Promotional Information

Without exaggeration, this is one of the most important books on the Italian Renaissance to have been published over the last two generations. As a study of Lorenzo de' Medici's patronage, his wide-ranging artistic tastes, his complex personality, and the art world of his times, it is an original, comprehensive, and insightful work. And given Lorenzo's stature as a politician, patron, and poet, as well as the vast bibliography on the man and his times, it is also a work of remarkably courageous synthesis. -- Richard Goldthwaite, The Johns Hopkins University

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The Myth of Lorenzo
2. The Aesthetic Education of Lorenzo
3. The Temptation to Be Magnificent, 1468–1484
4. Lorenzo and the Florentine Building Boom, 1485–1492
5. Lorenzo, "Fine Husbandman" and Villa Builder, 1483–1492
Notes
Index

About the Author

F. W. Kent is a professor of history and Australian Professorial Fellow at Monash University and the founding director of Monash University Centre in Prato. He is the author of Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai.

Reviews

This suggestive book... looks for its audience to art historians whom F. W. Kent feels might benefit from a historian's discussion of the fragmentary information surrounding Lorenzo's various activities. -- Melissa Meriam Bullard American Historical Review Kent has brought the breadth and depth of knowledge furnished by his nigh on forty years' research in the archives and libraries of Florence, an extraordinarily sensitive ear for the voices of his fifteenth-century Florentines, a nuanced and subtle understanding of their society and its leading figure, and a Renaissance elegance of structure and writing. -- Ros Pesman Australian Book Review Extremely valuable... Even though the book tackles a specific theme-Lorenzo the Magnificence's relationship with the visual arts-it also characterizes this key Renaissance figure in the broad political, cultural, and psychological terms available only to a scholar so deeply engaged with every aspect of Lorenzo's life. -- Lorenzo Fabbri Renaissance Quarterly Elegantly compresses long study, and will stand as a companion to the same author's forthcoming two-volume biography of Lorenzo. -- Patricia Rubin Burlington Magazine A book with much to offer all readers. -- Susannah Baxendale Journal of Modern History [Kent is] to be commended highly for penetration as well as precision in [his] scholarship. Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance A remarkable biography of a remarkable man. -- Wayne Andersen Common Knowledge