| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

F. W. Kent. Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence. (Johns Hopkins Symposia in Comparative History, number 24.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 230. $36.95.

This suggestive book on Lorenzo de' Medici as patron, which grew from a series of lectures, 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. Caught chronologically between two great family patrons, his grandfather Cosimo and Cosimo I, sixteenth-century Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose patronage programs dramatically altered the artistic and urbanistic landscape of Florence, the extent to which Lorenzo fostered the arts has long been debated. The obvious factor complicating the comparison concerns his death in 1492; he was still in his forties, not young by fifteenth-century standards but still young enough for speculation about what he might have done for art had he lived longer. A further vexing issue concerns finances and whether Medici fortunes had diminished such that, notwithstanding his political prominence, Lorenzo could ill afford to divert shrinking funds toward expensive public projects, especially at a time when he was scrambling to finance dynastic ambitions for his children. Yet monies seem to have been readily available to feed his voracious appetite for fine antiquities, notably gems, coins, and hardstone vases. Kent gives a passing nod to these scholarly concerns without, however, weighing the evidence. Rather, he aims to convey an overview in the heroic vein of Lorenzo as a committed if remote patron and promoter of the arts. Kent devotes chapter essays to Lorenzo's aesthetic education, what he calls "the temptation to be Magnificent," Florentine building activities in the late 1480s until his death, and Lorenzo as proprietor of country villa estates.

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