Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (Enterprise)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.86 (878 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393058271 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-04-20 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
An account of the Renaissance era's preeminent financiers describes how the Medicis built their fortune, documenting the political, diplomatic, and metaphysical tools that enabled them to retain their wealth and become art patrons and nobles.
Douglas Maxwell MD said Well written and detailed. Follows the important family members. Well written and detailed. Follows the important family members, so is not a comprehensive history of the relationships, which determined policies.. A well-written history book (for a change)! The focus of the book is the rise, and fall, of the Medici bank, rather than the Medici themselves. However, the former explains a lot about the latter. It takes you through the founding of the business, as a not-wholly reputable business conducted by merchants and sailing very close to the winds of usury, to the over-stretching of the bank and its demise. However, by this time, the Medici had become indispensible to the financing of wars, which had enabled them to become politically very powerful. Ironically, they could now afford to neglect the very business that had initially been responsible for their . "Solid summary of the Medici story" according to F. B. Jeffery. Tim Parks once again demonstrates his ability to write an engaging story about things Italian. Following his revealing exploration of how soccer is played (on and off the field), he turns to an explanation of the rise and fall of the Medici banking dynasty. Bottom line: smart founders, arrogant successors, times change and one must change to survive. I have a better if not deeper understanding of Italy during the Renaissance. His final suggestion is correct: read Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy for a more thorough appreciation of our Italian forebears.
. The spirit of capitalist enterprise that fostered cultural originality and underpinned patronage was accompanied by a Christian conviction that money was a source of evil and that usury was a damnable spiritual offense. Like the Medici-commissioned funerary monument for the anti-Pope John XXIII, the effect is startlingly vibrant, resembling "those moments in Dante's Inferno when one of the damned ceases merely to represent this or that sin and becomes a man or woman with a complex story, someone we are interested in, sympathetic towards." (May) Copyright © Reed Bus