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    The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty
    The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty
    The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty

    Written by Mary Hollingsworth

    Narrated by Anne Flosnik

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    About this audiobook

    Having founded the bank that became the most powerful in Europe in the fifteenth century, the Medici gained massive political power in Florence, raising the city to a peak of cultural achievement and becoming its hereditary dukes. Among their number were no fewer than three popes and a powerful and influential queen of France. Their influence brought about an explosion of Florentine art and architecture. Michelangelo, Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Leonardo were among the artists with whom they were socialized and patronized.

    Thus runs the "accepted view" of the Medici. However, Mary Hollingsworth argues that the idea that the Medici were enlightened rulers of the Renaissance is a fiction that has now acquired the status of historical fact. In truth, the Medici were as devious and immoral as the Borgias-tyrants loathed in the city they illegally made their own. In this dynamic new history, Hollingsworth argues that past narratives have focused on a sanitized and fictitious view of the Medici-wise rulers, enlightened patrons of the arts, and fathers of the Renaissance-but that in fact their past was reinvented in the sixteenth century, mythologized by later generations of Medici who used this as a central prop for their legacy.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 6, 2018
    ISBN9781977375506
    The Family Medici: The Hidden History of the Medici Dynasty
    Author

    Mary Hollingsworth

    Mary Hollingsworth is a scholar of the Italian Renaissance and the author of The Medici, which was widely praised on its publication by Head of Zeus in 2017, Princes of the Renaissance, published in 2021 and Conclave 1559: The Story of a Papal Election (2021). Her other books include The Cardinal's Hat, The Borgias: History's Most Notorious Dynasty and Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century.

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