Medici Money - Softcover

Tim Parks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861977573 ISBN 13: 9781861977571

Publisher: Profile Books, 2006

Synopsis

In the 15th century the Medici family ruled Florence and are famous as patrons of the arts and political actors. Parks explores the root of their power: the family bank. For five generations the Medici bought power and influence, often with a now legendary ruthlessness, until the collapse of their bank in 1494.

About this title

About the Author:

Tim Parks has lived in Italy since 1981. He is the author of eleven novels, three accounts of life in Italy, two collections of essays and many translations of Italian writers.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. The Renaissance, so often seen as a clean break with the medieval past, was really an age of creative ambivalence and paradox. In this marvelously fresh addition to the Enterprise series, Parks, author of the Booker-listed Europa and a literary observer of modern Italian life, turns to Florence and to a particularly compelling contradiction. 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. In the space where this cultural conflict plays out, sometimes as stylized as one of Lorenzo Il Magnifico's tournaments, sometimes as life-threateningly fiery as Savonarola's sermons against worldly vanities, we find a world both akin to our own and almost incomprehensibly distant. Parks is a clear-eyed guide to the ambiguities of Florentine culture, equally attentive to the intricacies of international exchange rates, the spiritual neurosis about unearned income, the shocking bawdiness of Lorenzo's carnival songs and the realpolitik of 15th-century power. His prose is swift and economical, cutting to the chase. 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)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1861977573
• ISBN 13: 9781861977571
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288