April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (review)
- April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici
Martines, in true Florentine fashion, dedicates his book to an envisaged audience of "my enemies . . . heralds of will and energy" as well as to a "delightful laity" of friends, while admitting some hesitance to essay a subject that "real" historians have until now avoided: the sensational murder in 1478 in the cathedral of Florence of a son of the city's dominant Medici family. Assassinations in sanctuaries have inspired poets to fuse drama and history—why not a historian, especially one so distinguished and so unusually well-versed in Renaissance and modern literature? Unfortunately, April Blood is at odds with itself and never approaches the power and imagination of the author's earlier work, nor of Angelo Poliziano's absorbing contemporary account of the Pazzi conspiracy. New research enriches the specialist's understanding of the episode, but the blood-and-thunder quality of its dramatization masks aspects more alien and intriguing. A brief allusion to the meanings of spilled blood, "cannibalism," and assaults on the body in contexts of criminal behavior and religious devotion suggests the potential, here unrealized, of both subject and author.
Dale Kent received the book award of the College Art Association in 2001 for Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron's Oeuvre. Her other books include The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426-1434 and (with F. W. Kent) Neighbors and Neighborhood in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century. She is professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.
