Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> better for worse- and I think for better-the Medici dominated Florence for three centuries excepting two comparatively brief intervals. Though it seems to be modish to denigrate this remarkable family at present their literary and aesthetic values have survived and their monuments surround us materially as well as spiritually. Lorenzo known to history as the Magnificent was the most versatile and talented member of his family whose European status had been established by his grandfather Cosimo. Until his death in 1492 at the age of forty three the executive in the Palazzo Vecchio or Palace of the Priors remained virtually under his control. As his most lucid biographer E. Armstrong pointed out ‘the period of Lorenzo’s power may be divided into two almost equal halves. The first of these closes with the Pazzi Conspiracy.” During its five-hundredth anniversary I thought it opportune to recall an event which had wider repercussions than the recent assassination of Signor Moro one-time Premier of Italy. Fortunately it was a failure. Its result was the opposite of what the conspirators intended. Lorenzo rose like a phoenix from its ashes. Had it succeeded the Medici would have been extinguished. Florence might then have fallen into the clutches of Girolamo Riario the predatory nephew of Pope Sixtus IV with the Pazzi as his satellites. Until Professor Nicolai Rubinstein’s long-awaited edition of Lorenzo’s letters is published I feel somewhat handicapped; but he