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  • Cosimo De'Medici and the Florentine Renaissance
  • T.K.R.
Cosimo De'Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. By Dale Kent (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000) 537 pp. $39.96

That we know so much about fifteenth-century Florence is not merely the result of its appeal as the setting for one of the "golden ages" that shaped the modern world. It is also due to the extraordinary riches of the city's archives. Historians are naturally drawn to evidence, and the Florentines were lavish both in what they recorded and in what they preserved. There is probably no other place in the world, except perhaps Venice, about which we can know so much, despite the passage of 500 years.

Despite the wealth of information, however, Cosimo de Medici, the man who more than any other embodied this golden age, remains enigmatic and elusive. His public achievements are well known: the enormous wealth he accumulated as the head of a huge international bank; his political and diplomatic efforts as he rose to dominate Florence and then to represent its interests on a broader stage; his building projects; and his patronage of the great artists of his time, notably Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Fra Angelico. But he was not a man who let outsiders into his private world, and, as a result, historians have long been divided about the larger aims that he pursued. Was he seeking to make himself the "prince" of Florence? Did he use his wealth mainly to further his political ambitions? In particular, was his patronage of the arts primarily another means to that end-that is, were his buildings and his commissions intended as demonstrations of his wealth and power? [End Page 471]

Kent's book is a massive, learned, beautifully illustrated attempt to answer these questions, especially the last one. Drawing on the abundant resources available to the student of this period, both in the archives and in the extensive secondary literature, she insists that Cosimo in fact had no princely ambitions. His patronage, she claims, was an expression of personal devoutness, family solidarity, and the classical and republican commitments of his native city. Although she proclaims her lack of expertise in the analysis of artistic creations, she makes her case by taking on art historians as well as historians, and, in effect, constructs an interdisciplinary argument that relies on both textual and visual evidence.

If the result is an often effective and convincing interpretation, it is not always so; her insistence on the coherence of her vision leads her to demand too perfect a consistency. This flaw becomes apparent as she hands out plaudits or brickbats to her scholarly predecessors, choosing among their views (even within one person's oeuvre) according to the support or obstacles that they provide. Thus, she relies at times on the insights of Gombrich, the distinguished art historian. But when his understanding of fifteenth-century Florence seems to contradict her position, she hastens to set him right. One of her assertions is that the style and taste of Medici family patronage over the generations is marked by continuity and shared values. The contrary view, expressed by Gombrich in an influential article that Kent calls "brilliant but often no more than suggestive" (241), was that there were marked generational differences.1 This position she dismisses as a "Victorian bourgeois model," but the alternative that she adduces is also largely suggestive. That there is plausibility (as well as inference from silence) on both sides she does not acknowledge. Here, and in many other places, an embrace of ambiguity would have been welcome.

It may be that Kent felt that, to plumb her evasive subject, she had to argue forcefully and deny exceptions. She has certainly given future scholars a great deal to consider as they try to reach their own conclusions. But the book can seem unwieldy as it pursues its single-minded goal. All aspects of contemporary society and culture, not to mention individual actions, must contribute to the slightly saintly picture of Cosimo that she draws. One's complaint is not that in so large a work repetitions occur-such as the mention of Pope Eugenius IV...

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