to the Aztec and Ottoman, through to the most recent and biggest Empires: the British, Russo-Soviet and American. Charting 5,000 years of global history in ten succinct chapters, Rise and Fall makes comprehensive and inspiring reading to anyone fascinated by the history of the world.
