THE MEDICI MARY HOLLINGSWORTH
Head of Zeus, 528pp, £35, Oldie price £24.15 inc p&p
Accountant turned art historian Hollingsworth, who has also written on the Borgias, spans the years from 1216 to 1637. ‘Rather than concentrating simply on the glory years at the heart of the Renaissance,’ wrote Michael Prodger in the Times, ‘she covers, with a daunting grasp of the labyrinthine Medici family tree, the dynasty’s full 500-year span. Where Hollingsworth is at her most interesting, though, is in chronicling the dynasty’s decline. The great Medici rulers managed to keep their faults in balance, but their lesser heirs lacked this capacity… In Hollingsworth’s surefooted telling, this ruthless but enlightened family were at their best when they were true to the Florentine motto of “profit and honour”, at their ugliest when they chased only profit, and selfdestructive when they sought neither.’
While welcoming it for being ‘lavishly illustrated in colour (with a red ribbon supplied as a page marker), clearly written, and meticulously edited’, Theodore K Rabb in the Times Literary
Supplement lamented ‘the sparsity of attention given to the intellectual and artistic achievements that made Florence famous reduces the book’s appeal’. Because ‘the promotion of art is seen as an arm of policy… little space is given to any of the artistic works that the patronage produced’. Tim Smith-laing, the Daily
Telegraph’s reviewer, found it to be ‘a careful, understated book, largely uninterested in the grand revisionist statements used to sell popular histories, and it is all the better for it … Hollingsworth brings a forensic eye to her material, particularly when it comes to the lines of credit and cold hard cash that aided the Medicis’ rise. But for all that, her book is never short on drama. In fact, it’s littered with events worthy of any gangster movie or bonkbuster… It is a striking family portrait, but also, by proxy, a picture of a world that, despite its fine flourishes of art, literature and natural philosophy, was cynical, brutal and precarious.’