Death In Florence The Medici Savonarola And The Battle For The Soul Of A Renaissance City 1st Edition Paul Strathern by Paul Strathern 9781681772301, 1681772302 instant download after payment.

On April 8, 1492, the de facto ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici — “Il Magnifico,” the model for Machiavelli’s prince, the patron of Botticelli, da Vinci and Michelangelo and the “needle of Italy’s compass” for 23 years — died at the age of 43.

Historian Paul Strathern opens Death in Florence with de Medici's final suffering and wasting away from congenital gout, a sad contrast to his days of robust glory. De Medici alone is a fascinating and complicated figure, and Strathern draws a finely shaded portrait of a man who was both connoisseur of the arts and mob boss, commanding a government that was part embezzlement and state terrorism, the other part carnivals and giveaways.

In his final years, de Medici encountered his one serious threat to perpetuating his family’s rule: “the little friar” Girolamo Savonarola, a charismatic fundamentalist preacher who taught a return to the simple life of early Christianity. In the troubled years that followed de Medici’s death, Savonarola would become the center of power in the city and instigate the notorious 1497 bonfire of the vanities, where crowds of believers destroyed expensive gowns, mirrors, artworks and other symbols of Renaissance worldliness. Before long, Savonarola was aiming his attacks at the corruption of the pope and church in Rome.

For many pages, it's hard to see where Strathern's story is going. The protagonist dies less than halfway through the book. The two antagonists, in fact, seem to have reached a working truce: de Medici allowing Savonarola to preach in Florence, and Savonarola refraining from challenging the Medici family's rule.

But the death of de Medici and the pact between him and Savonarola were only preliminaries to the great social upheaval that was to follow.

Strathern, author of The Venetians and Napoleon in Egypt, has a gift for condensation and for balancing a history overloaded with unappealing characters: the deformed French king Charles VIII; the reigning Borgi